Stalactites

177-183 Lonsdale St, Melbourne 3000

Visited: 27th Nov 2011

Eating at Stalactites is an interesting experience in itself - it feels very much like sitting in a cavern, with the slate tiled walls, low sloping ceilings covered with stalactites and overhead illumination. The floors and the tables and chairs were all wood, which fit in perfectly with the dark interior decor.

Stalactites ceiling

There were four of us today, so we decided to share the small mixed giro platter with marinated spring lamb and chicken from the spit and a bowl of fries.  It was a good thing we settled on the small platter, because there was much more here than it initially looked!  

Mixed Giro Platter (small $16.50)

Bowl of Chips

The lamb was very tender and juicy, and the chicken was really nicely marinated and seasoned, but extremely salty.  Now I usually love salty things, so I did enjoy it, however it made us really, really thirsty (we had to ask for an extra jug of water after!!! LOL) and left me parched for the rest of the day too.  Even though we had a bowl of chips, after a while it almost felt like there was too much meat... we should have ordered some pita with dips or something to go with it, so it was a good thing MerlinFan and Scimitar both had souvlakis, so we could steal the pita off them!

Scimitar had a chicken souvlaki and MerlinFan settled on a mixed (lamb and chicken) souvlaki.  

Mixed souvlaki $12.50

Now the souvlakis come with lettuce, tomato, onion and homemade tzatziki rolled in warm pita bread.  The pita was airy and thin - not chewy and thick.  The tzaziki is a homemade yoghurt, garlic and cucumber sauce - I felt it could have used a bit more seasoning to really bring the souvlaki together, but that's just my opinion.  

There could also have been more consistency in the filling of the souvlaki.  Scimitar's chicken souvlaki was more like a vegetarian souvlaki - it was packed full of lettuce and tomato and probably only a few shreds of chicken.  On the other hand, MerlinFan's mixed souvlaki was crammed full of lamb and chicken right to the bottom of the wrap.  I would have felt extremely screwed if I were Scimitar and saw the generous amount of meat in MerlinFan's souvlaki compared to mine!

We had wanted to try the dessert platter which sounded really, really good (baklava, galaktoboureko and creme caramel with vanilla bean ice cream) but ended up being too full to take another bite.

Overall not bad, but I would have expected more for a $12.50 souvlaki - a bit disappointed after reading such great reviews online.

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