Lady Lunchalot

Horsham is really growing on me. I’ve already noticed some peculiarities about this town – the way everyone from the taxi driver to the local real estate agent tells you their life story (this is one quality that I find quite endearing) and how all the restaurants in town are so keen to feature seafood on their menus. I still haven’t figured out where all this fresh seafood is coming from. It’s enough to make you think Horsham is a quaint seaside fishing village with a crab pot and a prawn trawler around every corner, when it’s actually many hundreds of drought-stricken kilometres inland in the heart of Victoria’s sheep district.

So when O and I took ourselves to The Olde Horsham for dinner on Friday night, you can understand why I was expecting to find a menu full of hearty country dishes like lamb casseroles, mutton pie, and maybe something exotic like, oh I don’t know, corned beef?

Instead I found a weird medley of surf ‘n turf. There was steak cooked to your liking topped with a crown of king prawns, seafood marinara, and my personal favourite, steak kilpatrick (!) That name is so good it deserves a drum roll.

Ever mindful of my generously-proportioned hips and impending nuptials, I went with a piece of grilled barramundi (it’s a freshwater fish, so forget about the fact that Horsham’s waterways have all but vanished in the drought and I could almost pretend that fish came from local waters) and steamed vegetables with strict instructions to hold any form of butter sauce.

O ordered the obligatory lamb shanks. The lovely man said they were the second best lamb shanks he’s ever had – he last had shanks when I cooked them for his birthday dinner last year. He’s always loved my legs ; )

My fish arrived and it was beautifully moist and tender, and the veggies were great even though they arrived dripping in deliciously hip-thickening cream sauce. The waitress was so lovely I didn’t have the heart to send it back. We heard all about her aunty, how she always scoffed down the bread when she went to restaurants (the waitress, not the aunty), and how much she loved McDonalds sundaes.

So all in all I loved The Olde Horsham. It was a warm, generous place to have dinner even if they did mess up my veggies and offer us strawberries for dessert despite the fact that they hadn’t stocked fresh strawberries for ages. It’s really nice to go to an honest restaurant with a soul. And I am sure they must have an aquarium out the back for all that seafood!