Sage restaurant and noodle bar to spice up city dining

WEDNESDAY, JULY 20: For restaurateur Amre Elsayed, variety is the spice of life.

And he wants customers to enjoy a worldly range of cuisine at Café Plaza, in Hamilton’s Walker Arcade.

Mr Elsayed and business partner AR Hakeem (owner of Arabian Deep Fried Chicken) took over the Hamilton restaurant — soon to be renamed Sage — from Donte Hunt three months ago.

They have now introduced a noodle bar and sushi to the Middle Eastern and international menu.

The pair also plan to screen international movies to accompany alfresco dining in the coming weeks.

Mr Elsayed, who was born in Egypt, is bricking out a patio where the restaurant will project subtitled films on to a large screen.

Gourmet

“We’re going to be playing movies every Friday and Saturday — international ethnic movies, free of charge,” he said.

“It will be like a film festival and the food that evening will complement the nationality of the movie, whether it is Filipino, Japanese, African or from the Lebanon.”

In another new concept for Bermuda, customers are able to choose exactly what they want on their plate, whether at breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The restaurant’s catchline is ‘Gourmet it your way’.

At each table there is a pencil and tear-off menu slips where people can tick the boxes of each food item they want to order. This relates to the breakfast menu, sushi and noodle bar.

Anyone confused by Japanese names for sushi will also appreciate a separate menu which contains large photographs of each dish with its pricing for three or six pieces.

In what Mr Elsayed describes as “Bermuda’s first noodle bar”, people can also choose their own types of noodle, meat, vegetables and broth.

The noodles range from glass to yo min, udon, ho fun and mal fun.

Mr Elsayed said: “We want to give people variety at low prices.

“Our dishes are very reasonable and we don’t have a service charge for the buffet.

“With the economy the way it is, we also know that people really don’t have the time as they did in the past to sit down.

“We all just need to keep going and keep our heads above water until it picks up again.”

At breakfast, you can order a plate with a choice of eggs and toast, two side orders and refills of tea and coffee for $9.50.

The lunchtime buffet, for dine-in or takeout from 11am to 6pm, is $10.50 per lb, with no service charge.

People can choose from western-style salads and hot dishes, such as mixed vegetables, fried fresh fish and chicken wings.

Or they can sample Middle Eastern delights such as hummus, tahini, baba ganoush and tabouleh, all served up with pita bread.

A wide choice of lunchtime sandwiches and fajita wraps are also available.

In the next few weeks the restaurant will be renamed Sage and will open for dining and takeaway until 10pm, Monday to Saturday.

Mr Elsayed and Mr Hakeem will also be offering new dishes such as merguez — a Moroccan spicy lamb sausage — with harrisa hot sauce, shish tawook and tagines.

The restaurant’s wood-cooked chicken and lamb shawermas and shish kebabs are already proving popular at the weekly Harbour Nights food court.

Mr Elsayed said the new name will reflect parent company, Sage International, and the herb popular in Middle Eastern cooking.

Lightness

“A lot of people also use sage for tea and coffee and medicinally,” he said.

“It’s a very nice tasting herb and the name reflects its lightness.”

He has also taken a unique approach to the restaurant décor.

He created a wall of recycled bricks and materials inside the restaurant, featuring bits of a boat, inkwells and even lemongrass.

In the centre of the shopping plaza, he has also placed artistic pieces of driftwood around the dining tables.

The creative panels are adorned with natural and man-made materials such as shells, brick and coconuts.

“I thought it would be something a little bit different,” he said.

Mr Elsayed is a former co-owner of Café Cairo, and the new restaurant’s executive chef also has links to the Front Street establishment.

Mohamed Wafik was a former executive chef there.

Mr Elsayed hopes Sage will offer something new for customers. He said: “I’m not here to compete but I want to offer something different from other restaurants, because that will help everyone in the community and those restaurants as well.

“My main focus is good quality food. We try to keep it as organic as we can and to use local produce such as onions and tomatoes as much as possible.

“All of our meat is also halal as we are health-conscious and this is a clean way to prepare the meat.

“All our food is freshly prepared every day.”

Café Plaza/Sage is open from Monday to Saturday, 7am to 6pm, in the Walker Arcade. Contact 295-5130.