The general feeling was positive – good ambiance, good service, good food. However, it was priced like an Overture but really was more of an upmarket Italian/steak place and not quite as inventive as I expected. More detail:

Food: *faint memories*… there was meat, and there was things-with-sauce. The meat was not outstanding – it was good but not brilliant, and not good enough to be the “speciality of the house”. The things-with-sauce – Pork, I think, and was it springbok or osso buco? Or springbok osso buco. It was very very good, in a home-cooked goodness kind of way (large portions, rich sauces), which is slightly out of kilt with the ver’ posh vibe, but that’s no reason for complaint. The carpaccios (which have their own section of the menu) were good, but not amazing, and the steak tartare, which I can’t resist, was not as good as I like it – the balance of condiments was not right.

Service: Excellent if occasionally slightly scarce. The bread basket at start was really interesting with all sorts of different home-baked things. Service highlight: Deliberating over desert, some of the party eventually ordered (yummy) things, and the waiter turned to me. “Nothing for me”, I said, until he turned away and was walking off. “Wait!” I called. “A SPOON.” He nearly keeled over giggling. I like cracking waiters up.

Ambiance: Lovely decor, very pleasant, light and modern. All works together.

Value for money: Slightly too pricey for its offering. Only one bottle of corkage allowed – but communicated nicely so we let it slip.

Altogether: It was nice, but won’t become a regular.

Food: 7

Ambiance: 8

Service: 8

Value for money: 6

All that being said, it remains a tragic truth that the Famous Butcher’s Grill simply doesn’t deliver. It should have rung warning bells when the Evil Landlord had to undertake a mini epic quest just to track one down – the branches in the suburbs seem to have closed down in the last year or so, which does not auger a franchise in the bloom of meaty health. The remaining branch is in the Cape Town Lodge, a hotel in the CBD, and even on a Friday night with live music was not a seething locus of steak-guzzling activity.

The ambiance isn’t bad: it has a reasonable feeling of cosiness, and really quite pervable scrolly brocade designs in the wallpaper and tablecloths. I can’t think that the live music is a plus, though; it’s too small a venue for a guitar dude with the amp cranked up high, and it was frankly intrusive. (He didn’t have a bad voice and the music was recognisable 70s-90s guitar pop, but reinterpretations of Chris Rea do not aid my digestion.) It also helps to be given a small, complimentary bowl of perfectly adequate leek-and-potato soup as a welcome and a talisman against the cold of the evening, which has been a little sharp-tooth-bitey winter recently. The waiter was pleasant, attentive and willing to be amused by the usual Salty Cracker antics; the service is mostly good, and our starters arrived astonishingly quickly. The food, however: the food is … adequate. Okay, shading down into “not up to scratch” in some areas. Mostly as ordered, but in the “serviceable” category rather than even the “good”. Nothing inedible, but nothing really exciting.

I wasn’t blown away by the starter offerings, but most of the usual suspects are there; deep-fried Camembert, calamari, the standard steakhouse fare. (I was deeply amused to see that they advertise a basket-of-blitong starter as “African Sushi”). Often this sort of basic starter off a small menu is done very well at a steakhouse, but my calamari had a rather dry, crumbly breading to it, and wasn’t exciting for flavour or texture. How difficult is it to spice up a breading? Honestly. Stv and the EL had the Camembert, fairly inevitably, which seemed to be OK – sufficiently gloopy on the inside and crunchy on the outside, and Stv managed to polish off the whole thing, which is something of a testament given his tendency to shrivel up and die when overly cheesed. Jo’s Avocado Ritz was a bit odd – piles of lettuce and a seafood mayonnaise pile under which some lonely avocado bits presumably lurked. She’ll have to weigh in on how it actually tasted, but it looked like very 50s cuisine to me.

