Rita's Bar and Kitchen — Restaurant in Sydney

Rita’s Bar and Kitchen

Rita’s Bar and Kitchen can be found within the Cat and Fiddle Hotel, Balmain. Inside the heritage style pub you’ll find the best of both worlds. There’s both the bar with tartan floors, beers on tap and gaming space as well as the Hampton’s style restaurant called Rita’s. Rita’s has a high glass cathedral style roof providing bright light to the venue, mosaic tiled bench tops and white chairs, and a vibrant wallpaper.

The restaurant provides a casual dining space and relaxed atmosphere, which makes Rita’s suitable for a catch up with friends, a date or even an outing for the whole family.

The menu also supports this, being so extensive that you can have a fine dining meal, shared plates or a pub classic. Options for kids too, and plenty of dishes to satisfy those with dietary requirements to cater to vegetarian, gluten free and dairy free diners.

The menu is innovative, with a Mediterranean influence and the presentation of the dishes is high class. Evidence of this can be seen especially through our first dish, the stunning Western Australian Octopus Carpaccio with fennel, skordalia, saffron aioli. A light starter, beautifully flavoured and it worked well in the terrine style arrangement.

We followed this with the roast beetroot tarte tatin, using orange beetroot in a honey glaze, sitting atop crispy pastry with goat’s cheese and pine nuts. Again, a superb dish in all regards, a little savoury and a little sweet for good measure.

Another one of the small dishes we enjoyed was their Balmain bug, certainly appropriate to have on the menu given the location. The bug was cooked in a herb butter sauce, making for a light and fluffy flesh, softly flavoured and easy to pull from the shell. It was topped with extra of the buttery sauce and smoked salmon pearls and bottarga.

From the larger plates, we opted to share the 450 g wood fired lamb shoulder, a good chunk of the lamb, served with the bone in and the meat was tender, falling softly from the bone and perfectly paired with chimichurri sauce. We recommend ordering a side, and our choice of the Zucchini, rocket and pecorino salad was perfect. Now it might sound like a basic dish, but whatever they did to this was amazing. Not normally a fan of rocket, the combination with the pecorino and lightly cooked zucchini was brilliant.

We were satisfied and full after all of this, shared between two, but there’s dessert on the menu too if you’re into your sweets, even an affogato.

Whilst you’re here, be sure to get a drink or two. Whether it be a beer, wine, cocktail or one of their many gins, there’s something to please everyone. Their French Martini was excellent, delicate flavours and topped with dehydrated raspberries, providing a nice touch. We then selected a Gin and tonic, opting for the Applewood Alpine gin, with notes of macadamia, vanilla and wattleseed, flavours that shone through.

The whole experience was topped off with a high level of service. Cameron was friendly and super knowledgeable on all aspects of the restaurant’s history, menu and drink list. He promptly took our order, continued to check in and provided for excellent hospitality.

We would like for thank all involved for a great dining experience and we highly...

I hate to do a one star review but I honestly can't remember ever having a worse dining experience.

My family and I came on a night that was moderately busy (tables were about half full) and it took at least 20 minutes before I asked the manager if we could get some service. About 5 minutes later our order was taken. Pizza and other items that came out of the pizza oven were a tad slow but not too bad. These were reasonably good. It's with the drinks and all the other food that we had the biggest issue. It took an extraordinarily long time for any of the other food or drinks to come out and this was after multiple and it ranged from decent to utterly atrocious.

On the decent end was the chicken schnitzel which was quite nice. The steak was reasonably cooked but massively over seasoned with pepper and tough. The seafood platter had some decent oysters but everything else in it was terrible. In particular, the lobster was tough and rubbery and the prawns were so tough that they honestly could have hurt someone. On top of all this, the drinks took so long that some didn't even arrive before we had to leave.

On top of this, the noise in the place was way over the top. They might need to do a better job dampening the ambient noise.

Throughout the meal, the staff did apologize for all of the issues and to their credit we weren't charged for the drinks and the food items that we faced issues with but they didn't actually correct any of the issues throughout the meal. Would...

We had a terrific experience at Rita’s: very good food, cooked well and with style. Pan-fried snapper fillet was generous with good body and nicely moist; Portuguese sausage in garlic jus and on mash also very tasty. Cauliflower with gratin sauce as a side was outstanding. Until… until I hit the crunch in my mouth and found two tiny ceramic chips mixed in with the sausage. These things happen, but what annoyed me was the attitude of the chef: he seemed monumentally dismissive and unconcerned. He said they were two chips from a salad bowl. Ok, but what were they doing in my dinner, and in my mouth? He said they’d probably been chipped in the kitchen. Would I like a beer? Or a wine? I thought my teeth had broken, or I was chomping on broken glass. Whatever, it shouldn’t have happened, and the chef, I’d have thought, should have been more concerned. But he seemed he couldn’t have cared less. Wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Disappointing. We’d go back, because overall it still was good. Food was top stuff otherwise, and floor and bar staff were very friendly and obliging, and just as concerned as we were. But the chef’s response was rather a...