$18.90 I watched a COCKROACH scuttle across the counter of this place in broad daylight while I was standing there making up my mind, and this should have been the first and only red flag telling me to walk away, but I hadn’t eaten all day and I had already walked for 25 minutes in the cold and rain specifically to get here, so I just ordered the Nepalese lamb curry pie with accompaniments and drew a tomato sauce smiley face on top to help me forget about the grubby open kitchen. The pie is described as ‘Minced mushrooms nuggets with traditional Nepalese spices in a tomato, peanut and coconut cream sauce’. When I opened up the lid, indeed the spices wafted out dreamily. The pastry was perfectly tasty and flakey, albeit structurally compromised at the foundations from being served on top of the gravy and mash, so picking it up took some double-handed coordination. The flavour was rich and delicious, but the texture was wanting. I couldn’t really detect any of these mushroom nuggets nor any chunks of ‘lamb’, and throughout it were tiny bits of crunchy peanut from having used non-smooth peanut butter which unpleasantly triggered associations of cartilage and gristle from my non-vegan meat pie days. No pie filling should have crunchy bits. Full stop. 😖 The gravy was this cheap and nasty instant stuff, the peas were peas, and the mash was small in quantity and very roughly done as there were chunks of unmashed potato in it still. This whole dish was the exact same meal that I had with my family on weeknights as a kid, and so the nostalgia prevented me from not liking it. Did it taste good? Absolutely. Should a café in Sydney be charging people nearly TWENTY DOLLARS for a dish made with the same utilitarian sigh as a tired parent after a 12-hour shift at the hospital, and in a cockroach-infested kitchen at that? Absolutely not. Hand-made Farmer’s Market beef pies sell for $5 maximum in Gosford. This whole thing is a $10 cafeteria dish at best.
