To celebrate submitting the final assignment in our course, a few of us from work headed over to Ostani at Hotel Realm for a quick bite. I got the club sandwich because I'm quite partial to the things. I guess because hotels are so inexperienced with making club sandwiches, I finally got it (what felt like) half an hour after ordering it. This one was OK but I did find it a quite bland and the sourdough rather dry and uninteresting. TBH I don't think sourdough is the best bread to use for a club. Aioli in lieu of the ketchup I got with my chips would have also been a god send. At the end of the day you don't really go to Ostani for the great food but for a relaxing drink close to work in a nice setting.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
La Rustica
La Rustica pretty much epitomizes my perception of the average Canberra restaurant—very mediocre food (and that is putting it nicely), overpriced and just, well...stale. Yep, La Rustica is the kind of experience I would have expected to get in a solid neighbourhood cafe in 1998, if that neighbourhood cafe charged you 2014 Canberra prices.
Their grilled vegetable salad (which promised grilled eggplant and zucchini on the menu) comprised of mostly leaves with literally one slice of zucchini, one of eggplant and a couple of meagre morsels of artichoke and semi dried tomatoes straight out of the jar. This was after they tried to serve us a plain green salad in lieu of the grilled one we had actually ordered. To accompany this stellar creation we got an antipasto platter. Half of it was wild rocket while the other half was filled with bread (of the quality you'd expect at your local Vietnamese bakery), a small amount of prosciutto and salami, and... MORTADELLA. Don't you just love it when the dominant cold cut on your antipasto platter is effectively Italian Polony? Don't get me wrong, there isn't really anything wrong with Mortadella per se, it's just that I expect the antipasto platters I get at restaurants to have things like bresaola, duck liver parfait or rillettes.
All of this may have been forgiven if the pizzas were good; spoiler: they weren't. I'd describe the quality as up there with my local Domino's, with Domino's probably marginally ahead especially given they charge about a fifth of what La Rustica charges for theirs. By now I'm probably beating a dead horse but for anyone who cares: the bases were too thick and nowhere near crispy, the Margherita was VERY bland. Even Stevie Wonder could have seen that there was definitely no buffalo mozzarella in sight. While I don't expec this in every 'gourmet' pizza (a nice fior di latte will suffice), the $30 price tag per pizza justified at least some premium ingredients. I will say though that the Santa Vittoria lemon iced tea they served was delicious!
No comments:
Post a Comment