Savina

Shell (15 January 2010)

I visit Savina every time I go back to my home city of Liverpool. My recent visit was on the last Sunday of December 2009 and I have to say Savina never lets us down. I have eaten a lot of things on the menu and have been more than satisfied. My husband always has the same dish though - men don't like change! He always has the chilli which is made with steak and is delicious. My new favourite dish is the steak and chicken fajitas. The staff are very attentive and accommodating, and the restaurant has a lovely atmosphere. It is an ideal setting for a romantic meal. Lovely restaurant and look forward to my next visit. Well done to all at Savina.

Nut Allergy (22 March 2009)

From the outside Savina does not look promising. It is in a row of four identical restaurants, an Indian, Italian, Japanese and then Savina, the Mexican. It is a bit like a ready meal section in a supermarket; all the cuisines of the world but all made in the same factory and all horrible. Once you are inside it gets a lot better. Mexican restaurants are often themed and terribly kitsch. It is as if someone thinks you won’t notice how bad the food is if the waiters have to suffer the indignity of a wearing a giant sombrero. Thankfully, this restaurant is different and thoughtfully laid out with huge booths with high sides. As a result you can be the only people in the restaurant and without feeling self conscious and also be in a full restaurant without being crowded. There are a few sombreros around the sides, it clashes the rest of the modern décor. There are a lot of restaurants in this area and Mexican food does not have a good image in the UK, it is associated with Doritos and mass produced tequila. In order to draw people in Savina offers a menu del dia all day Sunday to Thursday and before 5pm at the weekend, just £9.95 for two courses and £12.95 for three. Value menus are often brief and unimaginative but here there are a range of choices and the main course I wanted was on the offer. I started with nachos, the cliché. They came with baked cheese, salsa, guacamole, sour cream and pico de gallo and were very prettily presented. There was a good balance between the heat from the chilli and the cooling element of the avocados and sour cream. Baking the cheese on rather than just throwing on grated stuff gives a much better texture. The only problem was that too much stuff had been thrown on so the nachos at the bottom went soggy and I had to eat the last ones with a knife and fork. You could bake the cheese on the nachos and then serve the other sauces in separate containers, it is just a suggestion. My companion had tacos with spicy beef. It was a very generous serving for a starter and he liked the meat but he would have preferred the tacos to be a bit crispier. For a main course I went for another classic of the Mexican restaurant, a chilli beef burrito. The beef was shredded rather than minced which gave it a lot more bite. It was spicy but not burning and overall an impressive dish. It came with side-salad, not mentioned on the menu but very welcome and ‘fused Mexican rice’. The salad tasted like bagged stuff from a corner shop and was topped with chilli so it didn’t have a cooling effect, which would have been nice with the hot burrito. The rice had a lovely flavour but undercooked. My partner went for chilli Colorado, a variation on chilli con carne. This is the only Mexican food most people consider cooking at home, although it is from Texas and it is often ruined by adding too many kidney beans for the sake of economy. This was very different from the stereotype. Good chunks of beef and brilliant combination of onions, mushroom, garlic in a chilli tomato sauce, he thought it was delicious. It wasn’t well presented but then again there is not much you can do with chilli. He chose patatas bravas over rice, spiced potato with bits of red onion and chorizo. We were divided over this; he loved them and I loathed them, maybe because I am Irish and I can’t handle potatoes being messed around with. There was no way I could eat a pudding, I couldn’t even finish my burrito. My companion has a sweet tooth however and so he went for the banana chimichanga, a fancy version of banana fritter, served with ice cream. It was huge and as he ate with a huge grin on his face he must have enjoyed it.

The only real downside to the restaurant is the drinks menu. The wine list is short and expensive. I know that if a restaurant is serving food at under tenner for two courses they have to make the profit somewhere but this was ridiculous. A pint of draught beer is £2.90 and the cheapest cocktail is £4.50. Okay the house wine is £11.95 but the menu doesn’t even tell you what grape variety it is and only house wine is available by the glass. There are 5 whites available from the main list and 2 from the ‘connoisseurs list’ all at £30 or more. Having a connoisseurs list is pretty much admitting that everything else is rubbish. They have 6 champagnes, including Krug at £160 a bottle! How much of this do they shift in a normal week? We settled on a £20 Rioja, strangely the waiter checked that it was the red Rioja that we wanted and not the white, then asked if we wanted the Spanish Rioja, just in case we wanted it from Poland or something. It was a good bottle of wine but I felt I was being ripped off on the drinks to subsidize the menu. All together it was very good value but if you venture off the set menu mains range from £10 to £19, although to be fair that is for an 18oz T-bone steak that could easily feed a family. The service was rather odd as there were three different people doing it. They all seemed courteous but as the person who served the food had not taken the order she had no idea who had ordered what. I can only assume they did this as it was quiet and the manager wanted everyone to do something. If this restaurant is going to survive it needs to adapt. As we were eating we noticed a few people look at the menu then walk off to restaurants with more familiar food like Chinese or Italian. I love Mexican food and it is underrepresented in the UK as few Mexicans have ever settled here. Savina has got the right idea with huge portions, a nice ambience, a children’s menu and what is does serve is nearly all good. I would like it if they got a longer wine list with plenty by the glass and some innovative wines for under £15. I would like to see some salads and fish dishes on the set menu. I will definitely go again but I would like to linger a little longer with another glass of wine at the end of the meal. Oh, and get rid of those sombreros!

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