Birthday dinner at Sikke’s

This year for my birthday we had booked a table at the recently (mid-April) opened restaurant Sikke’s. The restaurant calls itself a neighborhood bistro that you can easily pop into for a glass of wine and a small bite at the bar or stay longer and have dinner. We arrived a couple of minutes early and had to wait a while for our table. Once we were seated we were asked if we would like an aperitif. I ordered a Negroni and hubby a Dry Martini.

We looked over the menu while enjoying our drinks. The menu consisted of four starters, four mains, four side dish options and five desserts. There were also a specials board with a few alternatives. I decided to start with mozzarella, salted lemons and thyme and hubby chose the beef tartar with crispy capers and an egg yolk. I ordered a glass of Riesling with the food and hubby had a beer. While we waited for our starters I noticed that other tables were served bread, but we did not get any. When the waiter brought the starters, he noticed that we didn’t have any bread and said he would bring some. I would have preferred to have the bread served before the starter which it apparently was supposed to be but at least we got some bread, which was delicious. The starters were both lovely and I was inspired by the salted lemons, I want to try to make them at home.

For my main I had Arctic char with a sour milk and cucumber sauce and green asparagus and hubby ordered grilled rosemary Baltic herring with dandelion. With the mains we also ordered a serving of fries seasoned with rosemary salt and served with ketchup and aioli. The mains were well made with top notch ingredients and we enjoyed both. The fries were tasty, and the aioli was good, but we could not decide if we liked the ketchup or not – it seemed to have cinnamon in it, which was quite interesting. Once we had finished eating our mains we still had some fries left but the waiter was extremely quick to come and clear the plates and also took the fires away without asking if we wanted to finish eating them. This seemed a bit odd. The next less than perfect experience was that once the plates were cleared no one came to ask us whether we wanted something else, like dessert or more to drink. After waiting for someone to come for closer to 30 minutes I finally caught the attention of a waiter walking by and asked for the check. It was then brought rather promptly but once we had laid the card on top of the check to pay, we again had to wait for quite a while for someone to come and take the payment.

All in all, a nice dinner in a pleasant restaurant but the service still needs some tweaking. I am sure we will come back, and it will be interesting to see how the menu changes with the seasons. The restaurant also hosts something called pasta Sundays when they serve four different pasta dishes, a salad and focaccia to start and a dessert to finish. I would also like to check this out at some point.