St Katherine's

26 Cotham Road
Kew, 3101

Normally when I venture in to a restaurant like St Katherine's it's snap, eat and get it on my blog asap. For some reason though, St Katherine's just doesn't seem to inspire "Tell the world", at least not with any sense of urgency.

St Katherine's is the latest in the production line of restaurants opened by the Calombaris empire and is a joint venture with Shane Delia of Maha.

Entering the doors of St Katherine's one is confronted with an expansive dining room which has more of a school hall cafeteria feel to it, light, airy, noisy and cutlery in old tomato cans. The menu for St Katherine's is lengthy and mainly Greek influenced. Being a quick lunch, we opted for the rotisserie of the day set menu which was made up of appetisers and roast chicken.

The daily bread - Hommus smoked almond vinaigrette - Tuna basturma, tzatziki, dill, cucumber


Appetisers got off to a good start, spicy tuna bastuma in tzatziki, smooth hommus and zingy pickled vegetables. All of this was served with bread that was delivered in a bag to the table and was titled as "Our daily bread". It was about here the penny dropped, St Katherine's is just a bit too smug and is trying to be a bit too clever for my liking. Seriously "Our daily bread"? I am sure they thought it was clever when they launched, just as I am sure that the wait staff suppress their inner groan every time they take this to the table. I also wonder why they think it is a good move to serve bread in a paper bag that has to travel all the way from the kitchen to our table. I'm certainly no greenie, but sheesh!














Rotisserie Chicken & Pilaf Rice

Anyway, now that I have got that out of the way, I can comment on the roast lunch. The rotisserie chicken in my opinion was perfect. Very moist, very tender and sections were roasted off to the point where the meat was brown and crunchy. Some would call this burnt and it could be construed as such, but they push it to the limit and do it well.

So given St Katherine's isn't exactly around the corner in a part of town that I do not frequent too often, I can't say that St Katherine's is worthy of a detour. The $25 lunch is reasonably priced for the standard of food, but it could be argued that similar food elsewhere would be sub-$20. I guess that is the price for dining in the presence of Calombaris, well perhaps not George himself, but there are plenty of his cookbooks at the door for sale to remind you exactly who runs this place.

St Katherine's - 3/5