Cultural Centre
Northbridge
Perth WA 6000
Website
Hours
Mon-Sat 10am-12am
Sun 10am-10pm
Lot 20 is all-in one café and bar located in the heart of the Cultural Centre. The place has a wonderful layout with many different micro-spaces created in their alfresco yard and indoors: cosy spots, hide-in spots, alone spots, eating-with-your-pal spots, girly spots, macho spots, couples spots. Spottified!
The place is woody, retro-industrial, very colourful and with plenty of funny and quirky elements of decoration and artwork. The painting with the jugglers freaks me out every time, I swear. The toilets are great with all those black tiny tiles and the chromed piping ending in those bottles of white creamy soap, really cool.
The atmosphere is also very cool, not only because of the design, but because of the various clientele that visits the place, all ages, all dressing styles, all kinds of humans, that are seasoned and stirred up by a mix of retro music.
Opening times are awesome - food, coffee and drinks available in the city centre any time of the day from 10am to 10pm. Beat that! And the prices are OK taking into account that this is Perth city centre.
One of the things I like the most about the place is that they add new dishes very often, so if you happen to go often, you will always find something new to try. I love that. It keeps me going to places.
FOOD
Lot Twenty has a mix cart of post-modern pub food, with plenty of vegetarian dishes, and they use local fresh produce, which is always a guarantee of freshness and flavour. They have a great concept about the dishes they offer, but the food has been yummy sometimes, OK others, and absolutely blah others.
The top in my chart have been the Son in Law Eggs with chilly caramel dressing and coriander, so beautiful looking, so smooth in your mouth, sweetish and with a wonderful mix of flavours, colours and textures. The home-made terrine was great, fresh, soft, smooth and very delicate, perfect with the dollop of mustard sauce.
The asparagus on potato foam with yuzu and kaffir lime "magic dust" were wonderful, very simply prepared and beautifully presented. I also loved the beetroot salad, a mix of fruit and veggie salad infused in the beetroot juice, which was delicious; mine had apple, orange, compressed melon, beetroot and another veggie that I could not recognise. The warm vegetables salad was very simple, but very healthy looking and tasty, the veggies cooked to perfection, not too hard not too soft.
I liked their home-made onion rings and the fish and chips with the accompanying slightly spicy sauce dip - home-style unpretentious pub (oily) food and very filling.
I had high expectations regarding the slightly smoked pork belly, but I had a ploff sort of moment. The produce was top notch, and the flavour of each separate item as well, but the mix was not complementary. The cardamom and apple gel was lovely in flavour, and nicely plated, but it was not enough quantity or texture to envelop with its flavour and moisture the very dry crunchy pork belly. The chestnut flakes were also lovely, but another dry element to add to another dry element, dry to the square, which prevented the pork belly from gliding down my esophagus toboggan style.
The spiced cauliflower has been the main disappointment (absolutely ploff!). I love cauliflower, it is one of those vegetables that is easy to cook and morph into amazing things. However, the cauliflower was way too hard, the chunks too big, the dollops of herbed [sic] yoghurt sauce too thick to be easily spreadable and give moisture and flavour to the dish as a whole, while the wonderful pomegranate and nuts sprinkle were lost trying to seduce a frigid cauliflower. No chemistry, baby.
I did not like the olives. Why anybody would choose mediocre olives over wonderful ones escapes me, like a butterfly passing by. Perhaps they should like olives first to choose good ones!!
DESSERTS
Regarding the sweets, the Pear Friand was great! Very small (cute actually) but wonderful regarding flavour, moisture, texture and level of sugar. In contrast, the chocolate pudding sorta thing was a "does he love me-does he love me not" sort of dish. A 3-dollar dessert really puts me in the mood of anything good, so I did enjoy it. On the other hand, what I got was, basically, jellied condensed sweetened milk zombified by a bit of Milo. You could think, genius! I agree! But I prepare similar things at home in summer and takes no culinary skills to do so; I was just expecting something beyond my poor-dessert-making skills, that happens when your expectations are expectant. And... why not calling it Condensed Milk Pudding so my imagination does not fly mid way to crash hard against concrete reality too soon? Anticlimactic!DRINKS AND COFFEE
I love their wine and drinks chart, and the prices of the international wines are terrific for Perth standards. I absolutely loved the Lopez de Haro red wine, smooth like a nice kiss.Their coffee is well prepared and creamy, but the beans they use produce one of those "weakienikis" that we find throughout Perth. Perfect for you if you like smooth weak coffees. Otherwise, my easy-solution kinda solution is ordering a topped-up long macchiato instead of your usual flat white. I did so and I was happy with the strength an flavour of my coffee. Oh Wittgenstein you know how wording works on the tongues of people.
SERVICE
Most of the staff are really welcoming, helpful, very friendly, and very cute! The problem is the organisation of the service at times. It was chaotic, confused and inattentive during my first visit, a bit of a disaster and got me annoyed. Fortunately, first impressions are delusive and I always give a second opportunity. Glad I did because the service has dramatically changed in my following visits, and these guys have been pampering my regal butt since then. Kiss Kiss.The main problem with the service is not the people, is that the dishes take quite a while to come out at times, no matter the difficulty in the preparation or how empty the local is. Almost half an hour for a dish of simple eggs is unacceptable. I wondered if they were helping the chicken to lay the eggs directly cooked onto the plate. Bang Bang.
However, I mentioned the issue to one of the waiters, and my eggs were on my table presto!, and my second dish came 5 minutes after ordering it! The Sound of Music.
That is willingness to please! Kudos to all them for the effort. The more I go, the more attentive they are to my needs, and that is always a great sign, and what turns customers into regulars.
***
I will go back, I like the place, there are many things I want to try, like their visually enthralling burger and Dutch chips, fish and chips, and all the new dishes they are incorporating into the menu. They have so many different veggie and meaty things that is impossible not to like at least a few of them. Having said that, their food can easily improved, and needs to improve, it takes a willingness to work the textures and flavours of some of the more avant-garde dishes a bit better to do so. Nothing really wow. But you don't want to be wowed that often; otherwise your wows would be less genuine.
EMERGENCY!
Coffee takeaway cup size is minuscule ridicule. Fix it! You need at least a large cup to make any coffeeholic happy!NOTES OF INTEREST
* Free Wi-fi for those who just communicate with their antennae.* No PayWave. Wave your fingers athletically to introduce your PIN, instead
FLEETING THOUGHTS
>> I hope they have big umbrellas for the patio area once summer comes, because the place is already hot, and you don't want to seat al fresco to get hot.<<>> How many steps or kilometres do the waiters do going upstairs/downstairs the kitchen the whole day? Good workout!<<
