Wednesday 27 February 2013

Casa Mexicana - El Compa

The scene: a Saturday night, a much needed catch up with friends and a lot of events and dramas to update everyone on, so what do we end up eating? Mexican of course! Corn chips, tacos and beer were on the cards when we descended upon this Northbridge restaurant last Saturday evening.

Casa Mexicana - El Campo was one of those places I've walked by and wanted to try, the furnishings seems pretty basic/casual, white plastic chairs, a red light by one wall and loud background noise, of people talking increasingly louder to be heard. This isn't your intimate dinner place but definitely suitable for a casual night out.

The menu is fairly compact and we were attended by a friendly Argentinian waitress, with genuine concern if the food we got wasn't good (but not like she could've comp'd anything free though) we proceeded to order a variety of menu items to get a good tasting of what this restaurant had to offer.

Started with a set of four starters - the house guacamole, a corn esquites, refried black beans and a small pork roll which I've forgotten the name of it already (it was that memorable?)

Anyhow the entree dips were served with corn chips which they graciously refilled upon request (I didn't notice being charged which was nice)

We then ordered some sopes, these are corn dough bases topped with a variety of toppings (think your typical beef / pork pulled meat toppings with capsicum onion tomato based salsas). For $10 these seemed a bit more filling than the entrees and packed a good punch of flavour. Size wise they were slightly smaller than the tacos, probably the size of a person's palm. They did come with two sopes per serve which was a plus

We skipped the quesadilla round and moved onto ordering a variety of tacos. At $7-10 per taco it isnt what you'd call good value with each taco consisting of a soft flour taco with good flavoured toppings. We had about 3 tacos per son and with the beers were just OK on the filled stomach meter. Taco varieties ranged from chicken, beef and pork tacos with a vegetarian cactus taco I didn't get to try unfortunately). All in all the flavours were fine, typical flavour combinations were used eg. Pork carnitas were paired with some apple cubes, beef had slivers of capsicum. I'll let the photos attempt to speak for themselves.

All in all it wasn't too bad (one plus the food arrived quickly and together!!) but not really a place to go back to in a hurry, about on par with La Cholitas I reckon. My search for new Mexican restaurants continues....
(Apologies for the really abysmal photo quality this time round.... dim lightning really hurts the quality)


Casa Mexicana - El Compa on Urbanspoon

Our entrees for the night (Guaccamole, refried black beans, sweet corn salsa and some a small sandwhich - pork based entree the name escapes me :(  )


Beef tacos....


Sopes ! They really were about the size of the tacos :X At least they came in serving sizes of 2


Pork carnitas tacos with apple hmmmm

Thursday 14 February 2013

Adelaide Day 2

Unfortunately no real exciting places to report.... Went to The Historian Hotel for after work drinks, being a Tuesday evening it was pretty quiet and being Adelaide they didn't have a cook on roster that day so no food or nibbles :(

Dinner was at some Italian place called Scoozi Cafe think of it as the Sienna's of Perth Italian fare (cheapish bistro Italian fare)

Was ok, had coffees there with Mr DT on the weekend earlier. Had the fettuccine veal ragu, strangely being a tomato based sauce I still kept tasting hints of Parmesan despite none actually being on it (maybe it was just the slightly off/strange smell from the ragu?? ) overall it was so-so and not getting food poisoning is always a good blessing. Pictures to follow but it isn't really a place to write home about.




Monday 11 February 2013

Adelaide Day 1 - an Abortion!

Supposedly an Adelaide "dish" presenting to you the AB! (From north Adelaide) which is as north Adelaide as Roe Street is north of the CBD ;)

(Double serve of a base layer of chips, lamb kebab meat and chicken kebab meat on top and lashes of garlic and sweet chilli sauce)

Protein and carbs.....
Courtesy of our SA FGC friend Peter Lay!
(Teh fighting gamez)





Adelaide day 0 - Parlamento

Landed in Adelaide around 6pm tonight I'm quite surprised the taxi fare was so cheap from the airport to the CBD! At $23 Ish dollars I guess it's not bad for a 30mins taxi fare hey??

Unfortunately being a Sunday and after 6pm everything is pretty much shut :( did see across from my hotel (the Stamford Plaza) there's a casino and train station!

Am glad Crown spent some money renovating our casino up, Adelaide's one looks like a theatre or the GPO building in Perth :))

Overall looks like a nice place, Rundle mall is what I would describe as Murray and Hay street mall joined end to end but yes Adelaide is a smaller town than Perth so there!

Food wise I ended up going to a restaurant next to my hotel since my alternatives were closed on a Sunday (/sigh)

Parlamento a home style Italian bistro, not too bad and the waiters are in old school black and white uniforms (++ for them being aussie/italian and able to speak Italian !) but food wise barely passed with my steak not coming medium rare but. More on the side of dead Gray :/

But that aside at least it makes a nice photo...


Parlamento on Urbanspoon