La Parada
Where: 1 Palm Blvd, uMhlanga Ridge
Open: Daily 8am to 11pm
Call: 031 941 6008
uMhlanga’s new kid on the block is a swanky affair. Its airy, open terrace buzzes on a sunny afternoon; inside is dominated by a giant bar along one wall ‒ with some very premium labels ‒ and the kitchen brigade is hard at work down the other.
There’s comfy table seating around the bar with Spanish tiles on the floors and banquettes under the mezzanine. A giant gold bull is centre focus at the staircase. There’s also a private dining room upstairs and a hubbly bubbly lounge up-upstairs.
La Parada, which in Spanish means the stopping place, is the latest chain to make it to uMhlanga, with three or four restaurants in Cape Town and one in Johannesburg. It is part of the Harbour House Group that also owns Tiger’s Milk.
But food writer Ingrid Shevlin and I are not here for the decor. (She was critical of the lighting. I didn’t like the one wall of stained glass. It reminded me of Spur.) We’re here to try its Spanish-inspired tapas.
The first thing one is struck by on the menu is a sushi selection. Tapas? Well, in the sense that it's small plates and different flavour combinations, maybe, but certainly miles away from Spain. Sufficient to say if rainbow, California, and maki rolls are your thing, they’ve got them, along with salmon bombs and ngiri. But we didn’t come here for sushi.
Mains, on the other hand, feel more like Italy than Spain, with a range of pastas that include mushroom, prawn, or chicken and broccoli. There’s also a beef risotto. And then there is the one item that no Durban menu is brave enough to leave out ‒ the burger. Here it’s a crispy chicken or a wagyu beef version, complete with their own burger sauce. There are steaks ‒ fillet in 300g or 500g, and T-bone 600g or 1kg. The only main course to pique interest was the kingklip and palak chaat (crispy spinach) with tamarind and coriander yoghurt. Mussels in white wine with sauce verde at least talk to Spain.
When it comes to the tapas menu, peppadew poppers with basil aioli looked a little bit ho-hum, as did tuna tacos with pineapple slaw and guacamole. Our waiter sang the praises of the wagyu potstickers served with kimchi and a soy dipping sauce. The kimchi was a deal breaker. More interesting were the prawn croquettes in a spicy tomato mayonnaise, and the beef fillet with tahini and honey yoghurt, walnut pesto, chilli butter and crispy leeks.
We started with the potato skins seasoned with truffle zest (R30). Now, these, if they came straight out of the fryer onto the table, would have been exceptional, except they had cooled somewhat by the time they got to us and had lost some of their crisp. They were paired with grilled calamari with chimichurri, cucumber and tomato and roasted garlic aioli (R105), which was a pleasant dish, except again, the calamari had been standing.
Then there was the tuna ceviche with avocado mousse (R115), which wasn’t a ceviche at all. It was more like sashimi. Ceviche is a Peruvian dish popular along the Pacific coast of South America. It’s fresh raw fish cured in lime juice, sometimes lemon or bitter orange, and spiced with peppers or chilli, spring onions or onions, salt and coriander. It comes from the Quechuan word for tender fish. This just tasted like a slab of raw tuna. If only those green blobs had been wasabi.
For round two, we tried the duck croquettes with cranberry sauce and orange segments (R120) which we enjoyed and were the pick of the lunch offerings. A bikini toastie (R70) was a disappointment.
The original bikini sandwich has nothing to do with beautiful figures in skimpy costumes. It’s named after the late-night munchies served by street vendors outside Barcelona’s Bikini Concert Hall. These crisp ham and cheese sandwiches have since had the Hollywood treatment, and morphed into sandwiches with Serrano ham, Manchego cheese and truffle aioli. All ingredients that pack a flavour punch.
Our bikini looked both under-tanned and under-filled. Half the joy of a toasty is the crisp bread and bubbly burnt cheese about the edges. This was positively anaemic. And the mozzarella added no flavour. It was left to swim in a pool of mayonnaise.
The pork rillettes with sweet mustard aioli and pickles (R105) fared no better. This French “spread” ‒ it’s not a pâté ‒ is made from slow-cooking meats in their own juices for hours until they fall apart and are intensely flavourful. It’s often a way of using all the trimmings of a variety of meats or preserving meats. This, however, was a pile of very dry pulled pork which tasted faintly of curry powder, again swimming in more of that mayonnaise.
Desserts are limited. There’s an olive oil sponge, which might be quite pleasant on its own, but it’s tarted up with all sorts of berry, strawberry and meringue treatments that make it sound more like an Eton mess. Then there's an orange and miso malva pudding. Now we’re both adventurous eaters, but neither of us fancied miso in our malva. Instead, we enjoyed the conventional churros (R65) with a chocolate ganache.
Finally, an apology. In a recent review of a number of restaurants along the Berea’s Problem Mkhize Road, I confused the name of one of the establishments. The cake shop where we had coffee and a crème brûlée is called The Cake Dealer. The Gourmet Station is part of the Junk Yard complex two doors down and sells imported sweets and frozen meals. I hope I will be forgiven: the Gourmet Station sign is at the entrance to The Cake Dealer, and the bill was just a no name brand till slip.
Food: 2 ½
Service: 3 ½
Ambience: 4
The Bill: R707 including soft drinks
The Independent on Saturday