An birthday duck at Lemongrass

It took my birthday for finally going to Lemongrass, a quite well-known and popular restaurant in Malmö. For years, I heard colleagues telling me how lovely the food was there. And if at first, the "asian fusion" confused me, then I taught that the popularity was possibly well deserved.
And finally, with our little Isabella, we decided to celebrate my 33rd birthday (sounds like the last supper...).

Located quite central in Malmö, it is not in a very beautiful building, however, the restaurant itself is quite cozy and welcoming.
The staff was very nice and polite, from tipping us on the fact that we could close the window to avoid smoke to intoxicate all of us, to recommending us to not take the tasting menu, in order to avoid to starve. Luckily, we followed the waitress advice and decided to try a bit of dishes, a plate of sushi, 3 appetizers and two main courses.

The appetizers and the sushi

The rice paper wrap, or better the vietnamese summer rolls, were ok. Just ok. We are used to the ones of another restaurant and those are great! And the hoi chi min sauce is much tastier. And for the same money we can get four times more rolls.
Another disappointment was the green papaya salad.  Ok, we are not in Thailand, but it lacked some sting in the taste and unfortunately, had quite little to do with the fantastic salad we still remember we took the first day in Nai Harn.
If these were the lows, we were enthuasiast instead of the spicy beef sallad. Finally spicy, finally fresh, had a fantastic sauce and the meet was nice and tasty. Yummi!!! Pity it was over too soon, but then there were four very nice pieces of sushi awaiting our mouths. Ok, it is not the sushi from Sushi Zanmai in Tokyo but for being in Sweden it was approved.

The main dishes

But the horror crawled on our table as soon as the main dishes landed in front of our eyes. Well, in our mouths, once again.
I took roasted duck. But I don't know if I was older than the duck. Quack!
And if the spring rolls that were served together with it were indeed nice (but nothing compared to Mattias' own execution), I had some pak choi (theoretically light fried with garlic) that had seen garlic when the duck was alive! (that is a loooong time ago).
Mattias was luckier in his choice with a crispy beef. Probably chinese inspired, it had a very nice texture and it simply tasted good. However, considering my unfortunate experience with the duck and since the crispyness of the beef was given by a quite thick glazing, I had my doubts on the quality of the meat hidden down there...

As you can possibly read between the lines, the experience at this restaurant was far below our expectations.  This teaches me to not ever trust certain people about food ;-D
Indipendently from that, although the place is nice, the personal professional and some of the dishes quite nice, I concluded that it is way over budget for the quality of the food (and the quantity) and that it didn't match my expectations over the dishes. If I could give a suggestion to the owner, I would specialize in one asiatic kitchen, instead of covering almost a whole continent without catching the right tastes.