Not the Best Restaurants

Not in the best Monday morning mood, but we did have a fairly interesting weekend.

It started *really* well on Friday when I received an invite from the folks doing the PR for Taste of Joburg this year (which is 30 Sept - 04 Oct, in case you were wondering) asking if they could send me a ticket. How awesome is that? When I checked out the site, I read that this will be their 3rd year ... which means I've been every year and blogged about it. Sometimes blogging definitely has it's perks and to me, this is a fabulous one! So thanks again to Nicola at Tribeca PR!

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On Friday night Varen & I met his mom and her new man for dinner at Monte Casino. We somehow ended up eating at The Metropolis (and that was after I'd said I didn't mind where we ate as long as there wasn't only steak on the menu). I naively thought leaving the restaurant choice up to Varen and him knowing my eating-requirements and him picking a restaurant he'd been to before would be a safe bet. Apparently not (in his defence I don't think he ate there the last time he went). I will say the decor in the place is very cool, and I love the pictures of Joburg around the place. But it has a pretty minimal menu. Seriously, how often do you find a smaller food than drinks menu (not including a completely separate wine list)? And most of it was red meat. I ended up having a very nice Roasted Aubergine filled with ratatouille and a cheese crumble. I did enjoy it, but prefer having more to choose from than this menu had to offer me.

Saturday was a bit of an admin day. I went to gym and then Varen & I headed off to Sandton to purchase our forex for Zanzibar! Yippee. 1 step closer to our much needed beach break! The evening however turned out a little disastrous.

We met J9 and Squeak for dinner at the Marrakesh Lounge. I picked the restaurant, I'd been wanting to try it out since it was recommended on one of my Moroccan trip posts. Okay, let me say right here, it's not a bad place, I imagine if you're just going to hang out with some friends for some drinks and to enjoy smoking a sheesha, it's a great venue. Sitting inside reminded us of the tents we slept in, in the Sahara. And Varen and I did have some time to enjoy remembering our trip while we waited for the girls to arrive. And the food really is exactly like we remembered from Morocco! But again the menu is very small. And although I already knew they didn't serve pastilla, I was hoping there might be a nice apricot tagine for me. There wasn't so I had Kefta. Which was very similar to the Kefta I'd had in Morocco and tasted really nice. It was definitely worth trying, but I doubt I'd go back for dinner again. Definitely good to trigger our Moroccan memories tho :)

We decided not to do dessert there since all they had was Ice-cream and Hot Chocolate sauce. So we headed off to Baglio's in Sandton for ice-cream and that was where our evening started to sour. We ordered from a completely un-interested looking waitress. Only to have her eventually come back and tell us they didn't have ingredients for 3 of our 4 orders. So we ordered again. and then eventually had another waitress come over and tell us again that one of our order's couldn't be filled. We were quite disillusioned already. And then it took an absolute age for the 3 ice-creams and my lemon meringue pie to arrive. We had to order glasses of water twice, although there were about 7 waitresses standing 2 tables over desperately trying to ignore us. The service was *shocking* ! My lemon meringue pie was probably the worst I've eaten. The meringue was way too sugary and the lemon part also had sugary-crunchy bits :P Eurgh. I didn't come close to finishing it. I will not be going back there to sit down again ... if ever.

And then we said our goodbyes and headed off home. Just as we got home J9 called to say they'd been stopped by cops in Illovo and were being told to follow them to the police station in Loveday Street for a breathalyser test. Varen and I sat home in a panic waiting for each message to come thru to hear that all was going okay. For 2 girls driving alone at close to midnight, I've be terrified to make a detour into Joburg's city centre. But then again I have a complete distrust of cops, as I've mentioned before. Luckily (and completely unsurprisingly), Squeak (who was driving) was under the limit and they left to head home again safely. What a relief. But still. What kind of idiots are cops? If you want to breathalyse people, set up a road-block so people don't have to head miles out of their way "to the only police station with a working breathalyser" (how can that even be true?!?! That is absolute madness!). Let me just say, it is not an ideal way to end your Saturday.

On Sunday Varen went into work again (did I mention we popped in there twice on Saturday so he could do stuff?!). And then in the afternoon we headed off to Emmerentia for a picnic to celebrate @jameshappe's birthday. Which was lovely, just to sit out on the grass in the beautiful weather we've been having :)

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And in the evening we *finally* saw District 9. I really enjoyed it. Which I wasn't surprised by ... what did surprise me was that I didn't find the accents as grating as I usually do in South African movies. I managed to immerse myself enough, I guess. I'm also not one for looking into the deeper meanings and the under-lying parallels so for me, as a sci-fi, alien film, filmed in Jobhannesburg, I thought it was great :) And wa-ay better than any of that typical-Leon Schuster "South African Movie" crap.