Ha Ha bar

——-04/08/2012——-

I was excited to head to the Ha Ha bar in Belconnen as it is one of the few restaurants along the street that I haven’t been to for dinner.

Entree~

Breads and dips grilled artisan breads with house made dips ($12.00) We asked them what the dips were (chilli and tomato, olives, hummus and pesto) and lucky we did because only one out of the four dips really tasted like anything. 

Crispy calamari smoked chilli aoili and fresh lemon ($14.00) Nice crispy calamari that wasn’t chewy and stringy.

Grilled Spanish chorizo with roast garlic aioli and grilled bread ($15.00) Unfortunately from this photo you can’t see that one side of the chorizo was really burnt.

Special~

Fetta in carrozza– crumbed fetta with a medley of mixed tomatoes and fresh basil ($16.00). I do love combining the flavours of cheese, tomato and basil. They have gone one better by crumbing the fetta!

Mains~

Grilled chicken salad with cous cous, beets, roast pumpkin, walnuts, onion, fetta, tomatoes and mixed leaves ($23.00). An okay salad but nothing to write home about.

12” pizzas:

Ha Ha pizza Sicilian meat balls, Italian sausage, proscuitto, roast chicken, chilli, mozzarella and olives ($23.00). Surprisingly not overly meaty, a great mix of flavours on a delicious base.

Margherita pizza tomato, mozzarella and basil ($18.00). The base really made all the difference which really brought out the simple flavours of the pizza.

Linguine with fresh local seafood, squid ink, garlic, chilli, olive oil and herbs ($27.00). This was truly a surprise when they put this down in front of me. For some reason in my head I thought I was getting squid ink pasta not squid ink mixed in with my pasta. There was a lot of chilli which almost made it unbearable to eat but there were a lot of prawns. It also didn’t look very appealing.

This is clearly not first (or any) date food. I had to wipe my lips after every bite and at the end my napkin was black. I dared not to bare my teeth at anyone while I was eating.

Even with the dim light you can see how black the dish was when I mixed it all through.

You might have noticed that we didn’t eat dessert which is very unsual, that’s because at 9:15pm ish they had only the cheese board left (1 out 4 desserts) which I thought was ridiculous considering they weren’t that busy.

I was excited to come here after a reading a review about delicious tapas and pork belly but they weren’t on the menu. The food was mediocre and the messy squid ink pasta ruined my dining experience. Maybe I’ll come back and see what brunch is like.

Venue: Ha Ha Bar

Address: 102 Emu Bank  Belconnen ACT 2617

Phone: (02) 6251 6110