Cape Town Fish Market Restaurant (Victoria and Albert Waterfront)
Cape Town Fish Market Restaurant (Victoria and Albert Waterfront), originally uploaded by garybembridge.
The Cape Town Fish Market restaurant is billed as “South Africa’s Premier Seafood Restaurant”.
Scary. As it clearly is not the best in the waterfront area of Cape Town, let alone Cape Town (which is packed of many very good places to eat).
The CPFM bills itself as serving sushi and great seafood. It is really a large sort of spin on “TGIF” steak and ribs sort of place – but with a seafood slant. It is a very large place with outside area, upstairs and downstairs. There is a large bar downstairs.
The place, and I have to admit this was a second visit as the first was in 2004 when we had sushi, has not got any better. For what it is, which is a chain style place to eat offering average food and average prices in a tourist trap part of Cape Town, it serves a good enough purpose.
Popular with groups of people out for a reasonable costing meal that will have something most people want to eat, it is overall a fairly grubby place with slow and slightly incompetent service by pleasant enough staff. The floor and tables, and cutlery etc, were quite a mess and there seems no pressure to keep it any better. Even the waiter took glasses away he noticed after bringing them were chipped and we asked for cleaner knives and forks.
The food was okay and tasty, though cold as the service is laid back and so assume it sits before people get round to bringing it out to the tables.
We had vegetable tempura and fish cakes to start, both were tasty and cold. Then we had chicken bento boxes, where the chicken wings were horrible (greasy and cold) but the chicken spring rolls were tasty. The rice was cold but tasty and the salad was fine.
It is the sort of place you swear you won’t go back to, and then end up ages later doing it and remembering why you said you woudn’t. the menu has very many offers and great sounding dishes, they are so close to making it work but service and general smartness lets it down.
Pity!
