Raising the food and drink stakes in Rosebank
The Park Corner complex hosts the Bolton Road Collection, Proof liquor store and Bar Ber Black Sheep
When a friend told me that mates we were joining for dinner had chosen Bolton Road Collection in Rosebank, Johannesburg, I groaned. I had been there a few weeks earlier, and definitely wouldn’t have chosen to go back. Its name grated – why does a single restaurant have the word "collection" in its title – what’s it a collection of … tables? The menu had more bird illustrations than an entire episode of Portlandia. The ambience was not unpleasant but yawningly unoriginal — reminiscent, with its exposed brick, incandescent bulbs and industrial fixtures, of a North American nowhere-land: Vancouver, Austin or downtown LA. These were the forgivable offences. Far less so was the mediocrity of my R95 short rib burger, which had been ordered medium but arrived verging on well done. Some of the supposedly triple-cooked chips seemed stodgy in the middle. And my friend’s west coast mussels were blandly underwhelming, with an aioli so oily it would have received a "fail" in a home economics cla...
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