There are an awful lot of restaurants in Southbank. (70, according to Urbanspoon.) In the face of such competition, you would expect that standards should be fairly high.
I’d never eaten at World Restaurant & Bar before, with the exception of some hot chips. They were decent chips. So when we couldn’t get in to yum cha at Red Emperor, and found ourselves wandering around Southbank looking for somewhere to eat lunch, we walked past World and thought, let’s give it a try.
I wasn’t planning to blog my meal there – sometimes I just can’t be bothered when all I’m expecting is a casual bite to eat. We ordered a ploughman’s share plate, and the beetroot salad. But when our meal arrived on the table, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep this to myself.
Exhibit A:
Yup. The beetroot salad, advertised in the menu as including Persian fetta, spanish onion, rocket and olives, featured CANNED BEETROOT. And not even canned baby beets, which might have been slightly less appalling. Canned sliced beetroot.
My partner always calls me a food snob but even he was horrified.
Worse yet, it didn’t even look like it had been freshly put together. The feta had all gone mushy and pasty, so everything was covered in this gooey purple slime. The olives were the really cheap black ones that you get at the deli counter at the supermarket.
It was the most unappetising thing I’ve seen in quite some time. Worse still, they were charging $15.50 for it.
I’m all for simple food, and not everything has to be a cuisine revolution, but at the very least I expect a restaurant dish to have decent quality ingredients. Canned beetroot is fine in a fish-and-chip-shop hamburger, but using it in a restaurant is just lazy.
My partner had a mouthful, just to check and see if it was really as awful as it looked. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. None of the staff asked us why it was untouched. (Maybe they knew.)
World Restaurant & Bar is a fine place to go for drinks. I won’t be eating there again.
KATE