...and so begins the blog of my food experiences with La Cascade

Tonight I went to La Cascade. I heard good things about it and figured I'd give it a go. The initial decision was to go to Divido in Mt Hawthorn but for some reason, I thought this would be a good idea. How wrong I was. How very wrong. And this awful experience has sparked my desire to begin this blog. And so here it is.

Restaurant: La Cascade
Cuisine: French
Address: 145 Stirling Hwy, Nedlands
Total: $133.40/2p
Rating: 0.5/5

I normally like to look at menus before I go to restaurants and so was disappointed to find that this restaurant didn't have one. Nevertheless, I found some information on it from some typical restaurant site (yourrestaurants, eatingwa, etc...). The reviews were fairly good, and it was advertised that they had a 3-course-meal deal for $49 per person, which is not too bad in my opinion. And so, I had high hopes for this dinner.

The entrees were around the $25 mark, mains $45 and desserts $15. So even if you were only intending on getting an entree and a main, you may as well go for the 3-course deal. And so we did.


Food: 1/5

Entree:
Deep fried camembertChicken liver

Main:
Snapper with lemon sauce (it was meant to have avocado as well but they had run out)
Rack of lamb cooked in a wine sauce

Dessert:
Nougat icecream
Profiteroles (their special for Friday/Saturdays) - Pictured below


My favourite dish of the night was the deep fried camembert, which does not say a lot for this restaurant. As a French restaurant I was expecting them to sell some foie gras, but all they had was chicken liver. It was served nicely on a mini fry-pan which I found very cute! The servings were a lot larger than what I expected, but you can only eat so much chicken liver before you start to feel sick. And the camembert was an entire round of cheese which is far too much for a single sitting! Tasty though. The snapper was very cheesy, which again is okay in small portions but it makes you feel sick after a while. The lamb was possibly the worst rack of lamb I have eaten. It was served over herbs on a sizzling plate. It was cooked as a whole rack and sliced up to serve. But this revealed the dry and fatty meat which I'm not used to seeing on lamb! It was still edible but definitely not up to the standards that I was expecting. And now the dessert. The nougat icecream tasted like icecream with crushed nuts. The choux pastry of the profiterole tasted stale but it was coated in a generous amount of chocolate fudge which made it okay.


Service: 0/5

We came at 6:30 and were the third table there. When we ordered, the waiter (I think he was the owner) sat down on a neighbouring table as he took our order. This is something I expect from The Moon, but not from this type of restaurant. He was also not that friendly. Back to the ordering - He advised us to order our desserts as well as they would get busy later on, and so we did. We later found out that his "busy" meant 4 other tables. And this "busy-ness" meant that we would have to wait for 3 hours for our 3-course meal, which is beyond ridiculous! A degustation takes at most 4 hours, and this is for 9 courses of delicately prepared tastiness.

During our meal, we called the waiter/owner over to order something and on his way to our table, he was stopped by another table. Instead of asking them for a minute (as we had gotten his attention first), he went to serve them immediately.

We were not offered any water or any bread to start.

We were not offered any cracked pepper or told that the plates would be hot or anything of the sort. The waiters (mainly the owner) appeared to just dump the plates on our table and leave immediately.

And lastly, after we finished the dessert we were just desperate to leave but were required to stand and wait for another 20 minutes as the owner chatted with other guests.


Ambience: 0.5/5

The restaurant was far too dimly lit that it was difficult to read the menus (which were almost A3 size which is beyond impractical!). In dimly lit restaurants you expect it to be warm and cosy but this was not even close. I found the need to wear a cardigan AND a coat just to stay warm. Very disappointing.

The chairs were the awful fake leather type of chair you expect to find in a cheap Chinese restaurant where you are in and out in 30 minutes and your food costs no more than $10. Not only were they awful chairs, the seats were cracked from wear. It was also far too dull on a Saturday night in my opinion. More than half the restaurant was empty (despite the owner exclaiming they would be "very busy" later!) which is pretty poor for a Saturday night.


I am glad that I can tick this restaurant off my list but it is not something I am keen to revisit and I would recommend against it, which is not something I do very often!

And we had to swing by Maccas on the way home.