On good Thai, and the silver linings of bad Italian
Please note that since writing this blog post, Sa Seada has closed down
The past week has gone by in a frenzy of administration. You know what it’s like when you’re about to go on holiday: not only do you realize that all the trip planning you’d been putting off can be put off no longer, but you end up working 12-hour days trying to get all your projects to a suitable stopping point before you go. Yesterday, I wrote 2,357 words in two hours. Even for a writer, that was pretty intense.
So here I am at the airport, trying to catch up on my blog in the last hour before boarding the plane to Chicago. Last week I tried two new restaurants in a bid to catch up with a few of my friends before I left. The first was a Thai called Krua Buppha. It’s a fairly unassuming little place off the Amstelkade, which is not an area I’d ever go to were it not for the fact that I was visiting a friend who lives there and we’d just been to Praxis (of all the entertaining things to do with a friend you haven’t seen in a month!) which must have been somewhere nearby.
We ordered the mixed starter, beef massaman and green curry – essentially as a test, because I order pretty much that combination of dishes at any new Thai restaurant I visit. The fish cakes in the starter were excellent – light yet not too eggy – and the satay sauce with its skewered chicken counterpart well spiced and fragrant. The two filo-wrapped parcels were a little heavier, but all in all it was a good start. The mains carried on the same vein, with ultra fresh butterflied prawns in the green curry, and melting grainy beef in the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice-ness of the massaman. Dinner came to around €35 each, including drinks, and my friend declared that he would be bringing his girlfriend here within a week. Not a bad recommendation by all accounts!
Last night, by contrast, was Italian restaurant Sa Seada. It was a good friend’s birthday dinner, and I rushed in late clutching gifts and a belly full of stress after my long (last) day at work. They kept pouring me Italian wine until I calmed down a bit, and the food followed shortly after…
There were 14 of us, so it made sense to start with antipasti to share. The usual suspects featured – serrano ham, roasted courgette, aubergine and peppers – plus a few surprises: something resembling cold roast pork, gratinated mussels (also cold), squid salad, and sort of cheese toasties. There was nothing terribly wrong with any of it, but it didn’t exactly rock my world.
My main, on the other hand, had several things wrong with it. I’d ordered veal scallopini, baked in the oven with layers of aubergine, mozzarella and tomato sauce. The dish was luke warm, the aubergine undercooked and rubbery, and the whole thing drowned in far too much grated parmesan. But the real sin was the side dish of potatoes and vegetables, which was unequivocally cold. The potatoes were flabby and overly salty. The broccoli was also laden with salt and overcooked by about half an hour. I turned to my friend (who I’ve given cookery classes to in the past) while prodding the green mush with my fork: ‘This is a lesson in how not to cook broccoli’.
Sometimes people ask me whether being a critic hinders my enjoyment of an evening out, arguing that if I’m sitting there mentally slagging off the food (or, indeed, verbally slagging off the food) I can’t be enjoying the company. But I don’t experience it like that. Last night – like most nights – I just separated the gezelligheid (which was lovely) from the food (which was poor). And there’s a silver lining to every cloud: if the food is good, it adds to my experience at the time; if the food is bad, it makes blogging about it so much easier…
But right now it’s time to sign off. Next time you hear from me I’ll be sampling soul food in Georgia, or Cajun in New Orleans, or BBQ in Texas… so long y’all!
