Fish Fingers and Banana Split - Bodega style

For most, the words "fish fingers" conjures up images of pre-crumbed frozen mystery fish, served by your parents to help you gain a taste for fish somewhere between your toddler and teen years. Same age-bracket goes for "banana split", but perhaps with a slight American tinge. Sydney Tapas restaraunt Bodega has reinvented the food wheel, and continues to do so on a daily basis with their fresh Argentinean culinary offerings often operating under similarly lo-fi names.

While the talk of the town is Bodeda owners Ben Milgate, Elvis Abrahanowicz and his new wife/old flame Sarah Doyle's (Maitre Di) latest Surry Hills restaurant Porteno, its little brother is still -and always will be- a favourite of ours.

We started with the house Empanadas, reasonably priced at $10 for 3 or $13.50 for four puffy morsels of Argentinean-style beef served with a heavenly sauce called 'salsa criolla.' There's a vegetarian alternative too, but if you ask me, dining at an Argentinian eatery as a herbivore isn't the best use to use your culinary time.

The humbly-named "Fish Fingers" ($16) are no breaded affair; they are kingfish sashimi sitting atop garlic toast, topped with calamari ceviche and onions. Lashings of the stuff. Not the greatest date food, but the most incredible mix of ocean and earth that you may ever experience; it's fancy surf & turf for the not-so-faint-hearted.

We doubt that you're still ravenous by this point, so ordering the most expensive dish on the menu may not seem appealing, but leaving without sampling the signature South American slow-cooked meat would be sacrilegious. We ordered the 'slow cooked lamb loin with roast garlic miso and eggplant' ($32), and if you think your taste buds got a work out with the kingfish fingers, you ain't tasted nothing yet. The depth of the miso, coupled with the melt-in-your-mouth lamb will mark a flavour milestone in your life; we're willing to bet money on the fact.

To finish, we can't go past the pimped-up 'banana split' ($14), a cream flan served with dulce de leche ice cream (otherwise known as 'heaven'), ginger biscuit and of course, the dish-hero, banana. We've been getting inundated with dulce de leche around Sydney-town of late, from the gelato flavour of the month to dulce de leche-flavoured-cookies at boutique cafes, but these guys were one of the first to pioneer the sweet, milky, caramel goo on their menu.

Other menu highlights include (but are not limited to) the Jamón Serrano ($12), salad of fried cauliflower, chickpeas and silverbeet ($16), and steamed pork belly with warm salad of onion and shiitake mushroom ($24). The drink list offers an incredible selected of native Argentinean wines, beer and cider, and an exorbitant number of wild cocktail imaginings, so wild that they've turned the next room into a bar of sorts.

Bodega isn't tapas in the traditional, small-plate sense of the word, so come armed with your appetites. Like other likeminded Sydney hot-spots, they doesn't take bookings either, so best get there around 6pm (opening time) with a lick of drool on your chin for staff sympathy votes.

Bodega Tapas Restaurant & Bar

216 Commonwealth St

Surry Hills NSW 2010

Phone: +61 2 9212 7766

Email: enquiries@bodegatapas.com