Dining at Durban's new street food joint is a hit-and-miss affair

Some childhood friends start bands. Christopher Kenneth and Luke Reddy settled on a restaurant. Craftsmen, the childhood friends' joint food venture, is a bare-bones eatery in Glenwood specialising in simple, Americanised versions of global street foods.

On their menu, you will find Asian-inspired "craft bowls" - teriyaki beef and chilli with pak choi and peppers, or perhaps peanut chicken and noodle - listed alongside Portuguese-style chicken, Mexican-inspired tacos, American-perfected hamburgers.

Their food is certainly good-looking albeit, it turned out, of uneven quality.

In some aspects, their food was consistently better than good - yet just as consistently flawed.

Take the Thai fish cake starter, as I did.

Excellent, the fish cakes themselves - lightly golden on the outside, tender inside, fresh, with little flecks of chilli - I ploughed through them happily.

The sweet chilli and ginger in the soy dressing which accompanied their bed of greens were an allegation - I caught neither whiff nor tang of the former two, and plenty of the latter.

In the end I abandoned the dressing altogether and my meal was the better for it.

I'm no fan of the trend of serving messy foods on boards - and the experience of chasing salad bits off the edges of a little wooden precipice proved yet again unpleasant for me, and probably also for the person who had to clean up when I was done.

My companion's preferred starter of "tender crispy chicken strips" was, yes, tender - deliciously so; also, yes, crispy; but goodness, the salt.

An excess of salt would prove a recurring theme for him - his follow-up mains also featured an overly salted smash burger pattie.

That burger could have been something - it had so much going for it - appropriate thickness, a juicy centre, the cheese melty, the greens doing their thing, but for the salt; and a char around the pattie's edges which strayed into burnt territory.

We took off the edges and it tasted better - but that should not be a thing that needs to be done.

The onion rings on the side were terrible. Stringy, with a raw onion taste despite being cooked to a darker shade of golden brown and the same burnt after-taste as that from the burger pattie.

I still regret not trying out one of the craft bowls, they really sound like something.

What I chose instead, regrettably, was the "Better than the Portuguese" spatchcock chicken.

It was blameless. It looked good and tasted alright but forgettable.

They do really good chips - enough that I plan to visit again just to try their take on loaded fries - it sounds promising.

Let's hope they hold the salt.

NEED TO KNOW

When to go: 10am to 10pm, Wednesdays to Sundays.

Who to take: Your work buddies - it's a good place for lunch, with a lot of the menu items suited to midday meals.

Good to know: The menu is evolving as the first-time restaurateurs find their feet. They've found solid hits in their wings and pork dish offerings - which were sold out when we stopped by.

How much do you need: With drinks our meal came to R244.

Address: 60 Helen Joseph Rd, Bulwer, Glenwood, Durban.

• This article was originally published in The Times.