Geethika D.
Yelp
After reviewing places to see where I should go in the Katy area on a dinner date, I decided to come here after looking at the reviews and seeing it so highly rated. It did not meet expectations at all. This is purely a review of the dinner experience, I would think the brunch or other dining times are much better since thats what the reviews I saw are talking about.
I always like to start off talking about the service. The initial service in general was a pleasent experience. I appreciated our server making sure we were taken care of in the beginning and we were all settled in. However, after we got our food, the service went from "great" to just plainly "too much". Let me preface by saying that the restaurant was basically empty except for 2 other tables, so i understand why they had so much time on their hands, but interrupting our conversation every 5-10 minutes does not create a very great experience.
Now lets head to the food. We got the appetizer platter with a mix of south african and latin foods. This, we quite enjoyed. The empanadas looked and were delicious. The south african dried meat and sausage were good snacking foods to have during our time there. All in all though, there wasn't anything to write home out, the food was... basic and there were no flavours that really stood out.
For the entree portion, we ordered the seafood platter which came with shrimp, prawns, mussels, calamari, bacon wrapped scallops, and zucchini with some rice. Let me start out by saying, why would anyone wrap such a soft peace of flesh like scallop in bacon. That is a disservice to the scallop. The scallops were very overcooked and chewy, and was not helped by the fact that the bacon was also chewy and salty. The shrimp was overcooked and also heavily salted for some reason. The prawns were by far the best thing on this plate, they were juicy and had a lot of flavor but even these were too salty. The calamari was ok but looked way too much like onion rings, and the mussels were good. The rice was the south african yellow rice with raisins. Rice was way too dry and a tad too sweet, and funnily enough, did not have enough salt on it.
Lastly, we were excited for the dessert as we are both sweet tooths and decided to get the creme brule. Imagine my surprise when the bowl we got was a round bottom glass bowl... The brulee was done nice, had a nice crack to it when we went in, but then came out overcooked creme. The texture was more of a cake and was definetly overcooked. It was sugar so all in all still tasted ok but if you were looking for nice creme brulee, this is not it. We also got some tea with the dessert and even that was some basic grocery store tea. I mean at least try to give us tea from latin america or south africa.
I might just be what we got on the menu that gave such a bad expereince. Maybe if you get the braised goat or oxtail or even the steaks it would be better. But, in my opinion a restaurant should serve everything with quality so making one or two things really good cant cut it.
I personally cannot recommend this place for dinner.