Bite the Bao
Where: Ballito Lifestyle Centre, Main Road, Ballito
Open: Daily lunch and dinner
Call: 032 946 8540
Food writer Ingrid Shevlin and I decided to make a trip to Ballito’s lifestyle centre so she could experience the Coffee Lab (see above). I had had a truly amazing cup of coffee there late last year and hoped for a repeat performance.
Coffee Lab is a lovely comfortable space in the foyer of a collection of art and design shops. There’s The Gallery, a decor shop, a few bespoke clothing boutiques and even a little book shop of the Denis Hurley Street Lit project. Tables and chairs fill the spaces in between - it’s charming and homely and inviting. The Lab itself is a counter focused on the coffee machine. There are a few nourishing gourmet sandwiches and cakes like sweet potato cake and carrot cake.
The coffees were top notch and we complimented the baristas on winning the Battle of the Beans award, proudly displayed on the counter.
For lunch we were contemplating one of the centre’s famed establishments, except they demanded a deposit, and neither Ingrid nor I found we had the tech savvy to make the payment on their website. Odd that.
Instead we tried Bite the Bao, a new eatery that opened in the main Market food hall late last year, specialising in dumplings and dim sum.
It’s a simple menu on the wall behind. You order from the counter. And either sit at the counter or on one of three or four tables behind us. There are bao buns with chicken, pork belly or brawn and fried bao buns with prawn salad or crab salad. We quickly found out that the crab was crab sticks. There’s also an XL burger bao.
Potstickers come in chicken, prawn, beef or veg, while steamed buns offer chicken or veg. Wontons offered a prawn or veg option and then there was korokke which neither of us knew. These are basically Japanese croquettes, potato filled morsels crumbed in panko. We opted for the prawn variety (R95) - chicken and veg were available. They had prawn flavour and the crumb was nice and crisp but were really quite heavy. None of the light and fluffy expectations one has with a croquette. More like bullets. A spicy mayo dip picked things up a bit.
The chicken potstickers (R75) had a good kick of ginger and spring onion and were nicely coloured in the pan.
I enjoyed the prawn salad fried bao buns (R85), despite upending one all over the table when the cardboard container they were in fell over. I (tried to) artfully rearrange it for the picture. I liked the fried bread - who doesn’t - and enjoyed the salad filling. Ingrid was critical that the whole was too heavy on the mayonnaise. Perhaps the unfried option would have given more of the freshness she was craving.
Then there were the steam vegetable dumplings (R65). I’ve never really been impressed with steamed buns. They’re sticky and often don’t taste of terribly much. We felt the same here. Basically something squishy and salty. Oh, well, saved by the soy sauce.
We did enjoy their home-made boba teas - passion fruit for me and strawberry for Ingrid - but they offer a whole range of flavours.
Bite the Bao does offer a small selection of sweet buns with fillings like apple crumble, custard, nutella and ice-cream, but we’d seen a magnificent selection of custard slices down the road and so we decided to try these.
Food: 3
Service: 3
Ambience: 3
Zara’s
Where: 90 Ballito Lifestyle Centre, Main Road, Ballito
Open: Monday to Saturday 6am to 5.30pm, Sunday 7am-5pm
Call: 087 460 0299
Dear Custard
That’s what’s written on the lines of take way boxes on the shelf ready to serve a veritable array of different custard slices. It’s also written on the display counter which is a side hatch out of Zara's Cafe.
There’s a slice with apple and cinnamon, another with hazelnuts and chocolate, another topped with strawberries and another with salted caramel. There are custard tarts and pies and pastries. It all looks so full and inviting. And as both Ingrid and I are lovers of the humble custard, we were hooked.
She fancied the salted caramel version, I the apple and cinnamon creation (both R59). As we said we would share our waitress very cleverly cut them in half and brought them to us on our own plates. “Enjoy,” she smiled. We did.
We both liked that the custard was not too sweet yet smooth and silky, the thin fresh pastry still nice and crisp. And we both thought that our choices were the best.
It was much later in the car going home that Ingrid regretted not getting some for the family.
Food: 4
Service: 4
Ambience: 3 ½