Vessel – King St Wharf

November 24, 2013

Lovely friend took me out on a “date night” haha. It was awesome. She found a Groupon voucher that gives us:
1) shared antipasto plate
2) bread
3) salad
4) big bowl of fries
5) 1 main each (total 2)

Took us ages to find the place, cause we got the street wrong. And it was pouring!! Pouring pouring rain!!! But that didn’t stop us.

The atmosphere was nice and quiet on a rainy Monday night. It looks like this place is able to hold quite a lot of people, with indoors and outdoors seating.

Didn’t manage to get a close enough look, but this looks like a pretty impressive wine collection! And a rather fun looking bar (backlight color changes often)

The menu choices that we are allowed to pick are not from the “mains” and “pizza” or from the specials board. Interestingly enough, we weren’t allowed to pick the pasta (separate category). Oh well!

Drinks weren’t included, but my friend was insisted that “since it’s a date, we must have drinks! Gotta get you all drunk missy!” Hold your horsey tiger!! So I picked a mojito, and she picked a cosmopolitan. I actually quite enjoyed my drink! It was just right. Not too strong, not too minty. Didn’t get to try the Cosmo, but she enjoyed it, so it is good!

Our dishes started arriving pretty quickly. Service staff was friendly. Usually, I find that people aren’t friendly when they find out that you are using a voucher, which is annoying. But the staff here are nice! Which is good. Honestly I don’t understand why would you lower your standards just cause someone is using a coupon. Coupons let people decide if they want to come back again.

1) antipasto plate to share. The meats were great! As was the cheese. My friend ate all the vegetables. We could have been really hungry, but it was enjoyable.

2) the focaccia is part of the antipasto platter, and we found a neat bottle of olive oil on the side.

3) big bowl of rocket. Unfortunately neither of us are a fan of rocket. It was left untouched. Wished they gave us like a bowl of mixed greens, would have been good. At least we could have picked some of the greens. No greens tonight!

4) fries! Good fries. We ate it all through the meal and it was crunchy, well seasoned and totally yum. It is just regular shoestring fries with herbs, spices and salt, but it was a nice touch!

5) on to the mains! I ordered the steak. Back to my issue with steak. Ah, Midwest I miss you so much! This steak is bland. It was cooked fine (medium rare), a little too medium, but the taste, it just isn’t right! I think a huge part was how it was seasoned. I would like to think that the meat plays a huge part on how the overall taste is affected, that is probably why. The vegetables were good and well seasoned.

Friend ordered the fish of the day. She said its good. They don’t scrimp on the serving size, that’s for sure!

After all of this, how could we not have dessert? I got us both some sweets, kinda cool that we both were between the same 2 choices.

So I got the hot chocolate pudding with cherries and house made vanilla ice cream. The pudding was more like a rich chocolate cake. Not like I had a problem with that, but I was expecting a pudding, or at least chocolate fondant. The ice cream was really good though! Love vanilla! They go really well together. Cherries are of the glazed variety, too sweet. Could have just gotten black cherries from a can, would have worked better.

Friend went for the tiramisu. Smooth rich and creamy. One of the waiters came up to our table and said that we had to finish our dessert! I thought that was pretty funny. Friend finished all of hers.

So how do I rate this, where should I start? I think I’ll probably come back if there’s another voucher going on. Hopefully we will get to try some pasta. I think it was amazingly fun. Not too sure if I would come back just for the meals though. That, I suppose, is the problem with offering coupons, you wouldn’t be interested in paying full price after. The meal is quite normal, even though the company was amazing. We looked around, and I guess most of the tables were paid with the coupons. There was a large table behind us with 6 people, there were 3 of everything we had, so = voucher.

We had a little $5 and below gift exchange after! I got her a little windmill note holder and she got me some limited edition bandaids! Most awesome gift ever!! I love the bandaids. Thank you!