Tapas, tapas, tapas! I love ordering a bunch of things off the menu and being able to try a variety of dishes at one spot. I saw good reviews online about East Thirty-Six, so I decided to give it a try.
This half-restaurant, half-bar is focused on serving shareable dishes and craft cocktails. It looks quite small from the outside, but it has a number of tables on the side and at the back.
I've been here previously just for drinks, but I didn't have a chance to try out their food.
I started off with a cocktail. Unfortunately, I don't remember what I ordered!
As for the food, my favourite dish of the night was the octopus. With smoked fingerling, tonnato, olive, and charred onion, this octopus tentacle was pretty good!
My most anticipated dish of the night was the Scallop Crudo. With raw scallop, lardo, celery, tequila, lime and cilantro, this wasn't what I was expecting. There were probably only 4 slices of scallops on this plate, which I've assumed equates to only 1 scallop per order :( boo.
Fries are always a side to order. I'm not really picky when it comes to fries, but these were quite hard to eat. It also came with salted chicken skin, which tasted pretty interesting and quite oily. I couldn't eat more than 1 piece!
The mussel escabeche dish here comes with pickled fennel and Ontario espelette. As cold mussels, these were definitely interesting. My friend enjoyed these, but I found it too sour for my liking.
Overall, we didn't have that great of an experience here. Besides having very little attention from our waiters, the food wasn't amazing like everyone has rated it to be online. Maybe we didn't order the right things, but unfortunately I don't think what we ordered was worth the price that we had to pay. Maybe if someone told me exactly what to order and could vouch for it's goodness, I'd consider coming back and giving East Thirty-Six another chance!
