Bel Mondo

Let's take a break from all the honeymoon posts, even though there are still plenty to go. Truth is, I just had an awesome dinner and I want to blog about it straight away :) 
A friend came visiting from overseas. It's her first time in Sydney. I wanted to bring her somewhere with nice harbour view, not too expensive and has nice food. The challenging part is she doesn't eat beef or raw meat. I told another friend of mine my problem and she gave me a few options. Bel Mondo was 1 of them. I picked it because 1. I haven't been there, 2. lots of people seem to like this place and gave good reviews on eatability. 

We started off with amuse bouche and some fluffy soft herb bread. Not sure what flavour the bread was though. I didn't really pay much attention to the bread as we were too busy exchanging updates and news in each other's life. It's very nice to catch up with friend who I had not seen in 13 years or so. 

SS ordered a Smoked salmon & cucumber cannelloni with avocado, horseradish & sweet corn as entree. I tried a little bit of the salmon. It was a very refreshing entree. The cucumber was cold like just came out of the fridge but salmon was little bit warm. It was as if the dish was trying to play trick on us "it's cold! no it's warm!" It was fun and it tasted really good :) 

I had the Chicken liver parfait with peach wine jelly, grilled brioche & micro herbs. Definitely made the right choice picking this as entree. The grilled broiche was very crispy outside and very soft and fluffy inside.  The parfait was very creamy and the layer of buttery stuff around it added another level of smoothness. I find that the peach wine jelly was too sweet on its own, but if eaten together with the parfait, the sweetness would be balanced out by the richness of the parfait. I would never think something so sweet can go so well with a chicken liver parfait. The only problem I had was I didn't have enough brioche. I had to finish the parfait because it was too nice to let it go to the bin. So I ended up putting LOTS of parfait on little bit of brioche towards the end. 

For main, SS had the Ocean trout with white bean purée, barigoule vegetables & red wine jus. I tried little bit of the trout, it was nicely done. Fresh, moist, couldn't get it any better. Another thing about Bel Mondo is that the lighting condition was not exactly ideal for photos. I took many photos, but most of them are blurry or too grainy. 

This is our Steamed broccoli with lemon & garlic to share. Simple and nice. Not undercooked that it's still hard, and not overcooked that it's gone mushy. 

This was my Slow cooked lamb shoulder with pea & mint risotto, caramelised garlic & honey purée. It looked like a small dish, but it was actually very filling. Instead of having mint sauce to go with the lamb, it was quite interesting to see that the mint part was mixed into risotto with peas. Still worked well with the lamb. The lamb is soft enough that I didn't have to use my knife at all, but I think it can be even softer still. 
We were quite full after main, so we didn't order dessert. Just went for a walk around Circular Quay and drove to Mrs Macquarie's Chair so that SS could take some nice photos of Sydney night view. 
Oh yeah, special mention to our waiter tonight. He was cute, funny and very patient with us. We actually asked him to take photos for us like at least 3 times (I took food photo, but SS wanted to take people photos with her camera). He didn't mind at all and told us that it was in his job description that he had to take photos for customers. He even helped arrange seats for us to get a better view. Then during the whole night, everytime he walked past our table he would make some joke. Very entertaining :) 


We really enjoyed our dinner very very much. Great food and excellent service. That's why I wanted to blog about it straight away (skipping all of my backlog material :p). 


Prices: $55 for 2 course, $9 for side dish. 
Phone: 92413700
Address: Gloucester Walk, The Rocks.