5 - 11 July 2001
Issue No.541
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 5 - 11 July 2001 Issue No.541 |
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Ideal types
Injy El-Kashef climbs Mount Olympus
When you've had one good fish experience it makes you long for more. Not just more, actually: moremoremore, and you can barely summon the patience till it's time for the next fishy meal. In order to put me out of my misery a very dear friend took me to Psaria, the fish restaurant that is part of the softly opened (official opening in September) Plato entertainment compound in Doqqi.
This Plato does not believe in the Golden Mean, clearly opting for an extreme of excellence. First there is that pleasant garden, nicely lit to create an around-the-pool kind of feel, and staffed by many, many people trained to welcome you with warm and comforting smiles. If you're heading for Psaria you go to the first floor and enter a spacious and dimly-lit interior decorated in terra-cotta hues, with stone floors and wooden kitchen chairs. When you sit down and the waiter lights your candle, you are innocently amazed to discover that it is designed like a fish bowl, with a shell caught inside the blue bubbly wax. Terribly sweet -- as are the china, the glasses, the ashtrays and the bathrooms. Sweetness all around.
The shell-shaped menu lists many goodies, some unavailable, however (like the Octopus Salad and the Fancy Cocktails), as the trial period is still underway. We settled for a Herring Salad and Black Caviar for appetisers as well as a baba ghannoug. The Herring Salad was absolutely delicious, with slices of onions, tomatoes, eggs, peppers and a nice oily dressing to cut the sharp saltiness of the fishies. As for the caviar -- well, it was caviar, but certainly nothing to pine for in your darkest hours. Three egg- halves rested on a bed of lettuce, caviar nestling where the yolk usually does. And since Psaria seems to be an-alcohol free environment, all we could sip with our appetisers were tonics and club sodas (it occurred to me, by the way, that Psaria, Greek for fish, must be the origin of the local word Basaria used to describe tiny fish -- just thought I'd share that linguistic discovery).
Time for our main courses. One delicious Grilled Sole Fish with Butter came soft and crispy around the buttery edges, its meat so tender it melted in the mouth. Eating the sole with bread and baba ghannoug is not the best of ideas because a) it unnecessarily tones down the flavour and b) the baba ghannoug was actually not fantastic. Six huge and scrumptious Grilled Shrimps (a quarter kilo of the LE150 type -- the only other available shrimp option being the jumbo, which is usually quite tasteless) left no room for the Fried Calamari, although that never stopped anyone -- just a question of changing your seating position, and your stomach can accommodate a lot more. As for the Psaria Rice, it fared no worse than the rest of our meal, although by that time even eating while standing up would not have allowed us to take in any more.
This delicious meal, with one ice cream and a cocktail, in a really pleasant atmosphere, left us LE144 poorer. Not bad for a philosophy lesson.
Psaria, Plato 001 Restaurants,
15 Osman Ibn Affan Sq (in front of Shooting Club main entrance and next to the Saudi Arabian Embassy), Doqqi.
Tel 010 513 0767
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