Good food, low budgie vibes at La Bohéme

 10 April 2024

 

LA BOHEME

341 Main Road, Sea Point

 

Tonight was my third birthday dinner, in the last week and this time with the fam, minus the elder goddaughter’s indisposed squeeze, and the deal was (a) a la carte, (b) three choices of tapas for R285,00 or (c) a three course “Spanish” menu for R350,00.

 

The owners of Bouchon and Silk also own La Bohéme and the tapas menu at the latter is pretty much that of Bouchon but the look, get up and style of the restaurant are chalk and lactose-free cheese. Bouchon is classy, welcoming and slightly mysterious. La Bohéme, not so much.

 

The general atmosphere is of, uh, bohemian dinginess and faded glory in desperate need of a serious face lift and redesign.  It’s neither stylishly elegant  or funky and quirky and warm and welcoming it ain’t.

 

On the night there was some guy morosely plucking away at his classic guitar, roundly ignored by the patrons. A pointless exercise in futility if I’ve ever seen one.

 

However, the service was excellent and cheerful and the food ain’t too shabby, considering it shares Bouchon’s pedigree. The drinks menu refers to a gin trolley, one of Bouchon’s theatrical highlights but here there’s no trolley; one orders from a virtual trolley, the gin is served to the table and the garnishes added on site.

 

Ever the fiercely otherwise member of the party, I was the only one to choose tapas; the others liked the options of the three-course menu better.  

As usual, I chose what I want to eat about as quickly as it takes met to read the menu but I was sorely disappointed when the server told me that the squid & chorizo dish was no longer available, necessitating a paradigm shifting re-perusal of the menu to replace the squid in my carefully curated sequence of dishes.

 

In the end the line-up comprised of the vegetarian soft tacos, sesame & coriander crusted tuna and Bourbon BBQ pork belly.

 

Amongst the others, they had each of the three starters on the three-course menu, the two rice main dishes and the steak and each of the two dessert options.

 

My vegetarian tacos were tasty yet subdues in flavour, the tuna was perfect and bracing and the pork belly was succulent, with incredible depth of flavour, so much so I would happily have eaten two more plates of it and did almost lick the plate clean. Truly scrumptiously excellent.

 

My dessert was a good crème brûlée.

The wife had the quite generous paella as her main and thought it was the best paella she’d had in a long time, with well-cooked seafood and unctuous, well-flavoured rice.

The so-called “burnt” Basque cheesecake (for me that’s as bad as talking about chai tea or naan bread; and, for the record, Basque cheesecake isn’t burnt, but merely aggressively caramelised) was a pale imitation of the genuine article, lacking the caramelisation and without the distinctive taste; it was just this meh fluffy light confection with syrup.

 

The hake croquettes were crispy, light and tasty and the  perfectly cooked meatballs had a perky bite to them.

 

The younger goddaughter and her beau agreed that the mushroom risotto, though otherwise yummy, lacked lemon juice, asked for some slices of lemon and elevated their dishes to their satisfaction. The elder goddaughter very much enjoyed her pan contomate (bruschetta with tomato) starter and rib-eye steak main dish, although the so-called duck fat roasted potatoes were the poor cousins of my version thereof (paraphrasing her). The goddaughters mostly liked the trés leche cake as dessert but weren’t ecstatic about the rather overpowering taste of saffron.

 

The fam split the bill (R2 800,00) five ways and our share, including drinks (we had a variety of gin cocktails, beers, bubbly and red wine) and tip, came to R1120,00, which is good value for money seeing as how it was Bouchon quality food in a low budgie venue.