Barendoe Restaurant Tapas Bar

As we arrived we were greeted by the very friendly Kim - so we were off to a good start. Unfortunately for us - Kim wasn't serving us. We asked our waitress for a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon to get us started - this is where we hit our first snag. We were informed that the restaurant did not have a single bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon of any brand, even though there was a great red wine specialty bottle shop just a few doors down. We didn't feel that the food we wanted would go with much else than a Cabernet, so one of us went for a wander and bought a lovely bottle of Reschke 2007 Cab Sav from the bottle shop, and took the corkage charge on the chin. We ordered 2 serves of char-grilled, marinated king prawns served with watermelon, fetta, baby spinach and Spanish onion. Although the combination sounded a little strange, we were intrigued to see what they had discovered about how these flavours worked together, unfortunately, it seems that they had made no discoveries here, it was as it sounds, not a great combination. I guess we should have realised as we all know, you don't serve cheese with seafood in general. The other dish ordered was a margherita pizza, which came out ahead of the other dishes – it was adequate. Because we wanted to savour our lovely bottle of wine, we order a cheese platter to finish off – the menu described it as including poached pear and ciabatta wafers – instead it arrived with no pear, and a sprawl of Arnott's Jatz crackers, with the cheese lumped together in the middle of the plate. We did mention our disappointment to our waitress, who simply raised her eyebrows and said “oh”. That was the best she could do – we received no apology or offer for compensation at having been served something that did not match the menu description. The Reschke was the best part of our meal. Good day.