Syd 'n Mel's - dinner

We headed out to Itaewon for dinner last night and ended up at Syd 'n Mel's, an Australian style restaurant. I'm at work when they serve their lunch/brunch menu, so dinner it is for us. They had a nice long wine list, but for bottles. I just had a glass of the house shiraz/cab blend.

I had the hamburger steak, which is just a hamburger patty served over mashed potatoes with grilled vegetables. They also brought out a basket of garlic bread. The garlic bread had real garlic in clearly recognizable chunks, with butter, on relatively thinly sliced pieces of french bread. It was excellent when they first brought it out, but when I tried a second piece after my entree arrived, it was chewy and tough. The main course was good. The vegetables were fresh, and drizzled with a balsamic reduction sauce. I'm not fond of grilled tomatoes usually, but here, it's still recognizable as a tomato, and tastes like a tomato, instead of a cardboard mush that sort of resembles a tomato. In addition to the tomato, there was a piece of zucchini, mushroom, eggplant, and bell pepper. The beef patty was spicy, and well-cooked. The potatoes weren't as good as I was hoping for, there were bits of what looked like green onion to give a hint of bite. But they were bland with no character.



This is the Queensland chicken served with a cheese sauce and fresh vegetables over rice. The sauce, while it looks like the nacho cheese sauce sold at stadiums in the US, didn't taste like it. The vegetables were fresh and tasted like vegetables, and the chicken was also fresh.