[info]
When? – 06/09/2012
Where? – Tin Roof Cafe, 338 Keilor Road, Niddrie
Price? - $20.00
Website? - None
Reviewers – Cale, Fridge, Lee, Ness, Stefo[/info]
Your what?!
Tiiiiiiin Roof! … Rusted.
Love shack… Baby love shack…
Every week we load up the parma bus and drive somewhere in Melbourne to try a new parma - but some weeks the Parma Bus just doesn’t feel up to it, sometimes he needs a rest, and on those weeks we choose a parma as local to the review team as we can get. Hence the Tin Roof!
Tin Roof never really registered to me as a place to have a parma, however a few months back short lived parma review site “The Parmassieur” visited and gave it a review - The review has since disappeared from the interwebs, and I’ve forgotten what it had to say about the place, but since then the Tin Roof stuck out in my head as a place to try. (On a related note, To The Parmassieur - What happened? Your site/twitter/everything disappeared off the internet overnight, I’ve been curious where you went ever since! Tweet, Email or Facebook me and let me know.)
Anyway, we arrived at a fairly quiet Tin Roof and took our seats, we were a group of three and were waiting on two more to arrive. In the meantime we ordered a few beers and some starters. Thats when the service started to get … Pushy.
It’s hard to put my finger on, but we got the distinct feeling that we were being moved along, that the longer we sat in those seats the less people they could herd in and out of the restaurant in a night - and it wasn’t appreciated.
It’s not like we were being rude or even taking up space and not spending - while we waited for the other two reviewers we ordered a round of drinks, a bowl of wedges and a dozen oysters. Even though we told the staff that we were waiting on two more, we were asked if we wanted to order our mains before our starters had even hit the table.
After we told them that we would wait to order our mains until after the rest arrived, the service stopped dead. I must’ve sat with an empty beer for at least ten minutes before we had to wave over a staff member and order another one. Both pushy and inattentive service in the space of twenty minutes, quite a feat!
The sides came out and they were actually quite good, The oysters seemed to go down well with the seafood-eaters and the wedges hit the spot nicely, plenty of sour cream and bacon finished them off nicely.
Everyone arrived as we finished off our entree, we ordered our parmas and awaited their arrival! before too long our chicken made its way from the kitchen.
Uh oh…
Now from the photo you might think that Tin Roof has opted for the unorthodox Schnitzel-Ham-Cheese-Napoli (or SHCN) topping order, however on closer inspection you’ll see that the napoli is visible purely because there isn’t anything else! No ham, and those few little light coloured dots sprinkled throughout the napoli is the cheese. Barely Melted. Barely there. So basically it was a S&N topping system, with a cameo by cheese as brief and disappointing as M. Night Shyamalan’s appearences in all of his movies.
You’d think, being down to just two elements, that the two elements would at least be quality - unfortunately not. The schnitzel, while big (I’ll give it that, it took up a lot of the plate) was terribly thin and tasteless, The napoli tasted as if it came straight from a can, there was far too much of it and it overpowered all of the other flavours in the dish.
Back to basics with the Cross-Section over ParmaCam this week! Sorry guys, forgot to pick up the tripod as I ran out of the house afraid of missing the tram.
There were a handful of slightly-thicker-than-french-fries chips hiding underneath the parma, they were okay, I thought I tasted chicken salt on one of them, but couldn’t on the rest - So I’m unsure if it was actually there or I am slowly slipping into chicken-induced dementia (quite a possibility)
The salad, while there, was definitely an afterthought. No love whatsoever in the stack of lettuce with a sliver of onion, cucumber and tomato with a splash of balsamic. Like the chips it was there, but nothing great.
I’ve said before that I judge value on “how far I would travel to try this parma again”, sadly the Tin Roof is no more than a 3 minute tram ride from my house, and I still wouldn’t recommend it.
All in all it was a disappointing experience - from the terrible service (after the hassle to get my 2nd beer the table was never asked if we were okay for drinks the rest of the time we were there) to the sub-par parma, Tin Roof is a little rusty, to say the least.
Parma - 3.40
Chips - 3.80
Salad - 3.40
Value - 4.00
Total - 3.60
The search continues…
