Relish review

Relish is a nice venue, with the restaurant downstairs, a bar upstairs and a function area on the top floor. The restaurant itself lacks some ambiance, due to the concrete floor and modern style furniture. It does have a great view of the mountain though.

I haven’t eaten at Relish for quite along time, probably a couple of years. They have changed their menu and style completely. When they first opened, the food involved combinations of divers ingredients into interesting sounding and palate pleasing fusion dishes. Now the menu is more basic, offering standard fare (including pizzas) but it does still have some original flavour combinations.

We were a party of four. Two of us had pizzas which were pretty good. One was the Sweet Lips, an interesting combination of garlic, ginger, honey, soy marinated chicken and coriander (R54) and the other was the Bokkie, sporting brie, sliced jammed figs, rocket and smoked springbok carpaccio (R75). The bases were not too thick, but thick enough to support the toppings, allowing one to eat by hand. I tasted the Bokkie and it was actually very good. I had the pan fried line fish (R75) which was Cape Salmon. It was pretty horrible. It was overcooked and the sauce (fragrant coconut cream) was too strong for the fish. The veggies it came with were ok but the chips were nice. The last dish we tried was the smoked chicken and brie pasta with avocado, cream and natural yoghurt (R60). This was fantastic, a very tasty dish indeed.

We did also share some starters, we tried the wood oven baked mushrooms (R35), which were average, and the garlic pita bread (R18) which is not pita at all. Other restaurants would call it a foccacia.

The wine list is quite pricey but offers 1 or 2 reasonably priced options in each category. We enjoyed the Bradgate Syrah at R95 per bottle.

The service was average, we often found ourselves looking around wondering what had happened to our waiter. Apart from that though, the mains took about an hour which is really unacceptable. All in all, I don’t think I will rush back. The food was acceptable but the wait and the lack of ambiance meant we weren’t excited.

Relish
70 New Church Street, CBD
021 422 3584
www.relish.co.za