The Canberra Science Fiction Club usually meets twice each month. The first Thursday is a General Meeting and on the third Thursday members, friends, family or guests can gather together to talk and eat at a restaurant. Each person pays for their own choice of meal. Everyone is welcome. You don’t have to belong to the club to join in. The only requirement is that you notify the Secretary at least two days before attending the dinner.
The Secretary has pre-selected the restaurants – the cuisines are varied and most restaurants have a banquet as well as a normal menu.
Six CSFS members got together in May 2021 for our regular restaurant meeting. The venue was the Lemon Grass Thai restaurant on the corner of Corinna and Ball Streets in Woden.
The Lemon Grass is a well presented, long established Thai restaurant with a peaceful atmosphere. The restaurant prides itself on offering “the opportunity to experience some of the most authentic traditional Thai cuisine available in Canberra”.
Five of us decided to share a banquet as our group was small, free of sniffles, three of us had had our first covid vaccinations, and Canberra hasn’t had any covid community transmissions this year.
The banquet included two entrees, five main dishes, fried rice and a dessert. The quality of the food was extremely good, especially for a reasonably priced restaurant.
The standout dishes of the banquet, also known as the dishes with the most debate over who got the last food on the plate, were: the Battered Prawns; the Massaman Beef Curry which had very generously sized pieces of beef given the price of meat at the moment; and the Pad Thai with Chicken. The Homemade Thai Coconut Ice Cream was stunning in the best way, with delicate pieces of fresh coconut in a coconut-cream based ice cream.
Every dish was a generous serving with plenty of fresh vegetables. The entrees arrived soon after we placed our order and the main meal dishes arrived together with a comfortable gap after the entrees. The food was delicately spiced, colourful and looked pleasing on the plate.
The Lemon Grass gets an extra thumbs up from me for providing the rice with the first main dishes. It’s surprising how many restaurants in Canberra haven’t been able to do that and leave their patrons waiting to start their main meals. (Our record failure for late rice was a few years ago in a Belconnen Nepalese restaurant when a long-lost plate of plain rice was served with the after-dinner coffee!?! Yes, that’s one of the reasons we won’t be visiting that unnamed restaurant again.)
In summary, the Lemon Grass Thai is a peaceful, pleasant restaurant with tasty, affordable food made with fresh ingredients, staff that are very helpful and attentive but not hovering, and a homemade ice cream that is worth the visit on its own.
