Dash is the restaurant and bar of the Queen Victoria Hotel in the Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. Named after Queen Victoria’s favorite pet, Dash is a sophisticated yet fairly small restaurant. It has a great panoramic view of Table Mountain and the Waterfront. It’s open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, each offering small menus that change regularly according to what fresh ingredients are available.

I stopped by for a weekday lunch and shared the dining room with only a few other guests. Reservations for dinner would probably be a smart move, however, as the dining room only seats 36. On the recommendation of my server, I tried the Parma ham salad with vanilla poached stone fruit and an orange blossom dressing. The salad was delicious, but I didn’t come across any of the advertised vanilla poached stone fruit. Instead there were some very tasty enoki mushrooms. For the main course, I tried the server-recommended pan-fried wild mushrooms on toasted ciabatta with poached egg and goat’s cheese. I was a little disappointed in this one. The ciabatta was more reminiscent of a toasted white bread hotdog roll. The goat cheese was mysteriously missing and was not replaced with something else delicious, unlike with the salad mushroom-for-fruit substitution. I’d go with a different main course next time. I finished off lunch with a delicious cappuccino, made from Dash’s unique coffee blend specially roasted by Origin Coffee.

The service was friendly and attentive, and the dining room is very stylishly and elegantly decorated. On the other hand, with so many top notch restaurants in the Waterfront, I wouldn’t necessarily head to Dash as a first choice unless I was a guest at the hotel. It would be a good location for a business lunch, however.