Sitar: Great buffet, but the soup!
Jan 09, 2003
TO be fair, our last visit to Sitar Restaurant was just before Christmas, when a huge celebration was taking place at the newly opened restaurant, and so things might have been more hectic than usual.
Dishes in a buffet should be labelled. The pasta had pork yet the waiter said it was beef
By Kadumukasa Kironde
TO be fair, our last visit to Sitar Restaurant was just before Christmas, when a huge celebration was taking place at the newly opened restaurant, and so things might have been more hectic than usual.
Since it seemed rather crowded indoors, we chose to sit outside.
Sitar has tremendous potential, especially with the large alfresco veranda that can accommodate at least a hundred people.
Anyway, we asked them to cover the tables with a tablecloth to cover the grime and soot that seems to pervade Kampala. Besides, anybody forking out sh10,000 deserves to be served in style!
A glance at the a la carte menu revealed a wide choice of entries, with unkind prices to match. But on second thoughts, there was little wisdom in going for the a la carte menu, seeing how busy they were.
At the insistence of the proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Poppat, we tried the soup.
For my money, I would have been perfectly content to make do with a regular soup such as oxtail, vegetable or even cream of mushroom. The rich, exotic, Chinese hot and sour soup, is at best a challenge that very few Oriental chefs in town have mastered.
My choice has always been the one at Fang Fang. The results here were a poor watered down version that should have been labelled any other name, but a soup!
To make matters worse, the bread was hard. Hmm, I didn’t know that this soup was served with bread?
Well, behind every cloud, there’s a silver lining and the buffet was a pretty decent spread and surprisingly, their matooke was good!
There was also a very generous amount of leafy, green vegetable dotted with a host of garden eggs. Of course, no repast in this town would be complete without the ubiquitous chicken!
The beef was tender and obviously was fillet steak and for the price we paid one would expect no less.
I believe labelling should be an integral part of a buffet. It was a great oversight for example, for the waiter to have told us that the pasta had beef in it rather than pork. The funny thing is that I had told that chap as much and yet he insisted to the contrary.
Besides that nasty glitch, it was a shame that the otherwise well prepared Basmati rice lacked salt.
The latter could happen with the best cooks, but the former is a sloppy case of negligence on the part of management.
Sitar is a purposely-built restaurant, that has great potential for character and ambience. The Seating is adequate and I am certain that the kitchen has the capacity to perform culinary tasks without any impediment.
The outdoor terrace is in need of some kind of shelter or tarpaulins so that the patrons sit there at any time, in pretty much any kind of weather.
By the way, it does get somewhat gusty. We were satisfied with the service and hope that by now, Sitar’s teething pains have lessened. Ends
By Kadumukasa Kironde
TO be fair, our last visit to Sitar Restaurant was just before Christmas, when a huge celebration was taking place at the newly opened restaurant, and so things might have been more hectic than usual.
Since it seemed rather crowded indoors, we chose to sit outside.
Sitar has tremendous potential, especially with the large alfresco veranda that can accommodate at least a hundred people.
Anyway, we asked them to cover the tables with a tablecloth to cover the grime and soot that seems to pervade Kampala. Besides, anybody forking out sh10,000 deserves to be served in style!
A glance at the a la carte menu revealed a wide choice of entries, with unkind prices to match. But on second thoughts, there was little wisdom in going for the a la carte menu, seeing how busy they were.
At the insistence of the proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Poppat, we tried the soup.
For my money, I would have been perfectly content to make do with a regular soup such as oxtail, vegetable or even cream of mushroom. The rich, exotic, Chinese hot and sour soup, is at best a challenge that very few Oriental chefs in town have mastered.
My choice has always been the one at Fang Fang. The results here were a poor watered down version that should have been labelled any other name, but a soup!
To make matters worse, the bread was hard. Hmm, I didn’t know that this soup was served with bread?
Well, behind every cloud, there’s a silver lining and the buffet was a pretty decent spread and surprisingly, their matooke was good!
There was also a very generous amount of leafy, green vegetable dotted with a host of garden eggs. Of course, no repast in this town would be complete without the ubiquitous chicken!
The beef was tender and obviously was fillet steak and for the price we paid one would expect no less.
I believe labelling should be an integral part of a buffet. It was a great oversight for example, for the waiter to have told us that the pasta had beef in it rather than pork. The funny thing is that I had told that chap as much and yet he insisted to the contrary.
Besides that nasty glitch, it was a shame that the otherwise well prepared Basmati rice lacked salt.
The latter could happen with the best cooks, but the former is a sloppy case of negligence on the part of management.
Sitar is a purposely-built restaurant, that has great potential for character and ambience. The Seating is adequate and I am certain that the kitchen has the capacity to perform culinary tasks without any impediment.
The outdoor terrace is in need of some kind of shelter or tarpaulins so that the patrons sit there at any time, in pretty much any kind of weather.
By the way, it does get somewhat gusty. We were satisfied with the service and hope that by now, Sitar’s teething pains have lessened. Ends