Eat City

coathanger

Eat City at the City Hotel 14th May 2007

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Eat City is a modern bistro style restaurant located upstairs at the City Hotel. We dined there one evening with some very special people and had a fabulous night. The restaurant was surprisingly empty for a Thursday night, but at least that meant that service was excellent!

The menu is fairly compact, with all meals being designed to share - they are "larger than entrée and smaller than traditional mains". We loved this concept as it meant we could order a few dishes to share between the four of us. After an exhausting selection process we decided on only four dishes, wanting to save room for dessert.

We had the Soft Shell Crab with Chilli Salt Crust first of all. It looked fabulous and tasted almost as good, though a little too salty for me. Next up was the incredibly rich Duck Leg Confit with Braised Lentils. After that came the Kurobuta Pork Neck with Cabbage & Apples - the pork was juicy and the apples were disguised as melon balls. Last but certainly not least was the Wagyu Beef with Gratin Potato & Mushroom Red Wine Jus. This was my favourite dish of the evening - the beef was incredibly tender and flavoursome.

Don't you just love a dessert trolley….hmmm….well, I thought I did, but there wasn't much on the Eat City trolley that tempted me. In the end we ordered a couple of the Chocolate Pyramids which were probably the low-light of the meal.

All in all though it was a great night - some very tasty wine, good food and the best type of company : )

TamaraC at 17/05/07

I don't know Coathanger - maybe we're more than just 'maybes'. So totally agree with you re Eat City...! TamaraC

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TamaraC

Eat City 2nd May 2007

9 found this helpful

Recently, I was the happy recipient of a visit from my much-loved brother and sis'lo. I may have shared some of my visiting rights with others, but one chilly night in Sydney, husband DC and myself had them all to ourselves. I checked out the Good Living weekly restaurant reviews, I asked my up-to-the-minute dining-out friends where they liked to go, and taking the advice of a my red-headed friend, I reserved a table at ‘Eat City', a restaurant in the city centre specialising in a selection of dishes to share, a sort of ‘French Yum Cha' with menu items ‘larger than entrée but smaller than main'. While the name suggests a badly-translated and still worse-tasting buffet diner, ‘Eat City' is actually a sophisticated, wood-floored, low-lit bistro with knowledgable, attentive staff and fantastic food. We settled in.

With only 12 menu items to choose from, you would think the selection of ‘any four dishes to share' for the incredibly reasonable sum of $38 per head would be fairly simple. But no. There were trigger ingredients for us all over the menu - haloumi, white truffle vinaigrette, soft shell crab and Wagyu beef. In the end we had to vote - we literally took a tally for each dish - and the clear cut winners were:

Soft shell crab with chilli salt crust, fennel, ginger and oyster mushrooms; Kurobuta pork neck roast with buttered cabbage and apples; Duck confit with Puy lentils; Wood roasted Wagyu beef, served rare with gratin potato and mushroom red wine jus.

Each dish came out on a rectangular platter with four serves of each dish sized just right for sharing and for satisfaction. No fighting for the extra crab claw for example…

First came the crab, plentiful with a sauce piquant with Asian flavours, but the crust could have had more chilli and less salt - it left me reaching for the sparkling water.

Next, melt-in-your mouth duck with the lentils cooked just right, overall, a beautifully balanced dish.

This was followed by roast pork neck (ordered by an insistent DC who was charmed by the word ‘Kurobuta' - it put him in mind of a South Korean front-end loader). In any case, it was delicious, with an accompaniment featuring small balls of apple (think melon balls) mixed with perfectly-sauteed cabbage.

For the finale to our main course feast, the Wagyu beef on gratin potato came out, and was so tasty and so silky that you could eat it until the cows came home (thankfully for us of course, they did).

The prospect of choosing dessert from a trolley wheeled to our table was wonderful, but I was a little underwhelmed by the selection, and by the dessert itself, a pyramid of chocolate sponge, with berries. Adequate, but hardly up to the standard of the main course offerings.

I would go back. I would have the scallops, the haloumi salad (ok ok, that's one of my trigger ingredients!) and the duck, pork or Wagyu again and again. And I would take my red-headed friend's suggestion that the cheese selection is fantastic and give the dessert trolley a skip.

Thankfully the underwhelming pyramid of chocolate did not bring us down (and lets face it, anyone can be undone by an underwhelming pyramid of chocolate…). We had enjoyed our wine, enjoyed our meals and each other's company enormously, and were reaching for diaries to try to find more time for ‘just the four of us' in an already packed schedule. Although it was not to be, it was proof that a great night out is sure to leave you wishing for more!

sue at 02/05/07

Sounds like a fabulous night TamaraC! Your brother and sis'lo are very lucky people to have shared it with you ; )

walid at 02/05/07

Can I be adopted??? Here I'm in the TrustedPlaces office eating my burrito and feeling slightly unsatisfied whilst reading your reviews. I want that Wagyu now!

Thanks for the great review TamaraC!

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