The crisis has been averted! somehow, miraculously, my phone appeared! i went to pick it up off fyshwick – so now it’s in my hands! yay!

At any rate, tonight, we decided to treat ourselves for once and go out to eat. My laptop’s been fully paid off and now it’s mine, all mine! so this was my idea of a celebration.

The thing with eating with chefs is that they are incredibly sensitive to bad food (well they should be, they should know when their food is going bad/tastes off). The good thing about eating out with Waife is at least he doesn’t start a complain going – we just don’t go back to the restaurant ever again.

Since we live around the corner from Braddon dining area, we decided to drop by Kitschen. This is not a choice because, oh it’s so near. There’s 2 reasons behind that choice:

1) i have ate there once before, just a quick lunch, and the scallops for the scallops salad was so beautiful. and the pasta too!

2) delissio, the other restaurant just the next block down, was visited before. we had to do take-away as waife had just ruined his ankle then. our house is no more than 10 mins away from them. but by the time we reach home: the risotto turned out to be uncooked while the prawns for the same risotto were overcooked. The seafood pasta was off. all in all, a huge never-to-be-visited-again. The coffee and chai latte were extremely beautiful.

I forgot to bring a camera along again. here’s a few background to this visit:

- waife and i visited this restaurant before. The first time we visited, we waited 20 minutes before we got our entrees (chorizo salad and a soup) – where the chorizo was burnt.

- we both ordered lamb shanks off their specials board. 10 minutes after we have received our entrees, we were told that there were not enough shanks to do both our orders. we were, at that time, the second customers in the restaurant for a monday dinner shift. Waife, starting to look irritated, decided on something else.

- an hour after we have ordered, our meals finally arrived. it was nothing special that i could pay a lower price for and get it somewhere else. wasn’t that impressed.

the only good thing about it all was the canolli i bought at the end of the night. the service was pretty average: your usual hi, orders, 2 bite check, byes.

however, i remembered my wonderful scallop salad lunch there, not to mention later on i secretly bought waife pasta from the restaurant to which he found was surprisingly good. so tonight, i insisted he at least try the scallop salad. I even tried to suggest to waife that perhaps they were undergoing a change of kitchen staffs – shit happens you know.

It was embarrassing.

The salad of the scallops salad was burnt (it’s a cooked salad with pine nuts and bacon). worse yet, it left a lingering charred taste in all corners of your mouth as the bits and pieces lodge themselves around the niches and crannies of your mouth.

He ordered gnocchi, to be safe, while i ordered chicken fettuccine, also to be safe. His gnocchi was undercooked with little crunchy pieces of potato all over it, albeit the sauce was wonderful. my chicken fettuccine was bland, saved only by the crack pepper that i chucked over it.

I was so embarrassed to say the least. I was so insistent that it was a once off thing, and i was proven wrong. he was so unhappy at the end of the dinner, i didn’t know how to make up for it since he didn’t want to eat anything else thereafter.

mind you, waife thinks it’s rude to complain about a restaurant’s food so he wasn’t about to say anything. when asked, he mentioned that the sauce was beautiful, albeit the gnocchi was slightly undercooked, but so beautiful so wonderful etc etc.

but we won’t be back again. i will miss the scallops, because i do like scallops, but that lingering charred taste in my mouth – i don’t want it there no more – and i am one of those people who actually like burnt food!

The thing is, and this goes for Delissio too, food like risotto, fettuccine, gnocchi aren’t too hard but also aren’t too easy to cook. Once they have prepped for the night, all you have to do is to throw it in, 20 minutes or so, bam you’re out. when it gets busy, of course it would take longer – but you want quality too. Basics food like that are part and parcel of any italian restaurant.

The fact is, they failed in producing them at a minimum level of quality, and that bombed. the worst is having such a good restaurant location and fucking it up…. but hey, they have a decent clientele size. if the customers can’t tell good from bad, they can still prosper… no?