As you know by now, we decided to run away from Bucharest for (only) one day to the seaside. There’s no hotel to review as we stayed at our place there, but we do need to talk about some of the great places to eat while you’re there especially since the swimsuit season is about to start.
In order to give you a good and relevant review on a place we need to have eaten there at least twice simply put because one time could be just luck. This time we decided, since we were only staying for one night, to eat at the same place for dinner and lunch the next day. Surely, if we have an unpleasant experience for the first time, we wouldn’t risk going there for the second time. This weekend D chose CRAZY Restaurant (he usually takes care of our food itinerary wherever we go) in Constanta. First of all, if you decide on spending your summer holiday/weekend in Mamaia, you should know that aside from very few places there, you’d be better off eating in Constanta both mentally and physically. Usually restaurants on the beach tend to be mediocre at best and quite overpriced.
Back to our CRAZY experience… Turns out this restaurant was a very good choice, but I would expect nothing less from D when it comes to food as he tends to do his research very thoroughly. First thing we did when we reached our destination was go out for dinner, turns out that wasn’t the best idea as unpacking, even for one day, tends to be very difficult after a bottle of wine. That didn’t ruin our dinner experience though… Because it’s dinner we’re talking about, the light in some of the photos is quite bad, but the atmosphere there was really nice thanks to that bad-for-photos light. As you can see, the pics we took on Saturday at lunch are a lot better.
Ever since I first entered the restaurant, I liked the interior design very much, it’s fresh and eclectic. This place has a few distinct areas for the different activities you want to conduct there: it has a bar-lounge area, a coffee shop area, the said restaurant area and an extremely beautiful terrace. For more photos (professionally taken) you can check their Facebook page.
The good:
As I said, the interior design is a very big plus, the location seems to be a good one for Constanta and the menu is very varied with lots of dishes to choose from. Mainly it’s international cuisine with a few fancy dishes. You can find anything from soups, salads, ribs, poultry (cooked in a thousand ways), all sorts of meat to even raw cakes. The staff was very friendly and well trained and the food came very quick. Basically we ate the whole time we were there. One could argue that the restaurant wasn’t full on that Friday evening, but it’s a good thing then that we came back on a fully booked Saturday afternoon and the food came just as quick, so no shortage of staff there.
Back to the dinner…we started with a plate of home-made nachos as we were very hungry from the road and we thought we’d have to wait a long time for a main course (we were wrong and full by the time we finished our nachos). D then had some ribs and I had the turkey breast and they were both as expected delicious and no, that wasn’t the hunger speaking for us. We decided to skip dessert and have a cheese plate instead for the remaining rose wine from Gramma. Overall, the experience was a very good one, hence we decided to come back for lunch the next day.
On Saturday, because the weather was very nice we had lunch on the terrace. D had the thai soup, which in my opinion looked like an aquarium with murky green water and totally grossed me out, but I can’t stand fish or anything coming from the sea. D said it was amazing so that was that with his soup. I had the ginger-carrot soup which was superbly done as you could clearly feel the rich flavour as opposed to other places where the carrot soup was quite bland. D also had the crispy taco (I was full at that point or rather I was preserving myself for dessert) with one of the best oxtail meat we’ve ever tasted. For desert we both had the raw chocolate cake and the carrot cake after which we were both sold on the place. In my opinion it’s very hard to not screw up raw cakes, but this one was very good.
I really appreciate when you can find raw or vegan dishes in a menu, not because I’m a vegan, but because it shows that they are interested in satisfying as many people as possible.
As a price point, this place is very decent, on the low-medium level as our dinner check came at around 50€ wine included and the lunch check was about 30€.
The bad:
The first bad thing I’d like to mention about this place is that their wine list is very poor, with only three varieties for each type (colour). The other thing that annoyed me was the fact that I really can’t understand how you can serve such good food with frozen potato fries. It really bugs me! It was quite obvious that they use top quality ingredients and all the other sides were made from fresh vegetables so I really have to wonder why one would screw it up that way… Well that didn’t bother us too much as you can always choose a different type of side dish. However this is a place that we’ll definitely come back to whenever we will be in Constanta.
Since we’ll probably go to the seaside quite often, we’ll try and put together a list of go-to places to eat there just to help everyone avoid those nasty places I was talking about at the beginning of the post.
CRAZY is defiantly on our good-food list for the seaside!
L.
evenlymatched.eu 
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