DECO @ The Civic Hotel
388 Pitt Street
Sydney, NSW 2000

Deco @ The Civic Hotel was the restaurant of choice for our dinner tonight. We normally wouldn’t dine out on a week night, but we did so because:

1) There was nothing interesting on TV tonight
2) The World of Warcraft servers were down for maintenance (Chris’ concern)
3) I didn’t have much to surf on the internet tonight (my concern)

I know, silly reasons, but hey, they mean something to us! So he came down to my office to meet me after work and we headed off to Deco. It’s above a pub, so I thought it’d be casual pub-grub.. I was surprised that it was pretty fancy schmancy. It’s cosy and candlelight, and despite having only 2 waitresses, they were super-attentive since there were only 3 other filled tables.

Found it a bit strange when we were repeatedly asked “Do you want any drinks??”, at least 3 times! We’d only asked for “iced water, please” which the waitress seem to find pretty incredulous. I suppose at restaurants, people tend to order wine.. but Chris and I aren’t big drinkers and we’re happiest with just plain ‘ol water with our meal.

Anyway, we started off with the BBQ baby octopus with radicchio, chorizo sausage and chilli dressing. This was Chris’ pick, since he loves octopus and chorizo. Me? Erm.. I’ll pass, thanks. Not very nice IMHO and the little suckers on the octopus REALLY FREAK ME OUT!!!! But Chris said it was tender and his verdict was “mmm…gooood”.

We shared our mains 50/50.. because I wanted both dishes and couldn’t decide 😛 The Spinach linguine with crab and salmon roe I had really high hopes for, and it was nice but not fantastic. The crab meat was superb and sweet, but I found the salmon roe really really salty.. like eating little balls of salt that burst in your mouth. When our waitress came around to ask how the meal was, I mentioned “The pasta’s a little salty” and she noted that it was probably the salmon roe, which was true. She said that she’ll bring it back to the kitchen and get the chef to make another one without salmon roe… but I felt bad as she was so nice, and I didn’t want to wait again for my food, so I politely declined. Chris didn’t have a problem with the saltiness though, so maybe it was just me.

The Red wine braised lamb shanks with bacon and polenta was superb!! Two HUGE chunks of lamb, which made Chris and I very happy. The lamb was super soft and so chunky and meaty.. mmmm… wish they gave more gravy though, it was delicious. We also fell in love with the polenta – it tasted like really buttery scrambled eggs, actually! Utterly delicious and went really well with the lamb.

We weren’t going to have dessert, but resistance is futile when faced with a Vanilla pannacotta with rhubarb compote & strawberries dessert. It was DIVINE!!!!! The pannacotta was really thick and had the most luscious vanilla cream flavour – not too sweet either. I didn’t like the rhubarb compote since I don’t like to mix my flavours. They make one of the best pannacottas I’ve ever had, IMHO.

It was a lovely dinner, but a lot pricier than I’d anticipated. Expect to pay $70+ per person if you go for a 3-course meal and a drink.

BBQ baby octopus with radicchio, chorizo sausage and chilli dressing

Spinach linguine with crab and salmon roe

Red wine braised lamb shanks with bacon and polenta

Vanilla pannacotta with rhubarb compote & strawberries