Elio

Italian Restaurant

Open 7 nights & Friday Lunch

02 9560 9129

159 Norton Street Leichdart

www.elio.com.au

Leichhardt, the best known Italian food district in sydney was our destination tonight. We found this busy little restaurant on Norton Street down towards the city west link side. In our humble opinion, a busy restaurant usually means it's a good restaurant.

Looking through the glass front from the street, the decor seemed modern and simple. We walked inside and were greeted immediately by no one. We waited by the door for about 5 minutes before anyone came to show us to our table.

   

  

The menu was in Italian. We had no idea what a Primi Piatti was, so we ended up choosing two mains. These of course were the Linguine Alle Vongole Zucchini e Prezzemolo and the Cavatelli Con Pesce Spada Mandorle Broccolini e Menta. Translation: Linguine with Tasmanian baby clams and zucchini in a white wine, chilli and garlic sauce & Cavatelli with swordfish toasted almond, fresh mint, cherry tomato and broccoli.

When asked what drinks we would like, we asked our friendly waiter to choose the wine that best complimented our meal. A moment later, he came back with two glasses of Fazio Insolia a white italian wine that goes well with seafood.

The wine was a refreshing dry white wine, very easy to drink even for a beginner like Betty.

Our food came out quite promptly despite the full house, which was quite impressive. The pasta was slightly undercooked although after letting it sit there for a while, it became palatable. The sauce in the clam pasta was quite bland at first and the clam shells got in the way of eating the linguine. After completely demolishing the clams, the linguine was a lot easier to eat now that I could wrap the linguine around my fork without the clam shells getting in the way. This made the flavour of the dish more noticeable. Overall, this could have been a good pasta if there weren't so many clam shells.

Betty

The same applied to my pasta, at first I thought the shells were undercooked, but after a bit of time I didn't mind it as much I think they softened in the sauce. My heart skipped a beat when I thought the cubes of cottage cheese - was chicken..!! But then quickly realised it was swordfish haha... I really really liked the almond flakes, only because I like almonds, but the texture of the almond flakes didn't mesh well with the rest of the dish. I actually wanted a creamy pasta tonight, but there was nothing creamy that was made with seafood.

I liked my dish a lot, Rick liked mine more than his! Which is always the case anyway :) The portion size was just right for me, although Rick was still feeling peckish afterwards, so we requested the dessert menu.

We decided on the Belgian chocolate budino with almond milk granatina, & Rick wanted to try the raspberry grappa (Grappa is a fermented grape skin spirit, which is 40-50 proof)

Like our mains the desserts came out quickly, we were very impressed. The chocolate budina had a thick & creamy texture much like a chocolate mousse. The flavour of the dark chocolate was slightly overpowering which we didn't mind since we're big fans of dark chocolate. We didn't really like the almond milk granatina (comparable to a sorbet), as the textures were just too different. The budina was warm and the granatina was cold. This didn't go well as the budina started to melt the granatina.

The grappa smelt very much like a sweet raspberry, but the taste however was nothing like the smell. Think of smelling a nice scented oil and then having a drink out of the burner bowl - nice smelling but tastes disgusting and foul. Rick drank it all though, waste not want not.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed the dining experience. But, wouldn't ever come back there again. The reason for this is simple. I want to try all the restaurants on Norton street before coming back for seconds.

Betty's Soup Kitchen

84 Oxford Street
Darlinghurst NSw 2010
Phone (02) 9360 9698

We decided to find dinner on Oxford Street before heading to the Bloc Party Gig. Walking around Darlinghurst we found a few nice restaurants off the streets from the main road, but i was looking for something cheap & nasty.. cheap & nasty we got!

This place had a high roof, i like this, you don't feel claustrophobic when you look up & around. They had a huge blackboard menu, this looked unchanged, like a set menu they had.

As soon as we sat down we got water, and a wooden cutting board with bread & a large serving of butter. This was soooo good! The bread was so soft, and with that much butter i couldnt help but pile it onto my torn off pieces of bread.



I went with the spinach & veggie pie $8.50, Rick the Lamb Stew $13. & we shared a pumpkin & potato pie $7.50. It came out instantly, very home style cooked indeed.

My pie was topped with mashed potato (reminding me very much of hospital food, something im really sick of). I was expecting some pastry but it was just potato, beans, tomato , tomato i hardly tasted any spinach, & had to top it all off with lots of salt.


The soup, was okay... packet cup'o'soup is alot nicer. & i think it's over priced as well.


Rick's lamb stew, reminded him of Asian home cooked curry, he quite liked it, and again it was topped with mashed potato, and a serving of peas.

Overall, i wouldn't come back here. I wanted to come here cos my name was in the title! I was so full, but the food didn't sit too nicely in my tummy, i regret coming in here to eat instead of the nicer restaurants we walked past.

Thai Banquet

Shop 4
40 Elizabeth Dr, Liverpool, NSW 2170
(02) 9600 9262

Open Weekdays 12pm-3pm, 5:30pm-10pm; Weekends 5:30pm-10pm

Upon arriving at this small Thai restaurant I almost thought I entered a takeaway shop, however this was the wrong side. Further down was another door where the sit down restaurant section resides. The decor was authentic with slightly dim lighting.

We were approached by a polite young waiter and were shown to our seats promptly. We were given two menus and decided to have the fish cakes and the money bags (vegetarian deep fried dumplings) for appetisers and the Tom Yum Goong & King Prawn Pad Thai for the mains.

After waiting for about fifteen to twenty minutes of zero service, Betty decided to get up and call a waiter over from the takeaway section so we could order our food. The waitress wasn't all too interested in what we had to order and quickly left once she had taken our order down.

The food came out quite quickly. This was much quicker than expected. The first to come out were our appetisers, the Thai Fish Cakes and the Moneybags. The fish cakes were not as spicy as i would have liked them to be but the sweet chilli sauce made up for that. The moneybags were quite nice with the clear sweet and sour sauce. The skin of the moneybags were fried golden brown and were crispy but not too hard. The fillings were similar to a samosa, but without the curry.

Next up were the mains. We still hadn't got our drinks by now so we politely reminded our waiter to bring our drinks out. The drinks came out rather quickly after that reminder. The Pad Thai was delicious, second only to the Pad Thai we had in Brisbane earlier this year. The noodles were cooked perfectly with enough tamarind to be very flavoursome. The only thing that could be improved for the Pad Thai would be for the chef to use fresh prawns, rather than the frozen variety. Although it is hard to find restaurants that use fresh prawns these days.

The Tom Yum Goong looked extremely good with it's dark red colour with mushrooms and prawns floating on the top. I was expecting the Tom Yum to be quite spicy from the amount of redness in the soup, but it was quite mild. There was enough flavour in the Tom Yum soup for us to be able to pour it over rice and eat it that way. All in all, the Tom Yum was delicious.

After eating all that food, we were satisfied not to need a dessert. Thinking that we would be waiting too long for a waiter to give us our bill, we walked up to the counter to pay.

I liked this piece of art, 3D elephants, this made the place feel like it was a restaurant in Thailand, i would lOVE to have something like this in my home

Ambience: 3.5 / 5
Food: 4 / 5
Service: 2 / 5

Pricing: 3.5 / 5
Average: 3.25 / 5