Every month A and I take turns at surprising each other and we go to try a new restaurant (past date nights that I have blogged about include Paddy Malones and Indian Ocean Brewing Company). This time it was A’s turn to surprise me, she knows that there are two restaurants that I have been dying to try with the first one being The Old Crow and the second one being Pleased to meet you. Unfortunately The Old Crow’s popularity meant that we weren’t able to secure a booking so we went with option 2 but option two was definitely not a backup option in any way.
Walking up to Pleased to meet you it has a definite speakeasy sort of vibe about it with no signage advertising the name of the restaurant and a single sign with ‘38’ in block characters (which signifies it’s address of 38 roe street). Walking into the restaurant the word that comes to mind straight away is ‘cool’, it all has a very cool vibe from the communal seating to the very trendy wait staff. I have to admit what my eyes were drawn to as I walked into the restaurant was the corner which revealed a whole pig that was slowly roasting on a rotisserie, this looks absolutely mouth watering. Another nice touch is the addition of rooster sauce on each table.
We decided to kick off things with a couple of drinks and the drinks menu at pleased to meet you is quite expansive with somewhere in the region of 12-15 beers that they have by the bottle and then a couple of different beers on tap. It might not seem like much writing it down but the staff all of the beers are delicious craft beers and the staff are knowledgeable on the different flavours of each one. The exception to this rule is the inclusion of emu export on the menu (see the opening picture), I honestly don’t understand why you would put emu export on the menu at a trendy place like this? Is it kind of a hipster thing? A bit like Pabst blue ribbon is in the states? Regardless of this fact we enjoyed a delicious cider and a Brooklyn Lager.
A and I were trying to describe the food and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious heritage to the food so it makes it difficult to say to somewhere “oh you have to go to Pleased to meet you, it’s a great <insert cuisine here> restaurant”, if I was to describe it to someone I would say that it is tasty food. Now with the ordering I left that up to A and we ordered way too much food! I am just going to list the dishes we ordered a little comment on each.
- Coal roasted suckling pig – This is the reason that I wanted to come to Pleased to meet you and it was definitely worth the trip, the pork was incredibly juicy.
- Coconut ceviche – A loved this dish! I have a feeling that whenever we go out to a restaurant from now on that A will be keeping an eye out for ceviche on the menu!
- Watermelon salad – The watermelon salad was alright, I think it just got a little bit lost with all the other flavours that were going on.
- Chips – These chips were really tasty! The thing that I liked about them is that they still had the skin on and that added a lot of extra flavour.
- Pork crackling with avocado dip – I knew that as soon as we ordered this it was going to be awesome and it was pretty good however instead of dipping the crackling in the avocado dip I loved dipping them in a little bit of rooster sauce.
- Navajo fry bread – We weren’t sure what this was when we ordered it but it turned out to by my favourite dish out of everything that we had! It was a flat bread that had been fried until crispy and rubbed with a load of paprika and cumin. So so good.
- Pulled pork burger and beef burger – All the dishes came at the same time so we left these until last while we were snacking on the other dishes and that meant that these dishes went a bit soggy but we both agreed that they would be delicious if we ordered them fresh.
A’s opinion on dinner was “I really enjoyed everything about the pleased to meet you experience. The service was fantastic, all of the staff we came in contact with gave the impression that it was a fun place to work. Every dish I would order again as they were all great but there still were quite a few other items that i would want to try next visit. I will definitely be back. “
So there it is, all in all Pleased to meet you is a great restaurant and I love the fact that they are doing something that is a little bit outside the norm. I want to make a special mention to the service because everything came out really quick and the service staff were as attentive as they could be on an extremely busy Friday night. I am already planning out my next trip back and what I can order.