We all had steak – T-bone, rump, fillet medallions. My medallions were nicely tender, cooked in brandy with a peppercorn sauce which was rather good; the grade of meat itself was excellent, and the specified “rare” actually achieved, although to the bleu end of the spectrum rather than the medium. (And, no, this isn’t because of all the vampire tv lately: I’ve always liked my steak rare. I only have it every six months or so, but when I do I crave it bloody). The only problem was that they don’t actually sear the outside properly, which means it was a sort of grey rather than being grilled to brown; in fact, this seems to have been a feature of all the steaks for the evening, rather a travesty given the “grill” delineation. Also, I seem to have got lucky with the fillet: Jo said her rump was tough, the EL reported his “stringy around the edges”, and Stv’s T-bone wasn’t properly cooked next to the bone despite a request for “medium rare”. The side dishes were perfectly arb as well as perfectly carb – mounds of bland mashed potato, undistinguished chips, the usual butternut/creamed spinach duo in the name of vitamins. (And what’s with that? As the EL pointed out at the time, all steakhouses seem to default to those two vegetables, probably because they’re easy to produce as large vats of glop. Or because there are deep underlying signifiers which one of these fine days I shall deconstruct).

All this being the case, it’s extremely lucky the EL found four hitherto unsuspected remaining bottles of Diemersfontein Pinotage under his bed, and brought two of them along; we polished them off, and it made up for a lot. We ended up full, but curiously unsatisfied; we didn’t bother to stay for dessert.

I fear that, on the Patented SC Scale, the Famous Butcher’s Grill is not that famous. The Judge from Really Bloody Steak awards the following:

Atmosphere: 6 / 10 (pleasant enough setting, points docked for inappropriate loud music)
Staff: 8 / 10 (Cheerful, attentive, vanished a couple of times and had to be extracted with forceps by the desk person.)
Service: 7 / 10 (quick to very quick, needed some prompting for water refills and wine-opening)
Food: 6 / 10 (meh. Could have been worse.)
Value for money: 6 / 10 (really would like to see more bang for my buck)

[Pssst! Looking for the short version? It's here: "cheap, good, Japanese food, despite the change of hands"]

Boom, Shake, Shake, Shake The Room

The evening did not get off to an auspicious start. The Boom Boom Shakalak bar above was quiet, but not quiet. It was fairly empty (quiet), but they seemed to be testing the maximum volume of their speakers (not quiet). Well, I whine, but it wasn’t exactly deafening. It did make for an interesting “mix” of their boomboom and Kubo / Sushi Master’s selection (of Richard Clayderman, The Magical Sound of the Pan Pipes, and assorted authentic eastern tunes). I felt The Fear that I’d picked a clanger for Cracker. Luckily this was not to be the case.

The decor was classic. Classic in the sense of horrible kitsch that sort of works, a la Minato’s.
We popped open one of our two bottles of vino (R15 corkage, btw. R15! Stick that in your pretentious pipe and smoke it, Aubergine! (Yes, still bitter about that.)) and perused the menu. Cheap! Interesting! Japanese!

And So It Begins…

We shared two plates of mixed tempura (prawns, calamari, veggies) for starters. Tasty! This was definitely Tempura Done Right and made me very happy. Bubbly, light, crispy batter, tasty sauce accompaniment. I could probably have handled another few pieces, but they weren’t stingy portions.

The Mains Event

For mains, we had a veritable 食べ放題 of goodies: beef tataki¹ with ponzu sauce; beef teppanyaki²; Chicken Kara-age³; chicken and veggies noodles fry-up; roast salmon belly; chawan mushi⁴. All the nosh was good, but stars for me were the beef tataki (pink!) and the salmon (pink!). Nom (pink!)!

The Dessert Of The Real

Then, unusually for Cracker, we had dessert. Bar one tempura and ice cream. So crazy it works.
Tasty tiny treat to round off the meal. Eck had his own, the J, J, S threesome shared two.

Conclusions, Thoughts, Comments

The total was R600, including a generous tip, which seems very reasonable given that we ate loads.
Certainly cheaper than lots of previous Crackers.

