[info]
When? - 20th of October, 2010
Where? - 43-49 Lygon St. East Brunswick
Price? - $19.50
Barry? - No
Website? - http://www.crooners.com.au/
Reviewers - Adam, Lee, Matt, Pat, Stefo[/info]
** NOTE - This pub has closed! Parma no longer available - Review will stay up for posterity. Enjoy!
It’s not often I venture up this end of Lygon St. but I was pleasantly surprised by the great range of restaurants and watering holes in the area - Definitely a spot I want to revisit at some point
We arrived at Crooners and got our table, a considerably smaller review group than what we had in the past but good none the less.
Crooners is more of a lounge bar than a pub - I had been there many years before, when it was a ‘rat pack’ inspired and themed establishment (hence the name ‘Crooners’) unfortunately it seems to have lost that theme at some point since I last visited, as the only thing I could see that remains rat pack-esque is the name.
I had read online that Crooners offered a Wednesday cheap parma night - unfortunately that wasn’t the case and we were charged the full price of $19.50 for our chicken, I was absolutely starving by the time we ordered and luckily they wasted no time getting our Parmigianas out to us.
Its kind of hard to tell by the photo, but the Crooners parma is actually two chicken schnitzels, fuzed together by a more than generous helping of cheese. The schnitzels were a little on the thin side but as there were two of them they can definitely be forgiven, Slice of ham was absent but this was a totally G rated affair, with no nude schnitzel at all - Crooners is a very cheesy parma, whether that is a pro or a con to really comes down to personal preference - but all in all it was a tasty piece of chicken
The chips were eclipsed under the parma, which unfortunately left them in soggytown by the time I ate my way through to them, standard shoestring fries again - nothing to write home about.
The salad was a well proportioned garden salad of lettuce, onion, cucumber and a single slice of tomato with a very nice tasting cream dressing which complimented the salad and the parma well - points for that.
All in all Crooners parma was pretty good - It’s worth noting that they are open till 3am on weekends, perfect if you get a late night hankering for some parmage on the way home from a night on the town. They have a decent wine list and a great range of local, premium and imported beers. The schnitzel was very thin, which normally would be a dealbreaker but as they were kind enough to provide two schnitzels they redeemed themselves on that front. $19.50 is a little up there in terms of price but I certainly didn’t leave hungry.
After the Parma we headed up the road a few hundred meters to ‘The Quarry’ a pub that had Pinball, Pool Tables and Buck Hunter to finish off our night.
Parma - 7.2
Chips - 3.6
Salad - 4.6
Value - 5.6
Total - 5.64
The search continues…
