Gluttony is a Sin

where: Gluttony, Smith St Fitzroy
what: Grilled baby octupus salad, side order of potato salad, skinny cappucino, freshly sqeezed apple juice, lots of water
when: yesterday afternoon

The first time I went to Gluttony, I was warned 'don't get the breakfasts. They're alright, but they're nothing special. You must order off the board.'

I ignored this directive and ordered poached eggs with hollandaise, and as warned, they were nice (I love poached eggs and hollandaise, I'd a lot of the time rather have just the eggs than the ham, spinach or smoked salmon you get with eggs benedict and florentine), but they were nothing special. And the meals of my dining companions were.

Rachel had a warm gnocci salad, and Liz had the terrine plate, and both looked and tasted amazing. And both were massive. There's not a lot you can do to make eggs on toast look big, so my meal looked teeny in comparison.

So, this time, I was determined to have that kind of experience with my Gluttony dining, and ordered appropriately. Massively. Three drinks and two meals. It made sense at the time, I promise.

Baby octopus salad. Firstly, mmmmm, seafood. Secondly, mmmm, fetta cheese and sundried tomatoes and olives. Thirdly, mmmm, chargrilled eggplant and sweet potato. This dish usually also comes with chargrilled capsicum, but the taste of capsicum makes me wanna vom, so I ordered it without.

The fetta cheese was crumbled into the dressing, so the entire salad was drenched in the yummy salty cheesy taste. The sweet potato and eggplant were chargrilled to perfection and had caramelised crunchy outsides. The small octopi were fantastic, and my only beef with the entire salad was that some of the larger octopi were really quite undercooked. In fact I left the largest one on my plate because I just couldn't stomach it.
Potato salad was chosen from a display of salads, because it looked so tasty. It was actually a bit of a disappointment, at least as a companion to the octopus, as the dressing was fairly bland, and just couldn't stand up to the fetta cheese dressing on the other salad.

In the potato salad's favour, however: Hardboiled eggs cooked exactly right. The whites were solid but not rubbery, and the yolk was set but arrested before it got to that awful dry, chalky texture. I am sure that this would have been a lovely salad to have with steak or maybe with some chicken, but it just couldn't compete with the octopus.