Sunday outing to Park Café

 21 April 2024

 

PARK CAFÉ 

Green Point Park, Green Point, Cape Town

 

Today’s dog day excursion was to the massive, highly manicured and hugely popular  inner city green space  that is Green Point Park, a place we hadn’t visited since the early part of  2018. I’d read many complimentary views of Park Café’s breakfast and the eatery is dog friendly.

 

We arrived at about 12h30 and easily found a table on the front patio, under the pergola. Soon after, though, more patrons arrived and soon the patio tables were almost fully occupied. There are also tables inside but they must be for colder weather. Today, until about 14h00 anyway, was a perfect, warm and wind-free day in Cape Town and it was a buzz gazing out on the vast lawns crowded with excitable  kids, adults and the odd dog.

 

The menu is surprisingly basic. For example, there is no standard range of coffees, just “coffee” in small or large sizes.  There is a small “all day breakfast” section and a lunch section with nothing exotic or out of the ordinary.

My comment was, either the kitchen was limiting itself to doing a few things very well or we were in a time warp, on a road trip in die platteland in the ‘80s where there was no ambition with food.

 

We drank small coffees, that were good, and my choice was the  smoked trout on a potato latke (R89), to which I added scrambled eggs (R15)

and the wife chose the harissa chicken salad (R89).

The food was excellent.  Kudos to the chef who did simple food real good. 

 

The latke was crisp and the combination of crème fraiche and scrambled egg was unctuous and there was a generous portion of trout. The wife was raving about her salad and loved the addition of fresh dill; fresh and delicious.

 

Of course, you can’t always get what you want and sometimes you don’t even get what you need, and that lesson was brought home when we ordered scones with jam, to fill that small, yet significant, empty corner in the belly, and were told that they’d already sold all the scones.

 

Clearly, the scones aren’t genuinely home-made, at least not on these premises, or the kitchen could’ve whipped up a fresh batch. We would’ve waited; it was peaceful on the patio.

 

Plan B was a shared slice of also very good, moist, carrot cake, easily the best I’ve eaten in a restaurant over the past year or so, though the wife thinks the vegan carrot cake at Old Meul in Simondium is superb. (I don’t know how much the slice of cake was, as it’s not on the menu and the printing on the bill was so faint it was illegible).

The bill (the food, cake and four coffees) came to R393,00. 

 

It was a very good and relaxing outing with great food. Park Café is highly recommended.