Riboville Restaurant is situated in the city center in the newly rehabilitated St Georges Mall area. This lovely, safe, area has plenty of parking and other up-market restaurants.
Riboville itself is situated in the old bank building, complete with ancient lift and massive vaults. The main restaurant is upstairs in a large open plan room, the smaller restaurant is downstairs in the bank vault. I would highly recommend that you eat in the vault as it is cosy and more personal and we loved it. The main restaurant is loud and cold and not my cup of tea. Make sure that you specify your preference at the time of booking and preferably in writing – they are unforgiving once you are there!
If you are counting your pennies, then give Riboville a miss. It doesn’t come cheap. Our bill for 4 people, with 3 of the cheapest bottles of wine, came to R1500 excluding tip. Not for the faint hearted!
That said, the food we had was great. For starters the three of us shared the Tapas options. There are 6 choices, and you can choose 3 of them. So we chose all six and they were wonderful. One of us actually had it again for main course…it was that good.
I had the sushi platter for main course. While it was okay, I didn’t think it was great by any means. Considering that the prices here are more than double my usual sushi haunt (Hong in Claremont), I was expecting greatness.
Two of my fellow diners had tuna and sardines from the fresh fish counter. The fish was lovely and comes with different sauce options, so you can try them all. The waitress recommended how big a piece to order, and she was spot on.
The staff were good. Our waitress and her runner were lovely. Not much in the way of humour, but they were attentive and answered all questions well.
The wine steward was a pretty pompous and tried to steer us to more expensive wines (even going so far as to say that they didn’t have the ones we wanted. Until we pointed them out in the fridge!).
All in all a good experience. If money were water, I would go back again and would recommend it to tourists – especially for the old bank vault atmosphere.
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[...] Kate wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI had the sushi platter for main course. While it was okay, I didn’t think it was great by any means. Considering that the prices here are more than double my usual sushi haunt (Hong in Claremont), I was expecting greatness. … [...]