Here, fishy fishy

By Injy El-Kashef
The other Blue Lagoon I know was a film starring Brooke Shields that my mother only allowed me to watch when I turned 10 years old, although my father saw nothing wrong with what he thought was nothing more than a nicely shot biology class. This Blue Lagoon is a large and multi-faceted arrangement with bar, coffee shop, small and main restaurants. I would personally go for the small: four or five tables in a dimly lit space with a huge aquarium housing many colourful Red Sea fish that I hadn't seen since my last dive four years ago.
Unfortunately, the waiter automatically escorted the party upstairs to the main dining hall, leaving me behind stammering "but... but... the fish." Upstairs is pleasantly -- not fabulously -- elegant but, unless you intend to whisper sweet nothings by candle-light, the aquarium is a much nicer setting.
One excellent Shrimp Soup for me with several medium-sized shrimps happily floating in a delicious stock, one Cream and Mushroom Soup for my mother that she seemed to enjoy. To take the same theme a little further we ordered a Seafood Salad and Fried Mushrooms as appetisers. The fungi were exactly four in number, reasonable in size, stuffed with an unexpected but perfectly pleasant blue cheese and parsley concoction and accompanied by onion rings. As for the salad, it was really good: true, the crab is of the processed kind (finger-shaped thin white layers with soft orange shells) but I don't mind those at all with a few tiny shrimps and calamari slices, all bathing in a lemony dressing and coleslaw on the side.
Next came the main courses. My mother was soon engrossed in a huge and tender beef fajita situation, which typically came sizzling hot with lots of green peppers and onions (although she claims a few hot spices could have improved matters tremendously -- she likes her palate numb), but with a serving of rice because they were out of tortillas. My Fillet with Roquefort Sauce was also very tender and bathed in a delicious sauce, which, however, did not taste of Roquefort at all (unless they meant something other than blue cheese), rather more like gravy. My rice was as good as hers and that always helps family relations. We had a good meal, pointed out the menu's spelling mistakes to the waiter and got the whole litany of excuses, then proceeded to order dessert.
My Chocolate Crêpe was very good: three folded crêpes with more chocolate sauce than would satiate even this reviewer and a tiny tub (brandy glass-like) with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. I left the tub untouched -- the whole point of ice cream is to mix it with the hot chocolate sauce, but maalesh. As for my mother's Blue Lagoon Crêpe, it was very weird. Let me put it this way: it is actually a soufflé in an oven dish, with a mixed fruit filling and the crêpes helplessly sitting at the bottom. She says it tasted good, and that's also good for family relations when you pay the LE155 bill.
Blue Lagoon, 7 Al-Nozha St, Ard Al-Golf,
Heliopolis.
Tel 417 0080
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