Thursday 7 July 2011

The Pier & The Pebble, Penarth

We had lunch at The Pier & The Pebble on the Esplanade in Penarth this week. The building, situated next to the oldest Yacht Club in Wales, was originally an Edwardian residential property. Inside it is light and airy, with a simple nautical décor in blues and white.

The Pier & The Pebble is open for breakfast, lunch and evening meals. At lunchtimes the menu features salads; meat, fish and vegetarian platters; and steak and fish dishes.

After some fine garlic bread, I had Mussels Marina (sourced from Ashton’s) cooked in a home-made tomato, chilli and garlic sauce. This proved to be a thick, tasty and hot chilli sauce. I decided I preferred a wine broth that takes the flavour of the mussels, which can be spooned up afterwards; although that’s not, of course, a reflection of the dish here, which did everything it set out to. The mussels were perfectly cooked and the accompanying chips were excellent. A fingerbowl on the table would have been nice.
My dining partner, who is always better at choosing from the menu than me (do you know people like that?), went for the Rump Steak, served with a large grilled mushroom and tomato, and a bowl of chips. The piece of steak I scrounged was melt-in-the mouth lovely. We shared a mixed salad.

For dessert, we had a scoop of Sidoli's ice cream each (one Cappuccino and one Amaretto) with coffees.

There was a smooth Worthington’s Smooth on keg (no thanks) and the Continental bottled beer appeared to be limited to Peroni today. My partner enjoyed her Taffy Apple Cider. On the drinks front therefore, probably more wine bar than pub.

There are currently three good restaurants along the Esplanade: the others being The Pier & The Pebble’s superior sister restaurant Mediterraneo and the excellent Fig Tree. With funding in place for the development of the Pier building, things are certainly looking up for Penarth’s seafront.

Incidentally, we used a Groupon voucher toward the cost of this lunch. A number of restaurants and sandwich bars in the Cardiff area have signed up to this scheme, which will be the subject of a future post.

http://www.thepierthepebble.com/

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