Back at The Brickhouse Oven again and this time, I tried their Seafood Platter, which is an item listed in their starters menu… According to their menu, its a platter consisting of Fish Fingers, Crumb Fried Squid (Calamari) and Crumb Fried Prawns as well… It arrived as shown in the pics below: 🙂
As can be seen quite a generous portion of the Squid along with some Prawns and the Fish Fingers and the whole thing served with some Mango-Jalapeno Mayo dip… Personally I felt this to be a sizeable portion and hence I didn’t go for any of their main course options in this particular visit as it was quite filling for me… I guess they meant this as a starter for a family, which explains why this became a whole meal for me 🙂
First of, even though the menu said Crumb Fried Squid, it turned out to be just batter fried without any crumbs… Anyways, personally, I am a person who doesn’t like to eat Squid at all and hence was very skeptical of this especially when I saw the ratio of the Squid to the others… I still decided to try it as it would be a shame to waste all that and I found myself enjoying the same… The bland and rubbery tough taste and texture of the Squid that I dislike was completely absend here as the Squid was perfectly cooked and the thin and crispy batter was very well seasoned to the point of it being ever so slightly spicy, which I liked… If I get Squid cooked like this, I wouldn’t have any problem eating it…
Coming to prawns, although I have no complains on the taste and the cooking of the Prawns, my problem with them were that unlike the Squid, which had a nice and crispy thin batter, here, the breading / crumb coating felt too thick and hence hard to chew because the outer coating was rock solid as based on the color, it clearly is way beyond that perfect golden brown colored level of cooking that one would expect, instead of being just crispy… Also it felt so thick that it was hard to taste the prawn and I ended up removing most of the breading and then ate the prawns with the minimal amount of the same that I left on it… Of-course, the seasonings were all perfect, but I wish it had a much much lesser breading on the prawns…
Unfortunately I ended up disappointed by the Fish Fingers… This is because while the Squid and the Prawns were very well seasoned, the Fish Fingers ended up being bland… However, the silver lining was that the breading on them, even though overcooked just the like prawns, the amount of it was ok and not too much like the Prawns… However being bland, especially the fish inside, was a problem because of which I couldn’t enjoy it at all…
Last but not the least, the Mango-Jalapeno Mayo dip felt quite refreshing with the flavours of Mango and Jalapeno and it seemed to work incredibly well, balancing the spiciness of the Squid and the Prawns… The Fish Fingers being heavily under-seasoned, the dip appeared to slightly make up for it… However, I loved the combination of the batter fried squid with this dip…
So, altogether as can be seen above, I do have a mixed feeling about this meal… At one end there is the Squid that I loved and on the other spectrum, there is the Fish Fingers that I couldn’t like at all and the Prawns which was ok but could be better… Anyways, I hope the TBO chefs and management makes the necessary corrections to this very soon… If you ask me, what I would suggest that they do is to simply ditch the crumb frying idea and do the same batter frying approach that that did with the Squid and maybe vary the seasoning based on the ingredient… And if they really are keen on doing the bread crumbs coating, I would suggest that it be restricted to be a very thin and fine coating, like how we usually see in a Schnitzel… In the meantime, I am looking forward to be back over there for more of that Squid… 🙂
