Sea Garden and Grill, Tooting

Post

Subscribe

Sea Garden and Grill presented itself as an option when we were planning the birthday meal of the seafood aficionado in the house, a.k.a the husband. Proximity to the home and of course the fact that the menu was definitely centred on seafood (the name's a dead giveaway!) made it our go-to.

The service was very friendly right from our booking and accommodating our running late. Now, during the day, this is a bustling indoor marketplace. It's by night that the place morphs into various restaurants. So, it's not your fancy restaurant decor with soft music and lighting. Think more al fresco style.

The menu is a tapas type one. Personally, I am not a great fan of this type of dining (I mean, one never knows when the meal is really over with no starters, mains, pudding!). We were a party of 4 and we began with the Cornish oysters. These were nicely presented and had their usual oyster-y taste! Then, we had a selection of smoked salmon and dill arancini and tempura squid. I had particularly ordered the latter as it said it came with squid ink aioli and being the food adventurer I am, I was curious to taste this. Whilst the ink part of it was nice, I felt the squid itself was rather too oily. My older daughter, who had ordered the former, loved her dish. The younger one had ordered grilled king prawns. These were nice!

As I said, this being a tapas, these little plates of food whilst very pleasing to look at and not too bad in taste, were gone in a few minutes. So, we looked for something more substantial and ended up with a crab bun. This was essentially a burger with crab meat fried in a tempura batter in the middle. It was indeed filling but again I felt, it was a tad too oily. Oh, and we had also ordered good ol' chips and these didn't disappoint- they were triple cooked with beef dripping. I sampled one just for the 'been there done that' thing and they were again NICE.








Would I go there again? Probably not. It's not that I didn't enjoy the food. I was conflicted about where to place the experience. Had we spent the same amount of money and bought these items from a fishmonger, we would have had so much more in quantity. On the other hand, had we gone to a posher restaurant, we could have sat in a nicer ambience- the kind that seafood deserves!

#tooting
#tapas_restaurants
#seafood_restaurants
#restaurants
#food_wine
#dinner
%wnlondon