For our catch up tonight Jenny and I had planned on going to the National Dining Rooms. Unfortunately they were apparently not open evenings so we ended up in The National Café instead. The room is lovely but unfortunately the service was horrid. Jenny had made reservations for us but when we walked in no one paid attention to us so we weren’t sure if we should just sit ourselves down. We ended up walking to the back to the bar to ask one of the bar men what we needed to do!

Once we sat down our waiter took an age to come over and give us our menus, and then he took another age to come back to take our orders! This café has generally gotten good reviews so it must have been a terrible terrible blip in service for tonight. We got so tired of the lack of service that we decided to just pay for our drinks and leave (and even then it took an age for our bill to be brought to us.)

Very disappointed.

We headed over to Cape Town Fish Market where we were disappointed for another reason.

The service was excellent and friendly, even when I tipped all the pepper over my fish! I blame the last person who used the pepper …. but the food was very average. The sushi roll was okay but our shared main of the Kalk Bay Platter (prawns, mussels, fillet of fish, calamari and Robata baby squid) for £36.95 seemed quite overpriced for what we got. The fried stuff was a bit soggy, the prawns didn’t taste right, and the fillet of fish was on the warm rather than hot side (it tasted much better after I got a fresh hot fish …) The Robata baby squid was probably the best thing on the plate but I kind of felt ripped off anyway.