Polpetta, Morningside

After one of our dinner party got stuck in the loo’s outside this restaurant, I began to think any restaurant has to be truly worth its salt if it is to be featured in the guide, having no facilities. There’s a real slip in the quality of a meal when you have to leave a good conversation to walk across parking lots, or over quads past biltong and sock shops to find the loo’s. In the case of Polpetta, the facilities are behind a big gate, the key to which is on a block of wood not unlike the experience at a filling station. The toilets here are not much better.

So the fullness of this restaurant on a Saturday evening must be due to its quality – or perhaps because it’s an Italian restaurant that specialises in pizza? Because the meal was ordinary, at times poor. Pizza is decent, again of the thin-base but commercial type; while the pastas I tasted were pretty flavourless in saucing, the pasta over-cooked. The meat dishes featured well-prepared meats (steak, veal, calf’s liver), but again the saucing and sides were pedestrian. So it’s a lot cheaper than better spots like Pronto (where you also hike for a pee) or Pomodoro (the new premises have facilities, evne though they’re in a mall)? Perhaps a touch, but not really: pastas R45-60, veal dishes R80, 300g fillet R95. I can only think this is a restaurant of absolute convenience, like if you live in the mall or parking lot.

Corner Rivonia and Kelvin, Morningside. 011 804 8866

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