There's an otherworldly feel in modern airport terminals, the sense that you could be anywhere that comes from the fact that you're really nowhere, or nowhere that has any distinct sense of place or personality. The same feeling hits you on the Kingston foreshore, so modern and new, so determined to tick the generic boxes of modern life, and so devoid of idiosyncrasy.
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This airport terminal feeling extends, for this writer, to the eateries of the foreshore, which through no fault of their own are housed in a kind of monotony of steel and chrome. Sure, the foreshore is pretty in a way and life is no doubt easy here. Although I wonder as I sit here at Cinnabar why I can't head outside, walk five steps and hop on to a ferry departing every 10 minutes for the other side of the lake. Surely this would deal to our car fixation in a uniquely Canberra way.
Cinnabar, in its right-on-the-foreshore location, is a surprisingly large space, with booth tables that look cosy in hanging metal-look curtains, and an area that can be separated with sliding doors for private dining at the back. There are cases containing what are labelled as Zhou dynasty antiquities, and a few other features making it clear you're in a Chinese restaurant, although the set-up is mostly pretty generic, black tables, carpet and chairs.
The menu has a familiar feel – sweet and sour pork with "fresh" pineapple; beef fillet with "house special sauce"; salt and pepper calamari; steamed whole fish with ginger and shallots; Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce.
We're interested in the "special duck floss rolls " ($28.80). "Floss" we expected to mean shredded duck meat, which is always a welcome thing, but these rolls are surprising. They come as four rolls served like ice creams in a plastic box, with greens inside the box, the greens clearly decoration only since there's no obvious way to break in to get at them.
The duck is not shredded but chopped in little cubes, in a sweet, sticky soy-based sauce, with red and greens peppers, peas and nuts. The pastry cones holding the duck meat are a little floury but it's a dish we quite like.
Crispy oyster with garlic ($22.80) turns out to be battered and deep-fried oysters, which for some reason I hadn't expected. The batter isn't heavy, the oysters taste clean, and there's loads of heat and salt and chilli and garlic here. We enjoy these.
The "crispy eggplant with honey and sesame sauce" ($18.80) also turns out to be battered and deep-fried, although with far less success. There are eight torpedoes of eggplant with a very thick batter which dominates, and a very sweet, sticky honey-flavoured sauce. The eggplant itself is lost here which is a shame, and sure, you don't go to a restaurant for the good of your health, but the batter and sweetness feel like a waistline worry.
Again, when we order stirfried fish cake garnished with sweet corn green beans and pine nuts ($28.80), we have in mind something different to what arrives. I'm not sure what, exactly, but I guess we didn't expect the "fish cake" to be tiny little deepfried balls that don't taste much of anything, to me, not even especially fishy, and don't have that bouncy squeaky fish cake thing. They're served in a basket made of a wonton-style wrapper with a good, fresh vegie mix of corn, beans and pinenuts.
We are wondering if we've misordered tonight, so we try for "dry chilli beef" as an extra dish. It comes very fast, like everything tonight, and it, too, is fried, the beef cut so thin and so hard fried as to be just a pile of little crisp sticks. They're covered in a very sweet, sticky sauce.
Most dishes have a shredded carrot and cabbage garnish, which puts you in mind of that slightly out of fashion way of serving Asian food, but they're clearly trying for their own take on dishes – presenting familiar things in surprising ways.
Music is poppy, insistent and rather out of step, somehow, with dining. The wine list is brief and unsurprising, but reasonable. Yalumba is the main premium label in wines such as the Virgilius viognier 2013, Signature cab shiraz 2012, Octavius shiraz 2009 alongside some "premium" Jim Barry Florita 08 Riesling. Long Rail is the local label on the list.
There are only two desserts – deep-fried ice cream and a coconut cream black sticky rice. We choose option 2, which is brought down rather by the coconut cream. Cinnabar feels like it's still finding it's feet and we can't help feeling that perhaps it would be better to steer its ship towards good, straight Chinese than trying to dress it up with their individual takes on dishes, some of which have been more confusing than successful tonight.