Alas, I fear that the Master of Sushi may not last. Part of it is that it’s cheap. And small. Both of these I see as plus points as a patron, but it must make it more difficult to make money. A more pertinent part is that we were the only people present. From 7 to 10pm. On a Saturday night. Oh, as they say, dear. I suspect that Kubo’s attracted a very local following that will desert the new look / theme / vibe / owner, given how fickle Cape Town eaters are.

Patented Jo Scores on the Doors

Atmosphere: 3 / 10 (kitschy decor works, but booming music is distracting. We enjoyed our meal despite it (had rather a jolly time, actually), but it would have much better without.)
Staff: 7 / 10 (Nice waitress lady, smiley sushi chef (even though we had none of his wares), very friendly and earnest owner (language barrier made interactions more entertaining / interesting))
Service: 7 / 10 (Not particularly attentive, but easily signal-able given small space, and food came well-paced, as it was ready, piping hot (esp. important for tempura))
Food: 8 / 10 (Me liked. Interesting, new Japanese food. A bit different to other places which generally serve sushi as their Japanese stuff, or some kind of bastard-love-child-fusion thing which, while tasty, is not really Japanese Food.)
Value for money: 9 / 10 (Our final bill was low for Cracker, perhaps still a little high in general, but we had lots of nosh for our cash)

Fellow Crack-ees: what was the other category we wanted to add?

________________________________
1 – basically very rare, sliced beef. Watching this being cooked was awesome. Big chunk of meat, held in tongs, waved at flame of gas hob. Hypnotic.
2 – beef cube stir fry thingy
3 – Japanese style fried chicken
4 – steam egg custardy thing in a tiny bowl. Um… google it!
5 – there is no five, you may have noticed. Except that there is because this is it. This is a secret bit. You may have noticed that we had no sushi. A bit odd when going to a place called Sushi Master. Well, since it’s only really Jo and I who are the sushi monkeys, and that there was so much other interesting stuff to try, and that I’m on a quest for Japanese food that is not sushi, we decided to forgo said raw fish for that night. Jo and I will return by ourselves, or with other sushi monkeys, and try some then. The menu looked shortish, but with interesting animals. We’ll be back!

I also wanted something not too upmarket for this, because we did another Overture run the weekend before, and trying to be upmarket after Overture is always an anticlimax. One needs distance.  Yindee’s had exactly the right vibe – not too expensive, generally relaxed sort of feel, decent food, waiter with a big grin, lots of dark wood in the décor. It all adds up. The major mistake I made, though, was to agree to try out their low-table cushions-on-the-floor room when I booked. It sounded like a fun idea at the time, but I forgot about my knees. It was never quite comfortable, which I found distracted from the experience – I managed not to break any portion of myself, but there was considerable whale-like floundering in getting up and down. We have now Done This, and don’t need to repeat it. Chairs are my new religion.

They have a one-bottle-per-table corkage policy, causing the Evil Landlord to fulminate something ‘orrible, but in the event their wine list is quite extensive and there are sufficient inexpensive options not to be offensive. (Is it just me, or are CT restaurants limiting corkage bottles more and more often? I blame the recession). Also, jo&stv brought a really good white, although I cannot for the life of me remember which. We did the standard oriental food thing, which was to order one dish each, bung them all in the middle of the table and share, culminating in arguments about who gets the last piece of duck. (Usually me).

Starters were good! fish cake thingies nicely flavourful, slightly standard beef satay and sweetcorn fritters, and really good potato strips in a sesame batter, my favourite from this course. Must try this at home. (I try the sweetcorn fritters at home, frequently, and have to say mine are better, mostly because I can’t restrain myself from Bunging Extra Stuff In, usually more chilli). We eschewed tempura on the grounds that it isn’t Thai, although I would have cheerfully suffered the inauthenticity. Deep fried things in batter make me strangely happy.

I chose, of course, duck for mains, crispy deboned duck with a rather delectable tamarind sauce – yum. The Evil Landlord had seared tuna, which was excellent, in a sort of herb crust. I think Jo had fish of some kind in a garlic and pepper stir fry, yes? also very good. I am totally, utterly and completely unable to remember what Stv ordered. It was also good. There were no actual bad choices here: the mains were better than the starters, I thought, with interesting flavours. The portions are reasonably substantial – I could have done with marginally more, and certainly more in the way of veggie components to the dishes, but we were all full enough not to want dessert.

