Church St Enoteca

Today I shall talk about Church St Enoteca, a restaurant located on Church St, Richmond. I will have 13 pictures today. Which reminds me, I had an idea today for my blog: “13 days, 13 dollars, 1 restaurant a day. The aim, to try and find the most worthwhile restaurant to eat sashimi for 13 dollars.” For example, I could go to Sushi Ten and have a bowl of salmon/tuna/mixed don for 13 dollars. Or I could go to Don Don and get a bowl of sashi don for 8.50 and then top up the remainder with sushi rolls. OR, I could go to one of the random sushi stalls around the city and order a pack of sashimi (15 pieces) for 9 dollars, and top up the rest with sushi rolls again. Something like that.

But I digress.

Church St Enoteca.

13 pictures.

Here we go.

The view from opposite the road. Perhaps it looks like a church.

And the menu.

The bar, seen from where we were sitting. This made the restaurant quite a bit noisier than I’d have liked it to be. Classy food should be eaten in silence. Well, relative silence, that is.

The customary free bread, which I love. My first encounter with bread with salt sprinkled on top. And I love salt. Still not the best free bread I’ve had though. Best bread I’ve had was in Bluestone, on Flinders Lane. Unfortunately, the pictures I have from that meal are too dark to be able to do anything with.

I seem to be ordering tuna at all the restaurants I’ve been to lately. That’s semi seared tuna at the top, raw tuna on the bottom, anchovies hidden around the plate, a dollop of cream(?I forgot what it was), sprigs of green sprinkled over the top, and that might have been a scallop as well. It wasn’t a very memorable dish. Only 4 slices of fish. Four! I can get 15 slices of sashimi for 9 dollars in a random sushi shop in the city.

This was a hit. Warm octopus slow cooked in olive oil, salad of chorizo and kipflers, parsley, garlic,  and lemon. Tasty. Substantial. Chorizos. Octopus. Excellent.

Veal, stuffed with sweetbread. Asparagus on the side, cloves of garlic lying around, and some pureed (?)potato to go with it. This was melt in your mouth stuff. Cutting it like a slice of cake, you could feel the fat melt in your mouth, and then the coarser meatloafy texture of the sweetbread in the middle. Amount-wise, it was good as well, but nothing compared to this:

500g of T bone steak. Hmm. Doesn’t look as big here as it did when we were there. I remembered it being huge. Half a slice of lemon, and a ball of spinach. A ball of spinach. The steak came with:

Mashed potatoes (which was better than the pureed potato) and pesto sauce (which was not better than the mustard).

We had problems with the steak though. Ordered it medium rare, on the outside it was nearly well done, called the waiter, who came with the front of house guy over, and they peered at the steak, and said “that looks medium rare to me". Preposterous! And then they told us to cut towards the middle and the bone, which we did, and it was at least medium, to my opinion. Then they started to explain why that was medium rare, and the type of grill they used, etc etc etc. We didn’t push the issue further though (didn’t want to wait another 20 minutes, dislike confrontations, didn’t want to spoil our meal, coward, not confident that I wasn’t wrong, etc etc etc).

After about 5 minutes, the waiter came by and politely asked us whether we wanted mustard with the steak or not. =/

Well, of course we did. Much better than the pesto.

We also ordered onion rings to go with our meal.

After all that, we finally get to the stars of the night. The desserts.

Callebaut Sao Tome single origin dark chocolate mousse, chocolate jelly, honeycomb, ‘aero bar’, mint whip, and dulce de leche gelato.

Vanilla yoghurt pannacotta, mango jelly, salad of mango and mint, and coconut sorbetto.

I think any description of the desserts wouldn’t do them justice. Suffice to say that there were plenty of ‘mmm’s and smiles going around.

That’s it for today.

Goodbye.