Menu has not changed much but food was good

I have been to N.B. Sørensens Damskibsexpedition a few times and I have had some great food experiences in the fine dining section upstairs (called Annen etage). But it has been a few years since I have been to this section and rumor has it that it has faded a bit. In the past I have had some mixed experiences in the main restaurant on the ground level but we decided to give it another chance and went there on a Wednesday evening at about 7.30 PM. The place was more or less empty when we came in but we were greeted with a smile and taken to a table. The interior tries to reflect the maritime history of the place and it used to be a shipping house with offices on the second floor. Now there is lots of memorabilia on the walls, ceiling and shelfs.
 
The menu is printed on a large piece of paper with Norwegian on one side and English on the other. All the dishes are marked for food allergens and that is a pretty good setup. Nikki wanted to try the special of the day (today’s home cooked meal) which was bacalao but she was informed that it was too late as they stopped serving the special at 7 PM. She was fine with that but it was a bit strange when the person that was next to us got bacalao served just a couple of minutes before our food was served.

I decided to go for the fish and shellfish casserole and Nikki went for the Chicken thai. They have a lot of Norwegian food on the menu which I think is good – baked cod, local mussels, the fish casserole and even “komle” (potato dumpling) on Thursday. I’m not quite sure how the Chicken Thai fits into this. We got some warm, fresh bread to start with and some butter and that was excellent as I was starving.

The food was served pretty fast and my fish and shellfish casserole was served with some toasted bread on the side. Usually in Norway a fish soup is always creamy so it was good to have a vegetable broth based casserole instead. The casserole was very tasty with good chunks of what seemed to be salmon and cod, big mussels scattered on top and some shrimp and small crayfish tails. The broth was excellent and I enjoyed the big platter to the last drop. Nikki found her chicken thai dish to be good – it was like a curry with rice served on the side. We were almost finished when Nikki chewed on something hard in her food and it turned out to be a small piece of porcelain that seemed to be from a plate. It is never good to find foreign objects in the food and certainly objects that can be sharp. When they came to ask us how the food was we told them that it was very good but we could have done without the porcelain piece. They seemed to handle it pretty good – our waiter informed the kitchen and apologized for this and gave us a discount on the meal. Not all restaurants know how to handle a situation like this.
All in all NB Sørensen was better than what I remember. The menu does not seem to be changed a lot over the years but maybe there is no need for that. I’m at least happy to see that there is one place in town where you can still get some taste of what Norway and the region can offer. Check out their homepage on http://www.herlige-stavanger.no/nbsorensen/
Regards
Gard
http://gardkarlsen.com – trip reports and pictures