Tuesday 2 February 2010

bedouin kitchen, st kilda

A number of our Melbourne Peeps love the Bedouin Kitchen, and had a spectacularly delicious meal there ages before we arrived in Melbourne. So when A invited us out to dinner on Sunday night, we were very interested in what there was to offer.

The menu is not super extensive for vegans, but there are some obvious options such as dips, olives and tabbouleh. I went for the Kushery ($18.50), which was layered rice, macaroni and lentils in a spicy tomato sauce. This dish does usually contain yoghurt, but can be made without.

something i ate (with lentils and pasta and rice)

It was a really mild dish, not overly flavoursome, but the combination of simple flavours and the rice with lentils and pasta made this a delightful and filling dish. I would love to try something like this at home, it seems quite straightforward.

Danni wasn't feeling super, or very hungry, so opted for the Arabic bread with dips ($14.50), minus the tzatziki. This was perfectly servicable, with spices on the bread (which I always love!), but there isn't a huge amount you can say about bread and dips.

Perusing the menu, and the dishes that came out, I suspect the food would have been a lot more exciting if we ate cheese (there was a lot of baked cheese involved in everyone else's dishes). However the food we got was still quite good.

dips

They were attentive and helpful, and very accomodating of dietary requirements. However our table ordered three serves of mashed potato (it is allegedly the best potato in the world, but it is not suitable for vegans so I wasn't invested in it). This order, though made at the same times as the rest of our ordering, failed to make it to the kitchen, and towards the end of the meal, when we asked where it was, we were told the kitchen had run out. The annoyance is less that they had run out (it happens), and more that they hadn't told us.

It was at this point that we left, because Danni wasn't feeling well, but later twitter updates indicate that maybe there was also a problem with dessert not arriving.

Food was good, points for helping us find the vegan food, but mixed feelings about the rest of the experience.



Bedouin Kitchen
103 Grey St,
St. Kilda

GF available

1 comment:

Eurasian Sensation said...

Is Bedouin still being run by a Malaysian Chinese guy?

Last time I went there, the food was almost really good, except everything was really lacking in salt. Weird.

However I did have this roast pumpkin thing with tahini and honey, which was sublime.