Daniella's Ramblings

Towards the end of last week my eldest daughter was invited to a sleepover at a friend’s house on Saturday night. Can anyone say ‘opportunity’? We quickly made plans for the youngest to sleep at her grandmother’s house and we had an opportunity for a night out! We didn’t have much time to plan, find things to do or indeed to even talk about what we wanted to do because life has just been a bit hectic. But we did know we wanted to do something. And we wanted to do it together.

This presented a small challenge when deciding what to wear. It is hard to plan an outfit when you don’t know what you will be doing. My spouse took the girls off to their various sleepovers and I started getting ready. I finally decided to wear my new off the shoulder, tight top with skinny jeans and my black boots.

 

I thought that this was casual enough to be ok if we went somewhere like the movies but was sufficiently glam (I thought the belt I accessorised with ‘lifted’ the whole outfit nicely) that it would be ok if we went somewhere a little more glamorous. I am a little unsure of this top to be honest it is a little risque. I do feel quite sexy wearing it and I started enjoying wearing it as the evening wore on. But I don’t think I could wear it to the mall during the day. Somehow one shoulder bare seems sexier and more risque than having both exposed. Weird.

When my spouse arrived home, we decided on a ‘dinner and a movie’. She wanted to try the Greek restaurant Plaka at Cresta and I thought Red Sparrow may be worth seeing. We got ready, snapped a few photographs and we were off. We arrived at Plaka and whilst it was busy we there were still a few tables available. The waiter was professional and seated us right away. We asked for a glass of tap water each and he brought the menus. My spouse asked the waiter what the meze were and how big they were. after some debate I convinced her that they were probably too small to have as a main meal. We therefore selected the grilled calamari and the Sheftalia. The waiter asked if we had ever had the Sheftalia before, we said that we had not. He then suggested that we should try something else because it was quite ‘different’. Never a good sign! Nonetheless we went ahead with our choices.

Whilst waiting for our food to arrive we saw another table get some very yummy looking pink drinks. We asked what they were and were told by the manager that they were strawberry daiquiris. He asked if he could get us some. We said that we were not wanting to drink alcohol. ‘No problem’, he said, ‘I will make you a pair of virgin cocktails’. We agreed, and they arrived. We were sipping our drinks, chatting about this and that when a tiny plate of grilled calamari was placed in front of me. Before we had a chance to say anything the waiter had left. We looked at each other wondering what this was. Had the waiter mistaken our order? Was this a starter portion and the main meal was due to arrive later, or what? We waited a good few minutes before we saw the waiter again and before we could say anything he assured us that our order was coming soon. Fair enough. We assumed that all would be revealed shortly. We waited. We finished our cocktails and waited some more. We continued to wait. We waited a very long time. I would say it was more than half an hour later that three tiny meat sausages were presented to my spouse.

We finally realised that the waiter had misunderstood us and ordered meze portions of these dishes. The restaurant rather foolishly has both meze and full portions of exactly the same dishes on the menu, with them being called exactly the same thing! Oh dear. The waiter saw our confusion and asked what was wrong. We explained that we had ordered the full portion and received meze portions. He was very apologetic and asked if he could fix it for us. At this point I was less than impressed. We had waited a very long time for the second plate to arrive. Why had they brought my calamari and then taken so long to bring the Sheftalia? We assessed the situation and thought of we waited for them to correct the error we may not eat this year. So, we said no thank you and ate our food. The Sheftalia was actually very good. I have no idea why they felt the need to issue dire warnings about its palatability. The calamari were cold. Which is to be expected after a thirty to forty minute wait I suppose. I was nonetheless less than impressed. Being meze portions, there were no sides, so I cannot comment on that. Even at meze prices, I felt that at R20 per meat sausage and around R5 per calamari tube, the pricing was rather aggressive.

We had originally planned on eating dessert at Plaka (we had even chosen what we were going to have) but decided that it probably was just not worth the risk. We called for the bill. We were somewhat staggered to see that the virgin cocktails had set us back R55 each or R110 for the two. Perhaps not an excessive amount in global terms but if you consider that these were pretty much strawberry juice and that they accounted for more than 502 percent of the bill… Well they were far pricier than anticipated. We paid the bill and left.

We were now feeling somewhat hard done by and decided that we would forego the movie and that we would just go to Dominique’s. I had had a delicious cheesecake there on Tuesday and thought that it would be a chance to redeem something from the evening. I had a cappuccino and a slice of berry cheesecake. My partner had a hot chocolate and a slice of chocolate mousse cake. We cut the cake slices in half and we each had a piece of each cake. The chocolate mousse cake was very good, but the cheesecake was divine. I am usually a fan of the icings and toppings of cakes, but I really couldn’t decide whether the cake, the crust or the berry topping was best. I kept taking little bites of each trying to decide. The service was excellent, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In retrospect we should have eaten our meal there!

We left Cresta and went home having redeemed something from the evening. It just goes to show a night out en femme is always fun, even when things do not go quite as well as we would like!