Bar Lourinha

We had planned to visit Mamasita tomorrow night, but as luck would have it, I have been forced to have an unexpected x-ray and specialist appointment to work out what's wrong with my ankle. And as a result, Mamasita will have to be postponed for a week or so as I am now broke...

But I did manage to get over to Bar Lourinha last Thursday night, for an unexpected bottle of wine, some yum food and a catch up with a few friends. Ollie has been to Bar Lourinha many times before, and hazellee wasn't with us, so it doesn't really count as our first visit, but I thought I would put up my thoughts anyway!



I had never visited before (my poor excuse is that it’s at the wrong end of the city for me – see why we needed to create this blog??!) and I had heard good things, so was looking forward to trying a few items off the menu. The girls were heading off to dinner after this, so we didn’t order much. Here’s what we had…*

Yellow tail kingfish ‘pancetta’ & lemon oil
This was beautiful – the best dish we had here by far. The fish just melted away in your mouth and it was nice and lemony, without being too oily. Yum. Could have eaten several more portions of this!

The goat special – cant remember much, except that the description featured the word ‘suckling’
The meat was full of fat, so was very sweet and tender, but probably some of it could have been trimmed away. Some of it was inedible… a few potatoes in the dish which were lacking in flavour and super boring.

Roasted mushrooms and garlic cream
These were yum, but weirdly, each tapas item was bought out one by one, so we couldn’t eat the mushrooms with anything else! We had selected this as a sort of side dish, so expected to have this with the others, but they were still good on their own.

Spiced lamb, white beans and free range egg
I can see what the recent Epicure article was talking about – why the need to specify a ‘free range egg’? Anyway it was really yummy, but nothing really amazing… until you added the coriander garnish – then it was super yummy!

*note – we didn’t take photos of the food. Ollie hates food bloggers who do that and so I just sneakily made notes under the table. But I will try and get shots next time when she’s not looking!

We also drank a bottle of rose (cant remember what it was) and they bought a good amount of bread and butter to the table – although I will comment that the bread was in two MASSIVE chunks, when there were three of us at the table? Weird.

Ended up being $45 each, which included a nice tip. We were in really early, around 5pm, so by the time we left at 7pm, there were loads of people waiting for tables. A popular place.



My opinion was that it was just ok. I am not in a hurry to go back there, but it’s a nice little place, great décor (love the horse/deer heads!) but I felt probably a bit overpriced for fairly average food.

Have you been there before? What are your thoughts?

And we’ve booked in for Cutler and Co for October 10 – stay tuned!