Cafe SaSa

Being one of dozens of restaurants/cafes/bar along Stanley Street, you have to be pretty good at your game to survive. The good thing is you can walk into almost any restaurant and know you will have a good time.

Food

We got a couple of entrees to share. The Brie mango salad ($14) - Brie, snowpeas shoot, cherry tomatoes, pinenuts w/cider dressing was wonderfully tangy, sweet and sour. The mango and brie combining extremely well. The Chicken mango salad ($14) delivered almost the same thrill, except with chicken replacing the brie. We also got a couple of seafood platters to share. They included: Crumbed Italian fish cake served with aioli,Grilled baby octopus salad,king prawns,seafood soup,calamari rings... amongst others. The standout was the seafood soup, with an intensity of flavour and hint of sweetness.

The portions were huge and we found ourselves struggling to finish everything, especially when we also had some deliciously garlicky bread to go with it.

The mains were even bigger,my NZ Snapper fillet with roast baby eggplant, sweet potato, black mussels and dill hollandaise ($28.50) was beautiful. The fish cooked just right. The eggplant was roasted to perfection and the accompanying sauces can stand on its own. Slokky ordered the Yearling scotch fillet with creamed leek dutch carrots, balsamic roasted tomatoes and garlic pepper sauce
($27.00), which was one of the best-cooked steak of 2006. The meat was juicy and soft, the leek was creamy all right. The tomatoes were very sweet.

All in all, one of the best meals I've had in 2006. It's just too bad I'd stuffed myself earlier in the day so I couldn't do this justice!

Rating - 8

Atmosphere

Cafe Sasa is basically in a terraced house. We were seated in the upstairs area, a narrow rectangular room. Fortunately they weren't full so we had the whole upstairs to ourselves. The lighting is very dim and they have a bar upstairs as well. Besides that, there are a couple of paintings on the wall, but nothing too distinguishing.

There was tablecloth on the tables and good cutlery, but it was one of those wet but humid summer days, and we couldn't figure out how to open the windows until very late into our dinner, so we all suffered from the heat for quite a bit.

We could look out the windows onto the street, to see people going in and out of restaurants and funky shops. Some of those restaurants look really good, must check them out sometime. I am sure the other people are checking us out as well.

Rating - 2

Service

We had our own waiter and he was extremely friendly. A few people dropped their cutlery and he was very good-natured about it. He also dropped some cutlery too but he turned a mistake into a plus by joking about it. The good thing was he wasn't cheesy like some waiters can be. The rest of the staff were also great. Things arrived quickly and promptly too.

Rating - 4

C-factor

We BYOed so it didn't end up costing that much. For great food at decent prices and great company, even though I haven't met over half the people before.

Rating - 1.5

Brownie Points - 15.5

Info

68 Stanley Street
Darlinghurst
NSW 2010
Phone (02) 9332 3002