This was a good experience, but not a brilliant one – solid food, nice vibe and setting without being particularly memorable, reasonable service but not outstanding. (Our waiter vanished completely when we wanted to pay him, and had to be summoned from the depths with strange rituals). Yindee’s bills itself as an “authentic” Thai experience, but I fear Stv’s cooking has spoiled us for that. It pretty much lives up to its cost bracket: I’d eat here again cheerfully and with enjoyment, but not to mark any special occasion. It certainly doesn’t trump our benchmark for Mid-Level Eastern Food, which is Jewel Tavern – flavour, quantity, vibe are all trailing behind the Tavern’s delirious high. Besides, a Lazy Susan on the table adds bonus style points which are difficult to overcome.

On the Patented Jo Table, the judge from Eastern Knee Troubles offers the following:

Atmosphere: 8 / 10 (nice try on the low tables, good vibe)
Staff: 8 / 10 (pleasant, cheerful. Too often Cape Town waiters appear to be confirmed misanthropes.)
Service: 7 / 10 (occasionally absent/slow, but passed the Water Test with flying colours)
Food: 7 / 10 (good but not spectacular)
Value for money: 8 / 10 (priced unpretentiously and appropriately)

So, http://www.fiveflies.co.za/.
In a very cool, many-roomed, many-bar-ed (although we just went for din-dins), big ole building in the middle of town is Five Flies.
I’ve heard varying things, mostly since going there, about the snootiness of the staff. We had a great experience – our waitress was lovely, and the one or two others who flew around our table were jovial and friendly. The maitre d’ looked a bit offish, but we only exchanged a word or two with him, so no probs there.

The food, you say?

Starters:
me, jess – Smoked salmon and cod fritters with rosti, watercress and garlic aioli;
jo – Pan-fried prawns with chilli, garlic linguini and squid ink lemon butter;
eck – Grilled field mushroom with gorgonzola, caramelized onion and creamy artichoke, truffle sauce.

Mains:
jess, jo – Springbok Wellington with mushroom duxelle, roasted butternut and foie gras, truffle jus;
me – Grilled ostrich fillet with potato gratin, mange tout, sauteed spinach and red wine sauce;
eck – Herb crusted, roasted rack of lamb with creamy garlic potatoes, fine beans and tomato jus.

Dessert:
I seem to remember that we did somehow squeeze it in, but I can’t remember who had what, when, why, or whicheeba.

The food was great. All round good with no duds.
Particular highlights were the ’strich and Eck’s lamb (informally voted overall winner).

Odd thing to note, but not really a bad thing, was the speed.
They must have an entire team of chef whipping boys / girls because that kitchen can turn stuff around like a professional ice skater, on happy juice, going downhill, blindfold. Fast, I mean. Very fast. We didn’t feel like we were being rushed, but we were surprised when our starters arrived maybe 10 minutes after we ordered them. And the mains maybe 15 minutes after the starters were taken away.
I suppose you could argue that that’s what restaurant kitchens are supposed to be like (you order your food, you get it!), but we’re used to a more leisurely pace of noshing.
I’d quite like to pop back there for lunch to see how the experience compares.

I’m not quite compote menthol (ahem) enough to do proper numbers, so have some pseudo-random ones:
Atmosphere: 6 / 10 (got a bit loud later on, with a bad table across from us)
Staff: 8 / 10 (speedy, smiley, accommodating)
Service: 8 / 10 (extra points for pace, especially when you known about it in advance)
Food: 7 / 10 (good, solid, fare, and some interesting combos)
Value for money: 7 / 10. (Um… how much was it…?)

