River Cafe
This was good, fairly light. It felt like a bit more of a lunch soup than an appetizer for braised beef, but it was well done. Nice little bit of texture with the croutons.
Bonus - while waiting for and eating my soup I was drinking this - the River Cafe take on a Pimm's & Ginger. Consists of Pimm's No. 1 cup, rosemary lemonade, ginger beer, some mint, and cucumber. Very spicy, yet super refreshing.
This was a very feminine and fairly odd dish. "Hey, look what we can do" is sort of the theme. Some of the flavours worked well together (the apple pearls, pear and scallop) but the popcorn was just odd and the dumpling, while delicious, didn't really fit in. Also, huge disconnect between this and the main.
Sorry for the lacking picture quality from here on out, it was hard to get the phone to focus in low light. Anyway, this was outstanding. Highlight of their menu. The onion was done unbelievably, the rice provided a good base, really can't fault anything about it other than maybe the plating which I don't care about much when we're talking about a beef entree. The beef itself was beautifully medium rare and perfectly tender. I had a scotch with it, their Jura, which paired well.
Bonus: We added on a dessert: sticky toffee pudding with salted caramel, hazelnut ice cream and cranberries. This is one of the better desserts I've had since... I don't know when. The caramel was saltier than you'd usually want it but it balanced so well with the pudding and the ice cream that it worked. Highly reccomend trying this if you end up there, not sure if it's a seasonal thing though as it's a pretty winter-oriented dessert.
All told, I was satisfied with the soup, confused by the second appy, very happy with the entree, and blown away by the dessert. There's certainly room for improvement in terms of how they did the menu overall. I felt like the first two dishes were more of an afternoon lunch type of set up, and then the entree was pure late night dinner. I think it would have made sense to ditch the second appy in favour of a simple dessert, because they seem to knock the desserts out of the park, or have the handful of times I've had one here.