Negotiating our way slowly and cautiously along the Avondale Shops end of Argyle Road, I remembered why it has been such a long time since we visited Sopranos for coffee or a meal.
By Le connoisseur
Along a road pock-marked like a battle zone, my non-four-wheel-drive and extremely aged car groaned and lurched as though it was in a drunken stupor.
The section of road directly in front of Sopranos is possibly the worst and one cannot help but wonder why nothing is done to rectify the problem, surely making it easier to get to this Deluxe Coffee Shop would increase their client base? Enough said.
We arrived in one piece to the relative calm and tranquillity of Sopranos, and chose to sit inside as there was a nip in the air. There is a spacious veranda area for diners, which is ideal for balmy summer evenings.
The restaurant has changed a fair deal since our last visit. The waitrons no longer wear Mafia-style hats and trendy uniforms, their outfits have morphed into a more East African style, consistent with the current trend in Fusion Cuisine. It’s a case of East meets West, and several places in-between. The uniforms echo the new (to us) fusion menu.
The whole idea of a fusion menu is both intriguing and confusing. On the positive side, you can go to a restaurant and have literally anything you fancy from a “global” menu.
So if you are dining on a whim, a fusion menu makes life quite exciting. Conversely, the menu can become over-powering, demanding that you make a choice there and then. We took ages to decide what we wanted and even after we had chosen our meals, were still second-guessing ourselves.
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On offer was a comprehensive selection of dishes, including Italian, Oriental, Indian and Zimbabwean cuisine. Sopranos offer way more than your ordinary coffee shop. Feeling peckish, we shared a starter of chicken samoosas, which was accompanied by a powerfully hot green chilli sauce. They were crisp and tasty, leaving our taste buds tingling in anticipation of the next course.
The cakes and pastries are elegantly displayed and I know that all of us subconsciously had our eyes on them as we came to the end of our main course. We selected a cheesecake and chocolate mousse cake to share between us.
The cheesecake was, well, nice enough, but nothing more than that. The chocolate cake was pretty much the same. At US$5 a slice we felt once again that the prices were on the high side.
I was very disappointed in the Cappuccino we had at the end of our meal. Lacking in full robust flavour, it was really just frothy milk with a whiff of coffee. I hadn’t expected the quality of the coffee to be so poor and certainly remember that Sopranos used to be a favourite choice of ours when we were looking for a quality cup of coffee.
We could have gone for the Mega Cappuccino, but at a cost of US$4 a cup (albeit a large cup), we felt this was over-priced.
Potentially, if you stop in for coffee and cake, you will need US$10 per person – quite pricey, especially when the coffee is weak. At the end of the meal we asked ourselves if the trip was worth it. The restaurant still has a lovely ‘junglemania’ play area for kids, it is a wireless ‘hotspot’ and there is a pool table for patrons’ entertainment, but we didn’t feel that this was enough to take us back in a hurry.
Deluxe Coffee Shop 3 Plates Expect to Spend US$10 – US$25 per head 6 Argyle Road, Avondale, Harare
