Saturday 29 October 2011

La Marina

It was my birthday on Sunday and I celebrated it with a couple of friends on Saturday in this nice seafood restaurant by the sea in Cardiff.

La Marina, located in Penarth Marina is part of the beautiful 'The Old Custom House'. El Peurto restaurant is located on the lower floor of the building while La Marina can be found on the second floor.

Offering stunning view overlooking Cardiff Bay, La Marina is the perfect place to have dinner and relax with friends and family, away from the huzzle and buzzle of the city.

La Marina is a seafood restaurant with a fresh seafood counter displaying fish freshly caught and hand picked!


To start......

Live Oysters

We had the very fresh live oysters on ice. With a spoonful of red onions vinaigrette, the ice cold oyster was very tasty and not a hint of fishiness to it! This shows that the oysters were very fresh and the chefs had treated it very well. A very delightful starter indeed!


Sea Scallops

We also had the sea scallops for starters. The scallops were beautifully seared with a nice browning to the surface but was not over-cooked at all! The flesh was just nicely cooked and tender. With a generous squeeze of lemon to intensify the flavours, the well seasoned scallops bathed in lovely home-made sauce was absolutely delicious!


To Follow.......


Lobster in Thermidor Sauce

All three of us had the day's special - Lobster in Thermidor sauce with asparagus.

The very fresh lobster meat was nicely cooked, sweet and soft. The thermidor sauce was wonderfully buttery with a slight hint of mustard (we did not like the very strong mustard taste to a different sauce when we had our lobsters here last time).

Simply delicious! I'll eat a lobster anytime!

However, I thought the asparagus was slightly over-cooked as it had become a bit tough and stringy.


The Desserts......


Traditional French recipe Crème Brulee

The lovely traditional French recipe Crème Brulee was perfectly made!

It had a super smooth texture that melts in your mouth and the flavour was so subtle and original as it had a slight egg taste to it with a very small hint of vanilla.

Definitely a very enjoyable pot of dessert!


Triple Chocolate Torte

I do not normally have a chocolate based dessert as it is usually very rich.

However, this chocolate torte was absolutely divine!

The Triple Chocolate Torte was surprisingly not too sweet considering that it had three different chocolates in it! It had a very rich, smooth, and slightly bitter dark chocolate taste to it.

The cake was so smooth that it was almost like a chocolate mousse and the very thin layer of chocolate sponge at the bottom just added another lovely texture to the torte.

It also had a nice touch of chocolate flakes on top to add crunch to the whole dessert.

Yummy!


Strawberry Roulade

Perhaps the strawberry roulade is not a dish to celebrate much about as the sponge was a tad too dry.

Not a very easy dessert to make, as I learnt from watching The Great British Bakeoff 2011, hence a very good effort by the restaurant.

But nonetheless, the strawberries were very refreshing and went really well with the cream inside the roulade.

Overall, a very wonderful dinner with good food, enjoyed with wonderful friends!

We will most definitely visit this restaurant again!

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