I rather like the inside of the Cabbage, it’s got that industrial feel – naked brickwork, giant air-con ducts, interesting spaces – which managed to stay just on the right side of pretentious. The vibe is pleasantly relaxed, and there’s a fairly continual trickle of cheerful guests climbing the stairs to the upper-level bar. I’m not entirely sure that the split-level thing works, though, the giant central staircase means that some tables are tucked away, which seems to require the waitstaff to have orienteering badges as much as the guests: we sat at our table for twenty minutes before a waiter actually worked out that we hadn’t been given a menu. (We had, however, been given a complimentary canape, and after ten minutes of wistful panting a passing waiter took pity on us and opened our wine. Memo to self, screw tops in future!).

The see-saw of the experience really got going with the actual arrival of our waiter, who was a gem – one of those intelligent, amusing guys who seemed perfectly happy to plug into the relaxed and slightly scurrilous vibe which Salty Cracker appears to generate. The menu is delectable, really interesting combinations of flavours, unusual vegetables, meats and cuts. There was much debate. When we finally ordered Jo asked the waiter if we’d picked anything that would disappoint us, and he gave his list a deliberately staged and cursory looking-over at arm’s length before saying “No!” firmly. We liked him. He was also thereafter very good with keeping wine glasses and water jugs filled.

We also liked the starters, which were, I think, on the whole better than the main courses. I’d heard good things about the Cabbage’s signature tomato tart, which was, alas, absent from the menu: the butternut/caramelised onion/goat’s milk feta one I had was, however, very good, and I shall definitely do my damndest to recreate the combination at home one of these days. Jo & the Evil Landlord had the beef tartare, which I think is probably the best I’ve ever tasted – full of celery, strangely, which I don’t usually enjoy but which gave it a wonderful bite and texture. I am, however, wishing I’d ordered Steve’s starter, which was definitely the winner – chicken-liver parfait in a sort of fig sauce thing, and more like foie gras than it had any right to be. (And I have to say, I always wonder what restaurants think about the Salty Cracker tendency to pass forkfulls of a dish promiscuously around the table. And to return the plates with nothing left except fingermarks in the sauce. It’s a toss-up as to whether they’re horrified or flattered.)

Things got a bit dodgy with the main course. On the upside: man, they do large portions. This is the nouveau cuisine sort of presentation, but with portions almost twice the size of those at somewhere like Ginja. Steve’s Three Little Pigs thing was very good -three sorts of pork in a cider sauce, lovely stuff. Jo’s great hunk of veal had, interestingly, a bone sticking out of it, but was likewise wonderful, with an incredibly intense mushroomy sort of pâté thing on the side. The Evil Landlord’s warthog chunk was a bit smaller and slightly boringly presented, no really stand-out flavours. My breast of duck, served on a completely wonderful parsnip mash with endive, which I love … was tough. Overcooked, leathery, dry. I am totally spoiled for duck by the French tendency to sear the outside of a duck breast like steak and serve it rare, and I’d fondly hoped that this might be the same, but I suspect they slightly overcooked it in the pan and then kept it warm long enough for it to dry out even further. Jo, fortunately, is less diffident than I am about this sort of thing, and hauled the waiter over to complain: the restaurant thereafter gained serious brownie points by dealing gracefully with the issue, whisking my plate away to re-do it (a bit of a wait, inevitably, made bearable by being fed forkfuls by everyone else, like a baby bird). The second version was indeed rare, although I suspect they went slightly too much in the other direction; nonetheless it was good, if not as tender as it could have been.

We were too full for dessert. This almost never happens. We looked wistfully at the dessert menu, which was fabulous, but couldn’t contemplate forcing anything else down.

So, overall this was a very endive/cider sauce experience – bittersweet. On the upside: attractive, unusual setting and relaxed feel, lovely staff, some amazing food, the ability to handle dissatisfied patrons sending food back to the kitchen with a certain dignity, and without bad vibes resulting. On the downside: some poor staff co-ordination, slightly slow service (we waited a while for the starter) and some definitely dodgy quality control in the kitchen. Also, their prices are about 20% higher than somewhere like Overture or Ginja, and despite the increased portion size, I don’t think the flavour/innovation levels of the food quite justify it. Jo’s famous four-point scale comes out thusly:

• Atmosphere: 8
• Staff: 8 (but Service 6)
• Food: 7
• Value for money: 6

I’ll keep the link there. For easy reference. To find the bit where they say you can only bring 2 of your own bottles. If you can. .

