Hav­ing recently pur­chased an Enter­tain­ment Book through the social club at work, I am determ­ined to get more than my money’s worth out of it, so I’m going to try and work my way through it sys­tem­at­ic­ally.

First up I wanted a quick din­ner before bowl­ing, and since I did­n’t have the book with me, only the gold card, it had to be some­where in the ‘fine din­ing’ sec­tion, and it had to be some­where in the Cour­tenay Quarter to be near The Lanes. A quick search on their web­site led me to 88 on Tory Street.

The food is billed as ‘Met­ro­pol­it­an – Viet­namese’, and the menu items are help­fully des­ig­nated with an M or V to denote their her­it­age, because obvi­ously it’s dif­fi­cult to tell where chocol­ate brownies or rice paper rolls come from. Since I was meet­ing my sis­ter at 6pm, I was the first per­son in the res­taur­ant but the wait­ress was still a little sniffy when I asked if we could move away from a table right by the loud kit­chen door to a table in the res­taur­ant prop­er.

Still, a bottle of Ata Ran­gi Rose ($36) made things bet­ter, as did the pro­spect of a whole crispy drunk­en baby chick­en with salt and pep­per, and a pile of skew­ers and noodles to be wrapped in lettuce leaves, served with sea­food spring rolls. The chick­en was deli­cious, although being so small meant that there was a high pro­por­tion of bones to meat. The skew­ers were like­wise very tasty, although the bacon wrap­ping on the beef was a little unex­pec­ted. The lettuce was met­ro­pol­it­anly frilled and in small pieces, which meant wrap­ping noodles, veges and meat togeth­er was pretty much impossible, but a knife and fork proved to be the way to go. The pork skew­er was espe­cially tasty and I wish it could be a whole main. We fol­lowed our mains with a shared chocol­ate & coconut brownie which was topped with hot fudge sauce and served with ice cream. It was very tasty, but it felt like a $10 dessert, instead of a $12 one, if you know what I mean. Still, with the gold card remov­ing the cost of one of the mains ($23.50), we each paid $36.50 for our meals, and that seemed very reas­on­able. I look for­ward to more gold card adven­tures.