Kush - krushed?

Continuing on from my FOG night theme, when I ventured out of the house tonight with Ange, I looked us both up and down and appreciated that we had put in the effort to dress up; tonight I thought, lets go down to what has traditionally been known as the classey end of Chapel Street for dinner.

I might have mentioned this before, but the Windsor end of Chapel Street (My end, the southern end) apparently doesn't hold a candle to the 'classier' Toorak end. Taking this in to account, I thought we were more suitably dressed to try somewhere down there... It took me a while to convince myself to leave the comfort of home, but we did.

The stretch of Chapel Street between High St and Malvern/Commercial Road was like a barren wasteland, there was nothing open and it gave you the feeling of being exposed. Where was everyone hiding?.

Having spent many years working on Chapel Street and living in the area I had an out of date idea of what would be good and what to expect.

We walked past the Old Pepper but weren't up for Pizza, so we continued... KFC didn't even come close to appearing on the radar! The next restaurant we passed was Sienna (the place to be seen on Chapel Street), but alas, pasta wasn't on our radar either... Hang on, are we on Lygon Street?

Then, across the road, I saw Kush. I used to love eating at Kush. It was cool, funky and fresh. Bound to be a good experience.

We went, in. The place was quite empty, but the street wasn't all that busy so we didn't think anything of it. There was no sign of staff so we seated ourselves. After an embarrassing attempt to order a drink we got the staffs attention and some table service.

I won't even mention here the waiter asking me if I wanted to pour the wine myself. Hell, after FOG I'm no stranger to pouring my own drink. But hey, just pour us our first glass and then you can get back to your gossiping behind the bar.

We ordered the Saganaki, there is nothing quite like hot Saganaki with lemon squeezed over it and we got nothing quite like it! I actually used the garnish that came with it to help me eat it.

The napkins at Kush are the first sign I have seen of the GFC, are the little extras the first thing to go?

It was around then that we started to notice our surroundings. The nice clean fresh look of Kush of long ago had given way to ill chosen feature walls and a broken mirror. Personally I don't think menus written on mirrors are a good idea anywhere.

We ventured out for a ciggie, another of my bad habits, and sat in their seats out the front. Definitely one of the great places to eat and drink on Chapel Street in the summer. To the credit of the waitress, she came out to see how long we would be and to let us know that our meals would be ready in five minutes. Loved it, much better than waiting for us to come in and having our dinner go cold.

The mains were great, I had smoked Salmon pasta (yes pasta) and Ange had a salad. Great flavours and fresh. Beautiful.

It was good, but not great, there were too many things that just weren't right. I'd like to say I'll go back, but I really aren't that sure.

To add insult to injury, we went back past Sienna which was still packed! Bugger, I know where I'm going next time.