AZUL BEACH CAFE ( Legian Bali) 11/2018

Name: Date: Suburb: Melway: Introduction Ambience Service Food Wine Price Comments Score: /20

Azull (Mimdara Beach Hotel Legian Ba;li) 11/2018

Azul is the main restaurant at this beach resort hotel. It's the breakfast area and remains open all day for lunch and dinner. It's set up in a cavernous building, 

open on two sides, with seating for about 100 in the building and the surrounding balcony..  

 In daylight the plainess of the room stands out.

although it has a few sculptured figures along one inner wall.

We have had a few meals there now starting with lunch on the day we arrived. I thoroughly enjoyed a whole baked reef fish. This came covered in miniature root vegetables - baby carrots, diacon, a stem of celariac and something unidentifiable they called onion though it was not that.

 Sandra was not quite so enthusiastic about her sweet sour ///??

There is a small wine list, mostly Australian, and a good variety of mocktails, juices and soft drinks.

 We next tried some pasta dishes
 Spaghetti Carbonara, which was meant to be linguini, 

was a good choice, but I preferred the seafood pasta,which didn't quite fit into the linguini flat shape. The dish was a little small with a decent amount of seafood although I would have liked more.

Gelateria Pasticceria D'Angelo (Rome) 08/2018

Asian Spice Asian Urban Cuisine (Legian Bali) 11/2018

This, like lots of other areas in Bali is packed with tourists, and restaurants. We were looking for a Rijsttafel, literally 'rice table'. This Dutch word refers to an Indonesian meal made up of a large number of small dishes served with rice. There may be 40 or more but we only got eight plus sauces and rice.
Indian Spice is a barn like restaurant on the main street of Legian. It is simply decorated 

with a long bar overlooked by a mural of five attractive ladies.

There's nothing elaborate here with simple table settings and menus offering photographs of all their dishes.

It's a very friendly place, as most of Bali is.

Our meal started with a peculiar (to us) soup with some small pieces of chicken, some baby pumpkin, which tasted a little like cucumber and something like very small pieces of dumpling. It was mild in taste but I have no idea how to describe it!

Next came the Rijsttafel. We were served BBQ'd prawns, saté chicken, calamari curry, fish cooked in banana leaf, battered fish, sambal, some sort of shallot salad, some tomato, a sweet sauce, a hot sauce and rice.

A meal that went very well with beer rather than wine.

The meal finished with a dessert - banana fritters with ice cream. 

Thick over fried batter did nothing to improve our feeling about this meal. There was nothing elegant  about this meal. Each dish had it's distinct taste and everything was tender but there was no delicacy about anything either. Certainly not a place I would ever consider returning to.
Score: 10/20

Camden Hotel (Caulfield) 11/2018

All this signage might give one the idea that this is a drinking place, which, of course, it is but it's also a place that serves fairly decent food at quite modest prices.

 It's unpretentious with basic table settings

 in a large open room with a central bar.
We'd heard that their large flounder was particularly good so that had to be top of our choices. 
What sort of soup do you have we asked. Surprisingly soup is not available, it's not on the menu but there's enough to chose from.
So, first the flounder. It comes with chips 

or mash and a small salad on top of it.

It was not very big but it was plump moist and very tasty.  

I decided on a porterhouse steak. As usual I requested it be served 'blue' that is seared on the outside and just warm in the centre. 

Not as usual that was exactly how I did get it!! Served with mash and a mushroom sauce it was as good as it gets. 

 We were not sure they could do this well again but we thought it well worth a try. Sandra had the flounder again which was pretty well identical to the first one and I chose a veal cutlet with potato Gratin.

I have a particular aversion to eating charcoal and sent the gratin back to be replaced by chips.The veal was excellent. This time we tried the desserts.

The lava cake 

was overcooked, slightly burned and dry. Very disappointing. 

The apple and rhubarb crumble was a bit sour 

but quite acceptable. 

As the famous Greek philosopher rightly said 'You can't step into the same river twice" and that proved right here.

Will we go there again? Sure we will. 

Score:13.75/20