Wine Kitchen
Restaurants
By Howard Jarvis.
13.08.2013
Spending an hour on the front terrace of Wine Kitchen is not to everybody’s taste. But it may be after a few weeks. Explanation? The clang and drill of construction work on the building opposite.
Despite the immaculate waitress’s best efforts, a fine layer of dust lay on each of the streetside terrace tables. Despite that, however, the customers still came. And nobody was seated inside.
During the day, the patient, the insensitive and the deaf will be rewarded with great food. In the evening, the workers will have gone home, leaving the tables surrounded by a pleasant city hum and music from nearby pubs and clubs. Another patchy Art Deco structure close by isn’t pretty but the largely pedestrian streets and a curve of pastel-colored buildings to one side give Wine Kitchen atmosphere. A line of potted miniature palms helps too.
The restaurant has only a limited “business lunch” from noon, changing to a la carte at 5pm. We ordered an appetizer and main dish (€8.60 in total). A touch of theater comes when the cream soup, made from potato and leek, is poured by the waitress from a jug around a mound of tiny crumbs of crispy pork. It’s not especially sizeable, but it is memorably tasty.
The salmon fillet, roasted in a deliciously salty soy-sauce glaze and served on rice and green peas doused with a fishy broth, is also a treat.
Strangely, given the restaurant name, the wine list is limited. Dishes in the leather-embossed a la carte menu come with wine recommendations, but these are over-used. Laroche Chablis and a Wolfberger Riesling are both recommended for five of the six main dishes. Also, the evening menu’s limited choice means there’s only one vegetarian option, one red-meat dish and one for poultry; the remaining three are fish or seafood. But we enjoyed our lunch, so we’ll be back soon to try them. Hopefully the construction work will be finished by then.
