A few weeks ago my friend Joe and I, he who’s always willing to risk new dining spots with me  tried out new Green Point spot, Café Dijon.  It’s been open for about 2 months now and you’ll find it in Napier St opposite Anatoli’s.  It’s actually part of The Rockwell, so you if you don’t want to deal with car guards (they are rife in that area) you can use the Rockwell underground parking.  Nice and easy.

They have a very cute little courtyard area on the side, lit up with fairy lights, which I am sure is going to be very popular during the hot summer evenings still to come.  Inside I was immediately impressed with the decor.  It’s quite striking.  Rich colours, pretty lighting, beautiful fabrics and then these tree huge tree like pillars which kinda make you feel like you’ve entered some magical 3D animated world…

The menu contains some classic French bistro dishes, like French onion soup (R52), snails Bordelaise (R56), chicken Melanzane (R76) and and duck a L’Orange (R120).  Then they have a selection of Angus beef steaks (R95 – R125) and some Mediterranean inspired options as well.

For starters, our waiter highly recommended the Patagonian calamari (R55) – served with a pineapple, chilli, mint & coriander salsa and a lime mayo.  I looooved the sound of it, so it was an easy choice:

And it was absolute perfection!  Can see why he recommended it and it immediately got me very excited about the mains.  I was in a steak mood, so I decided to go for their Dijon cut signature steak (R95 for 200g).  Joe decided to go for the same, but the man-sized 400g option at R125.  You can’t really see a huge difference in the pics below – but trust me there was.  The top pic is the 400g with a mushroom sauce and the bottom one is my 200g one with a Bearnaise sauce:

Sadly I wasn’t blown away by the steak.  I felt it lacked seasoning and flavour and it was quite bland.  Don’t get me wrong, the meat quality was good – it just didn’t have any oomph.  The fries & sauce were tasty though.

For dessert we shared the caramelized lemon tart (R35):

It was a nice, fresh dessert option as I normally would choose something very rich & chocolaty.  But it was a bit dry though, so more cream or ice cream would have been perfect.

Service wise we did have a hiccup with regards to our mains.  When we asked what the steak comes with our waiter said fries and a sauce.  Turns out though the sauce is actually an extra cost of around R15.  Now I know it’s only R15, but it’s the principal of it.  You shouldn’t make something sound like it was included and then surprise you with it on the bill.  He did apologise for the misunderstanding, but it’s not like they offerred to take it off the bill… so I was a bit disappointed by that.

I would give Café Dijon the following Miss K Kiss-o-Meter ratings:

• For service:
• For food & ambience:

I see they are taking part of Cape Town Restaurant week this week.  This means you can book a 3 course dinner for R200 or a 3 course lunch for R125 until 29 Sep.  Not sure what their special restaurant week menu would entail (as it’s normally a surprise until you arrive), but I’d say it would be safe to give them a bash.

I want to go back to try something other than the steak.  Maybe one of their classic bistro dishes or something.  Based on that calamari starter, I have a feeling they have much better mains options than what I experienced.  Plus I just really want to stare at those amazing man-made trees again.  They were just so damn captivating.

xxx