Mida – Number 25
September 19, 2019
We went out, to Mida, on a Monday night; shock! Â But to be fair, it was a bank holiday here and we’d just got back from a weekend in the White Mountains. Â Therefore there wasn’t any food in the house, we couldn’t be bothered to go shopping and couldn’t be bothered to cook. Â To Mida! Â This is described as a local Italian style eatery.
Mida is a small restaurant, with a good size bar and glass windows along the length, making it light and bright. Â They have a Monday night special of “eat all you can pasta”, which is tempting, but there’s only so much pasta I can eat (I suspect Clark would have made a better attempt) and I fear I wouldn’t have done it justice, or got my money’s worth. Â There is however another special, which is the “della casa” – translation, “of the house”; basically the chef’s picks from the current menu. Â We decided on this. Â You are given a few small starters, a choice of two mains (one pasta, one meat) and a dessert.
Our ‘piccolo’ starters were a huge dressed salad, a bowl of olives and two arancini.  I was quite pleased about the last offering as I am rather a fan of arancini; a rice ball stuffed with ragu or cheese, coated with breadcrumbs and then deep fried – what’s not to like.  The starters were good and I was very surprised how much I enjoyed the simply dressed salad, but I put it down to the diet of meat, more meat and quite a lot of  cheese that had been consumed over the weekend.
We both had a roasted chicken dish for main, served with farro and sweetcorn. Â The chicken was really moist, the farro and sweetcorn almost like a risotto, topped with mushrooms, greens and toasted hazelnuts, with a fresh garlic focaccia on the side. Â This was really delicious, if somewhat enormous – we even had to take some home as we couldn’t finish it all.
Dessert was rather predictably a Tiramisu. Â Unfortunately it was a version made without alcohol…boo (or if it was there, we couldn’t detect it). Â When presented to us, it had been prepared with a lovely ‘M’ in cocoa on the top, but alas our waiter was rather impatient, dumped it on the table and then immediately poured the coffee liquid over the top before we had a chance to admire it. Â After that it just looked like brown mush – it did taste rather good though.
We had a fun night, the food was good and Clark even had a lunch for the following day. Â A little more care and less rushing from a couple of the waiters would have made it a better night. Â Everyone wants to feel a bit special when they’re out to have a nice evening in a restaurant, right?
