A Weekend of Happy Returns!

Or was it?……..

In our restaurant reviews, we always end by asking ourselves “Would we ever come back?” And I’d probably say more often than not, our responses have been “Why not?”. But pulling the curtain back and being truly honest with you, in actual fact we rarely return. The reason for this is that we spend most of our weekends/meals trying places we’ve never been to before, so we just don’t have enough meals in a week to loop back to past favourites.

However spurred on by the subconscious (we’ve both had dreams of eating a Griddle King crepe in the past week), we decided to set aside this weekend to re-visit a few of our favourites in ‘A Weekend of Happy Returns’!

Friday evening- Guzman Y Gomez (World Square)

Our first meal of the weekend, on Friday night we grabbed take-away from Guzman Y Gomez, as last time we were so blown away by their Enchilada and Quesadillas I had vowed to return and try their Nachos (impressed by their home-made corn chips). This time we ordered two Chicken Quesadillas and Beef Nachos to share. The Quesadillas were awesome! Couldn’t fault it at all!  However the Nachos were only ‘OK’. When I was fortunate enough to get a crunchy piece of corn chip it was great! The corn chip was already seasoned and then you go find something to shovel onto your chip. But after eating all the crispy chips on the outer perimeter, you’re just left with the clump of sauce, mince and the soggy chips. So eating the final 2/3 is a very sloppy messy affair. Which is expected, but this meal I just didn’t have the same overwhelming sense of ‘joy’ compared to our last meal from GyG.

Saturday lunch- Griddle King (Central)

Since we first tried Griddle King only a fortnight ago, I convinced 3 of my colleagues to try a Griddle King crepe, and each of them loved their first Asian wraps! And I was pretty jubilant that I’d introduced others to something new.   And my wife craved Griddle King so much, that one day at work she was almost tempted to sign up to Uber Eats so she could get a crepe delivered to her workplace! Haaha. So G-King was definitely on our list for our return patronage. This time I ordered the Cumin beef crepe (marked by a thumbs-up) while my wife was so impressed by what I had last time so she ordered the Miss Kim again. And by this stage I was starting to sense a trend – unfortunately the crepes weren’t as good as our first experience. My Cumin Beef crepe was tasty and the beef was well cooked and tender, however it lacked a sauce and the construction of the crepe wasn’t great so it kept threatening to fall apart on me. My wife’s Miss Kim just didn’t live up to expectation – the lettuce wasn’t as fresh as before, and the listed ingredient of coriander was missing. So we both left underwhelmed.

Sunday lunch- Encasa Rapido (Sydney Westfield)

And for lunch today, we headed back to Westfield Sydney for the Spanish baguette (Bocadillo) from Encasa Rapido. This time I ordered the Portuguese Grilled Chicken (after being told that they had run out of the Cubano), while my wife ordered the Argentino. By this time, I was telling myself to lower my expectations – but I was still quite disappointed with my Portuguese chicken. The chicken was well cooked, but it didn’t have any flavour, it didn’t taste grilled, the sauce was plain mayo without any spice so it was unspectacular. My wife’s Argentino was a tasty spicy sausage which we both liked. So my wife was pleased but my overall feelings was that I was unimpressed – not so Hapido.

You know that saying, “never meet your heroes” as you’re just bound to be disappointed by them? I think in my case it’s “Never go back to a restaurant which you’ve raved on about”, as you’re only bound to be disappointed by them. As I’ve placed them on a lofty pedestal, expectations set so high that each restaurant was bound to fall short, leaving me disappointed, underwhelmed, and unimpressed.

So unfortunately it wasn’t a weekend of happy returns, but a weekend of smashed dreams. *Sad look*.

**Comment: Not liking to leave our readers with a feeling of negativity, feel free to click on the headings as they’re linked to our more glowing/positive reviews of our first experiences at Guzman Y Gomez; Griddle King; and Encasa Rapido-  where I was much more hapido.