Black Sheep Steak

There's a new restaurant opened up by the lake that we've been meaning to try for a few weeks and on Saturday night we managed to go.  It's called Black Sheep Steak - which appears a contradiction but hey.  The chef spent 14 years living in Dunedin, New Zealand completing high school and a university degree there.  This accounts for the tempting sign outside (the board mentions pavlova which got Mr John's attention).  Sitting outside affords a lovely view of the lake and they have a fan out there too.

The menu is in English as well as Thai (and no, pavlova was not on it) with a variety of meats on offer.  We chose garlic bread, French fries and rump steak.  What we didn't realised was that main course came with a green salad and French fries, so we overdid it on the chips!  There was a good vinaigrette on the salad which made a pleasant change as you often get salad cream here (which, like every other condiment, has a sweet taste).  After we'd ordered, Mr John realised we hadn't been asked how we'd like our steaks cooked.

We got the attention of our lovely waiter, who had a few English words at his disposal, and went for "rare" as we thought medium-rare was pushing our luck.  I'd opened up my Thai App and was showing him the word "rare" when he indicated I should speak to chef.  At this stage I didn't know the chef was fluent in English and so I showed him my phone saying "rare" at which point he said....yeah sure!!  I was a little mortified but think I successfully managed to laugh it off.

Initially we got some round rolls delivered to our table that had a garlic type butter over the top.  We thought this was our garlic bread and although below expectations, it tasted ok.  Then we got our real garlic bread which was a delicious, hot, crispy roll done the traditional way.  This was served up with our very good French fries.  We didn't think anything of the order in which we were served as you often get fries as a starter here.  Then our steaks turned up (complete with salad and more fries) and looked and tasted excellent. 

The steaks aren't as thick as you'd get say in Australia but I've yet to see beef cattle here, so what else would you expect.  They were well cooked, nice and juicy and the whole meal came to 435 baht which we thought was good value for money.  It could have cost us less as we were pretty stuffed having had two lots of chips but we're already planning our next trip and won't make the same mistake!