Went here for the first time on a quiet-ish Tuesday evening a couple of weeks ago, and was really disappointed.
It didn't start off too badly. The decor is nice, somewhat similar to Wahaca, and I really enjoyed my fizzy passion fruit drink. For starters we went for the cheesy dough balls, chicken coxinhas and the prawns. The chicken was tasty enough, there weren't many prawns considering the price and the dough balls were essentially Pizza Express dough balls with a little cheese added, served with the same type of garlic butter. So far, so good.
However, when our mains arrived the disappointment began. Two of us had ordered the pork and papaya sausage, newly updated to go in a hot dog. This dish just didn't seem to have been thought through - certainly not tasted. The sausage was served in a brioche bun with mango home slaw on the side, with a sweet sauce on top of the bun. The sausage was nice enough, but every single accompaniment was sweet, adding up to a really unbalanced dish. Sweet bun, sweet coleslaw, sweet sauce and sweet sausage added up to a dish that felt more like a dessert than a main course, and wasn't better for it. I didn't enjoy mine and my brother didn't bother finishing the brioche bun. It just made no sense as a dish. The steak my brother's girlfriend ordered was nice enough, but the portion size was small and there was nothing particularly special about it.
The desserts were average. The nutella and banana pastels I ordered were tiny, with practically no filling - perhaps the nutella melted away into the pastry while cooking. They were also dripping with oil. The chocolate brownie was what you would expect in any mid-range restaurant, not bad but not brilliant. The real star of the desserts was the caramel frozen yoghurt, which was creamy enough to taste like ice cream, and came with one topping, for which my brother chose the oreos.
After that, despite a half-empty restaurant, the service was incredibly slow. It took ages for the bill to arrive, and then it seemed impossible to get a server's attention to take our payment. There was literally half an hour between the time on our bill and the time when someone finally got it together to take our payment. Added to this my brother's comment that Cabana serves, at best, Giraffe-quality food at higher prices, and we all agreed that we wouldn't be returning. read more