Goatfish: Warm Delicious Pies

We climb the wooden steps placed on the pavement, open the rustic wooden door and enter The Goatfish Café & Bistro. It was just recently that the café moved to this new location in Henveiru, and amidst the greenery, it looked creamy white, toasty and inviting.

Busy familiar faces and Goatfish’s usual shabby chic décor greet us. It definitely feels much homelier than before. Perhaps its because they’ve converted an old home into a café’.

There’s a particularly beautiful arch with a pastel blue and pink flower wreath painted on it. There’s also a proper outdoor section, the usual kid’s area, and a cozy smaller section with sofas and bookshelves.

We take a seat inside. We sat there, acquainting ourselves to the new environment, until a waiter brought us a menu. It didn’t take us long to decide what we wanted to eat; we were there for the pies.

We decide on the chicken pot pie and the cottage pie. We want a meat pie as well, but we don't see it inside the ready-to-eat food display, and assume they ran out of it. The chicken potpie is something we’ve had numerous times before, but the cottage pie is a new entry on their menu.

Our pies take something like thirty-five minutes to get to us; we don’t mind and more importantly, pies need baking.  So in the meantime, we drink water, look around and converse like everyone else around us.

The waiter places our pies in front of us; tempted as we are to dig in and start eating, we know better. We gently cut through the pastry crust of the pot pie to let out the steam and the heat, we had to let it cool down a bit, or else we’ll have to apologise to our tongues later on.

The cottage pie looks like it would cool down faster, so, cautiously we dig in, through the top layer of mashed potatoes and into the meaty sauce. After blowing on it thoroughly just to make sure, we finally taste it. The taste doesn’t get to us on first contact; it sort of gets compiled in your mouth as you chew. We laugh about how the more we chew the better it gets.

The mashed potatoes are soft with a really slight hint of butter while the minced meat sauce itself is juicy, perhaps even earthy. We can see shredded bits of carrots in the sauce, and we talk about how it could be the reason for the slight but pleasant sweet taste.  

We then proceed to the chicken potpie, steam was still coming out of it, but we decide that it would be all right if we proceed with caution. The pastry on top is crispy, buttery, we love it that way, and inside, the flavour of carrots and other vegetables we cannot identify combine quite intensely, in our opinion, with the pieces of chicken.

The pies are all gone except for little leftover crumbs and scraps. Feeling too full to move, we don’t holler to the waiter, instead we just wait until the bill is brought to our table, and lazily we settle it and slowly we head towards the door. The pies are definitely satisfying, maybe even comforting.