Mondo Organics

My Boyfriend, his Brother and his Brother's Friend all went to lunch with me recently. They were all previously locals in West End so rather than have me laboriously research a place, read blog reviews, Urbanspoon places, search Instagram photos and stuff. However, since my Boyfriend reassured me that his Brother was a local and knew a good place to it. I was quite excited as I was hoping we'd go somewhere fantastic that was a local hidden secret.

That is until we started walking from his house and started taking random side streets to get to main roads. This was an issue since my Boyfriend and I had gotten lost earlier that morning trying to walk home after I finished work. We ended up taking the wrong side street and overshot his road and had to walk another 5 minutes back. Terrible at directions we are.

Anyway, it was quite difficult deciding where we wanted to go since none of us wanted anything in particular, no one had any finicky dietary requirements and no one had a craving they wanted to fulfil. So we just went around and around West End, we went all of Boundary Street and Hardgrave road and criss crossed over everywhere. We looked at Lock n Load, the Music Cafe, all those Boundary Street eateries and nothing really caught our eye.

We went to Cup Coffee, Brother suggested it as he and his Friend had just eaten and weren't keen for anything too heavy, but there were more substantial meals for the both of us since my Boyfriend hadn't eaten breakfast and I hadn't eaten since 2am. I had one look at their menu and wasn't keen, it was a very bustling and busy cafe that Sunday and it looked like it would be hard to find a seat for the four of us. What was worse was that no one was eating any of the meals, just drinking the coffee.

We ended going up Hardgrave Road again and ended up at staring longingly at Red Hen, I was intrigued by Manakan Indonesia and Tibetan Kitchen. The Brother was wanting Vietnamese like Kim Thanh, Trang, Quan Thanh, Dakbla and but I refused since I am Vietnamese and have terribly high standards for Vietnamese food thanks to my own ability and my mother's cooking ability. His Friend wanted to eat at a little cafe I can't remember the name of and my Boyfriend did not care but he did want to eat, relatively soon, possibly even that day.

In the end, I got everyone to start playing scissors, paper, rock in a circle to see who would choose their first choice. However we got side tracked again and decided just to shout out names until we said the same name twice. Our option was Lefkas, a Greek restaurant. Our second choice was Mondos Organic.

It was closed of course. So we ended up at Mondos Organic.

I didn't take any pictures of the menu or the interior as the actual website and Urbanspoon pages have very good pictures already. Maybe I secretly knew that I would dislike this place and didn't want any photos already. It was gorgeous though, an airconed cafe, with lovely wide seating arrangements, pristine cutlery and table settings with a very extensive bar, and discrete entrance to the kitchen.

Inside Mondo

The service was great, our waitress was an impeccably dressed slightly older lady who greeted us warmly and allowed us any choice of seats, inside and out. I quite like it when you can choose your own spot in a restaurant, I really dislike it when there's no one in a restaurant and you get shoved in the worst part of the restaurant. Some examples include at the very back of the restaurant, in front of the kitchen, or in front of the toilets, or worse, at the very doorway of the restaurant so everyone has to walk past you.

We got immediately given a carafe of water, and asked for drinks. The Brother's friend wanted a skinny soy latte and a coconut kefir shake, but she had originally picked the self respect drink, consisting of apple, celery, ginger, lemon and tumeric. Ironically they were all out of self respect, and she instead got the coconut shake as a pick me up instead. It did make for some hilarious joking around about needing a boost of self esteem and stuff. I remember when the Friend was asking about the kefir bit, it was apparently a probiotic or something made at the restaurant?

Coconut kefir shake

Soy skinny latte

My Boyfriend ordered this nifty pink grapefruit infused lemonade that he states was hand made despite the bubbles as it had segments of floating lemon in it. The waitress ended up giving us a free second glass as she had made too much and was handing out the glass for free :). We instantly snapped it up. The Brother and I were happy with just water.

Lemonade

We given a few menus and then spent some time going over the menus and were told that the fish of the day was some sustainable free swimming kingfish. We had a nice time chatting about this, that and the other before we decided on our meals.

The Friend ordered kangaroo carpaccio, spiced beetroot glaze, fried garlic and chevril. She was keen for a light meal and the Brother was teasing her about eating kangaroo since he wanted to try some as well. The Brother and I sampled a bit of this dish and we commented that the kangaroo had been so thinly sliced it seemed to resemble a weird deli meat of some sort, not a fan. No one was quite sure what the little black nubs were on the plate, for some reason we were guessing cocoa? The texture was like it, but I was also reminded of dried raspberry bits.

Kangaroo carpaccio

The Brother ordered the sustainable kingfish, charred parsnip, spinach, cured egg yolk and kamut. Kamut is apparently an ancient strain of grain sorta like barley? Its apparently very good for celiacs, and it tasted like rice bubbles to me hahaha. I felt like the kingfish was super fishy, and I really like fish, also a bit dry?

Fish of the day!

My Boyfriend had the potato and parmesan gnocchi, fennel, smoked tomato olive and opal basil, he opted for the vegetarian version, meat lovers having chorizo included as well. God, I wish there was more gnocchi on this plate. He polished it off the fastest, despite having started the latest out of all of us. Good reason too, the gnocchi was pretty fantastic, soft, pillowy, smooth as silk and not overly floury with a crunchy outer coating. My only complaint is that they were a touch irregularly sized and could be a bit saltier for my taste, I suppose that's the love of handmade gnocchi right there.

Gnocchi!

I ordered the pork belly and crackling, mustard seed, sweet potato, radicchio, garlic and oloroso sherry. Pork belly should always be best option on the menu! Its like anything with bacon on it is delicious! I WAS SO WRONG. How do I even start to describe how bad I thought this dish was? My Boyfriend said it looked like it came out of a can. Individually, the components were good. I liked the quality of the pork belly, I liked sage leaves, probably the best mustard seeds I've ever had, radicchio is always delicious as were the garlic cloves sweetly roasted.

Pork belly

However, the pork belly wasn't seasoned. It was tender but it wasn't anything special. The pork crackling was terrible, there was no salt lovingly rubbed in, the top didn't even crunch like broken grass, it had obviously been cooked separately as there was no soft fat layer insulating the crackling and colour was terrible. I've better crackling at Bucking Beef and you can buy a cup of that for $2.50. The sweet potato was terrible, it was raw, it looked like it had been charred and should have just turned to mush as soon as I looked at it. Nope I had to saw like I was cutting logs. The sherry reduction was seriously too reduced too and sweet, it was like licking an interesting maple syrup.

Leftover everything!

All in all, it was a good idea and I can see where they were going but it failed in execution. I left about half my plate behind and was just sitting there, pouting, it was bad. I think the Brother felt really bad that we had gone to that spot and eaten there, when no one really enjoyed their meal at such an expense. The company was good however, and its bound to happen I suppose. At least no one got food poisoning.

Atmosphere: 7/10. Pretty nice. Probably too nice for a Sunday lunch for a first meeting. We probably would've done better somewhere, loud, cheap and cheerful. Like a pub bar.
Service: 8/10. Very attentive and friendly, able to answer all our questions easily and she gave us a free lemonade too!
Food: Personally 1/10 for my plate, you couldn't pay me to eat that again. 7 1/2 says the Boyfriend. His gnocchi was fantastic.
Price: Hella expensive. Subjective really.