So, while I’ve been beaten there, no harm in regrouping and starting from the beginning:

The noble cause that is this club takes us to lots of very posh restaurants. It’s the paycheck celebration event, spending money is not the issue – good food, good ambiance with good friends is. We have been doing this for 10 months now, and – as jess said last night – we have either been:

1. extraordinarily lucky in our choices
2. living in a city with examplary, wonderful, restaurants where nothing ever goes wrong
3. been total, easy to please lushes (worry), or
4. had this coming to us.

d it is.

The first sign of worry was the hushed atmosphere, followed abruptly by the “only 2 bottles of own wine” rule* (not mentioned on their website in any obvious way). The “tap water, please” clearly wrote us off in the minds of our waiters as the “was McDonald’s fully booked, then?” crowd. It’s not just that it’s difficult to get actual tap water (ordered deliberately, for reasons of environmental consciousness – I repeatedly fantasised, over the course of the evening, of having had the foresight to bring a shiny visiting-card sized printed note with me denouncing the bottled water business in order to bring the  waiting staff in line), it’s the clear downgrading in terms of respect in the waiter’s eyes that bothered.

The food, which could have redeemed this all, was not quite there. We invented a bunch of rating factors on our way out, and here are some i can recall, with my proposed scores:

• Atmosphere: 6
• Staff: 2
• Food: 7
• Value for money: 2

It could appear that we are simply not used to nouvelle-sized and intended portions, but to that i say “Ginja“! Which has been our best eat so far and is in exactly in the same thrust as Aubergine, but scores 10/10/9/8 on the same scale.

So, the food:

Pros:

• the tiny little cold cucumber soup and the sorbet we got between courses. That was lovely, interesting flavours – the soup had a goats cheese and parma ham floater (better than it sounds) which made the whole thing lovely. The sorbet was apple/mint, which works.
• The duck. Ask Extemp. That was good, unusual, curried duck. Mmmhm.
• the Asparagus+tuna+Parma ham starter, which was a good balance of flavours and worked well.
• Starters, for those interested, come in at R75-R100 each, which means value for money is difficult. They are tiny, but once again – a good place will do tiny but fill you up with intense flavour. This one fell short.

The not-good-enough:

• the tiny, expensive steak was tough. I will (excuse the terrible focus on money here, but I breathe slowly when scuba diving to save money) pay R165 for a palm-sized steak (see Tokara, for example), but It Was Tough. No redeeming features.
• The Tiger Prawn starter. R95, because of the rare Dwarf Tiger Prawns they have to catch for it.
  On Mars.
• I vaguely remember the EL calling his rabbit “anonymous”. Or was it “generic”? Mind, addled.

We forewent deserts, on account of having run out of wine, patience, and the ability to give them any more money.

So, I do think they have a different “experience” planned for us. The key to that seems to be their extensive winelist**, which their ice-queen-sommelier explains to you on a sip-by-sip basis

(literally:

people at the next table: *sip wine*.

sommelier: *run* Can you feel the peachstones? don’t they just taste like summer? on a raft? Can you hear the little fishes?

people: *nod vigorously*

little fishes: *sploosh*

sommelier: *sidles off*

people at next table: *sip wine*

sommelier: *returns triumphant* note how it develops! Those fishes! Gone! Now, with the rising temperature and … global warming, it’s all … nutmeg! and polar bears! taste the bear? Earthy!

Bear: Raaa!

Fishes: *shuffle off*)

i guess we missed out.

______________________
* yes, 3 between 4 people seeeeeeeems like a lot, but who are we kidding? and it’s not about the amount, it’s about the restrictions.

** ooh, they had a transparent wine fridge. Which glowed. In slowly-changing, neon colours. Not redeeming.