Where have you eaten lately? Tucker joint reviews

[stui magpie]

I just had lunch with my son at a little restaurant in Romsey called "Soltan Pepper". It was soo good I thought I'd come on here and give it a recommendation, then I thought why not start a thread were people can put up a review of different places they've eaten. Could be a handy guide for Nicksters if you travel around.

Doesn't need to be a restaurant, could be a pub, a bakery, a coffee shop anything. The only criteria would be that it was either good enough in some way that you would want to recommend it or that it was bad enough that you'd suggest people avoid it.

So, anyway, this joint is called Soltan Pepper. It's a smallish but tidy restaurant in the main street of Romsey that does what I suppose you'd call contemporary Australian food.

http://www.soltanpepperrestaurant.com.au/

They also have a facebook page and they have theme nights some weeks, like Parma night, or Burger night or Pasta night.

You wait to be seated, they come straight over to you with menus and water. They come back to the table to take your order and bring your food to you when it's ready. Proper table service.

I had the Porterhouse with chips and salad, the boy had the salt and pepper calamari.

I ordered the steak rare, but it was probably more medium rare but zero complaints. It was 2 inches thick and cooked perfectly. Seared and sealed on the outside and the inside cooked to the exact same consistent level all through. Juicy, tasty, bloody beautiful.

Chips were large without being too big, cooked perfectly for my taste which is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, the pepper sauce was very tasty if not hot. (at least I didn't find it at all hot, someone more sensitive to heat may think different)

The only bit that didn't impress me was the salad. More like a collection of garnishes with a bit of tomato and cucumber, but that's neither here nor there.

The boy was getting a bit toey initially, he's more of a pub bloke than a restaurant person but after his first bite of the calamari he was "Oh wow, I'm coming back here" .

So there you go. If you happen to be in the area I highly recommend this place to pop in for lunch or dinner, but probably advisable to call first and book, they were doing a reasonable trade today. As a Restaurant they're pricier than a pub, the steak was $35 from memory and the calamari twenty something. They do have lunch specials as well.

The Romsey pub Bistro about 100m away also does a very good feed, this is just a notch or two higher.

[think positive]

Ta both sisters live up the road, I'll check it out

Went to port arlingon golf club, medium rare steak with cream cheese and smoked salmon, crunchy veg and really good man chips

Apparently the Parma was sensational

[The Prototype]

Shamrock Hotel in Hobart, very good place to have a nice 10 dollar meal. I generally order a steak and veggies but you have steak and chips, and so on their. Very good service there, if you go there during a sporting event you can certainly watch it. I've been there a few times with Laura, we've done on dates there. May need to find another place around Hobart for that.

But I don't mind their steak it's always cooked pretty good, and they have crumbs on there. They make a nice garlic potato that they put on there with the carrots mashed pumpkin. It's a very very nice meal for 10 bucks that's every day up until about 8:30pm.

Always a good idea to book a table there though, they're pretty popular.

[stui magpie]

Cheers Proto, I just looked it up on Google, looks like a good place.

20 years ago I used to go down to Hobart for work once a month. There was a pub i went to a few times, can't remember the name but it was downstairs hidden away, about a block from the Mall. All the walls were this vivid green wallpape, they served really cheap but tasty tucker and 8oz beer glasses.

Haven't been over for a long time.

[The Prototype]

It's a very nice place, hard to park near and a fair hike from the bus mall/mall Laura and I walked from the Aquatic Centre to there it was a fairly long walk.

It's cool though, I will ask dad about that other place as well, he's drank at many of the pubs around Hobart so he'd certainly know the place.

[The Prototype]

Dad thinks it might be The Ship Hotel, even though parts of this could relate to The Tattler, The Shamrock, Bruswick Hotel.

The Shamrock is an Irish type pub, it was once opened by former Richmond player John Richmond, whose son Ben was on our list.

[1061]

Didn't eat there but went along to the Coburg Trash n Treasure today and noticed the drive inn has an area set aside for a food van during the movies. It's gotta be better than the crap they sold in the cafe.

[watt price tully]

[Tannin]

Some place in Lygon Street. Served us a huge "seafood platter" with every weird damn article of seafood you can imagine, and nothing, repeat nothing, repeat nothing except over-rich seafood aside from a tiny bowl with a few olives and and enough lettuce to make two mouthfuls between six of us. Oh, and about six small chips each. So here we are with a vast mountain of very expensive food in front of us, and nothing to eat. No fruit, no vegetables, no grains, no nuts, nothing. Oh, we ordered garlic bread and herb bread, but that turned out to be a tiny, and I do mean tiny, slice of unmemorable doughy stuff soggy with some sort of spicy grease. Not impressed.

I sat there picking at a couple of bugs - just about the only vaguely plain food there unless you like prawns, which I don't much - and drinking glass after glass of water for two hours wondering where the proper food was. Still, the conversation was good.

The minute we got home after, in theory, living the high life and stuffing ourselves for a couple of hours, my mother sang out "who wants a slice of toast?" 'coz several hundred dollars later we were all hungry.

[David]

Went to an overpriced cafe in Brunswick Heads. I can't get my head around paying $14 for what is essentially a small sandwich (smoked salmon bagel). Give me a big $9 pasta any day.

[stui magpie]

OK now, tannin and David,

If you're going to bag a joint, name it

if you're silly enough to pay over the odds for something you don't actually like, that's not really the eatery's fault, is it?

[Tannin]

Just some place in Lygon Street, Stui. I have no idea which one, nor do I care. It probably isn't too different to 50 other places in or near the same place. WTF is wrong with us when we plunder more and more precious rare sea creatures on a vast scale just to criminally waste the bloody things on dumb conspicuous consumption like this? Denude what's left of the oceans just so we can get indigestion from a madly unbalanced meal and/or throw most of it into landfill?

It's like those stupid counter meals you used to get where you got an inch-thick steak overhanging both ends of the plate too big for even a serious eater like me to finish, plus a desert spoonful of watery mashed potato, two soggy beans, and three overcooked peas. (Four peas if you were lucky.)


PS: I wasn't paying, I was basically there because my folks needed someone to drive them to Melbourne to meet some old friends. I don't normally eat out, can't see the point. If I want to share a meal with friends, I'll usually cook it myself and enjoy it. Or eat their cooking, and enjoy that.

[David]

I don't remember either�don't usually take notice of such things. This was Lola's choice; if I had my way, we'd probably be at Macca's every second night.

(BTW, I do actually like bagels. I just can't stomach paying $14 for something I can get for $7 at my workplace cafe or make for $4 at home. We ended up getting an Indonesian rice salad thing for $16, which was pretty nice but still outrageously overpriced).

[stui magpie]

Ahhh. chauffeur duties and no choice in the food. That sucks.

[Tannin]

Oh, I could have ordered anything I wanted, Stui, but I eat practically anything put in front of me (within reason) so I just went along with a shared group order to make things easy, even though I don't much care for seafood. I was expecting to have a few bits of fish or something else plain just to be polite, and fill my boots on all the vegetables and/or salad and/or bread and/or fruit. But all there was was seafood, nothing else. Well, OK, there was one tiny slice of some tasteless and unidentifable fish smothered in god-knows-what (which I ate), and a couple of bugs, but after that, there was nothing but calamari, oysters, prawns, mussels, and all sorts of other weird stuff in shells which I wasn't game to eat on its own without something plain and wholesome to bed it down with. So I just kept a little something on my plate and pushed it around from time to time to look good and kept sipping more water. If I hadn't been driving, I'd have wound up sozzled to the gills!