Categories
Bakery Vietnamese

Nam Fong Hot Bread – Bankstown NSW Restaurant Review

There’s a guy who keeps eating banh mi at work, and every time he does it I am triggered to get some the following day. I ended up visiting Nam Fong Hot Bread twice over the course of the week, each time a 10 minute detour on the way to work, because the first time I went I got a sliced pork roll and a roast pork roll, cut them into halves to share with my friend, only for her to eat the entire roast pork roll. I thought the intention was obvious!

Excuse the sogginess after a 45 minute drive and a 4-hour sit in the fridge, but this banh mi thit pork roll ($6.50) was on point. The meat packing was packed, the serving of pate and Vietnamese mayo was generous, and the pickled vegetables were fresh and tasty. I literally have no notes about this banh mi, and it approaches the Platonic ideal of what a banh mi should be. Even the price was unreal.

The roll that I bought twice but got to eat once, banh mi heo quay roast pork roll ($8.50) was again excellent as well as excellently priced. This roll featured a huge amount of meat, separate crispy pork skin which appeared to be made in house, and was easily something you would pay upwards of $10 for elsewhere. The flavours were good, the pate and mayo and roast pork in combination was very creamy, and this was just a good roll overall.

Both rolls even had the pickled daikon that seems to only make a showing in Bankstown and Cabramatta hot bread shops.

Can recommend, and didn’t let me down over the Australia Day long weekend when 5 other hot bread shops, which showed ‘open’ status on Google Maps, did.

Nam Fong Hot Bread Bankstown
54 Bankstown City Plaza, Bankstown NSW 2200

Categories
Middle Eastern

Clayton Kebab House – Clayton VIC Restaurant Review

A fortnight ago I shared with you some memories of Kebabmia and Pizza on Liverpool Street in Sydney, which has been closed since 2015.

For today’s out-of-cycle low-effort post I bring to you a photo and some loose thoughts of a similar meal from Clayton Kebab House in Victoria, which is still open to this day.

I specifically remember that this kebab shop, and actually most kebab shops in Melbourne, had a realistic looking lamb option on the menu, something that has become rarer and rarer in Sydney over the last decade.

While the photo of this chicken meat plate with salad does not look particularly appealing, it’s probably reflects more the 2015 era smartphone camera than it does the food. It really can’t have been that bad, as I ate here a two digit number of times during my time in Victoria.

Clayton Kebab House
342A Clayton Rd, Clayton VIC 3168

Categories
Fine Dining

Oncore – Barangaroo NSW Restaurant Review

We ate at Oncore to celebrate a number of occasions, one of which being my partners recent exam success. Two things have come of the past few years of pegfeeding – one has been that I’ve become much more appreciative of just how good a meal you can get at a nice neighbourhood restaurant, and two is just this overall sense of burnout.

I don’t really have the desire to go through each course in step by step detail as I once did, but I will present some thoughts from the night.

  • I enjoyed the seating plan, where we were sat essentially next to each other, facing the water. The view of the water was pretty nice, though the windows could have used some cleaning. I wonder what a gargantuan task that would be, at such a height.
  • Though we were faced away from the open kitchen, it was nice to peek back at it on occasion.
  • Service from the waitstaff was by far the best and most attentive we’ve had at a fine dining restaurant in recent memory.
  • The food was generally pretty good. We had the choice of two menus, a permanent and a seasonal menu, and we were able to each have a different one, meaning that we really did get to sample a large variety of different morsels.
  • I enjoyed the snacks course, and we had a lot of bottomless bread.
  • There was an overall heavy reliance on tableside saucing. I think probably greater than 80-90% of the courses involved some kind of sauce that was poured tableside. Why? Was this absolutely necessary? The theatre of a tableside pour diminishes when you’re doing it for every single dish.
  • My friend bought some grape candies from Japan that were 90% as good as the grape dessert at Oncore.
  • It wasn’t Sepia, and at this point I don’t know if anything ever will be again.
  • Where is Clare Smyth?

Oncore
Crown Sydney, Level 26/1 Barangaroo Ave, Barangaroo NSW 2000

Categories
Chinese

Cheng’s Xi’an Traditional Foods (程记西安名吃) – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

I want to skip forward and just say that this place is on the elite tier of Chinese food in Burwood.

The first time we contemplated eating at Cheng’s Xi’an Traditional Foods we peered in from outside to a completely empty, dingey looking restaurant, and decided to go somewhere else instead. This was clearly a mistake, because the next time we walked past, the place was completely bar one table, and once we were seated, others had to line up outside behind us.

The food was really quite good.

We had these 12 chicken and mushroom fried dumplings 鸡肉香菇煎饺(12个) ($13.80), which weren’t my first choice in terms of dumplings but were quite delicious despite that. The wrappers were relatively thin and crispy, with a nice lace applied to the bottom. The filing was plentiful and juicy, and the dipping sauce was an extraordinary mix of vinegar and chilli crisp. My partner reflected as we walked back to our car that despite eating dumplings for decades in all kinds of situations, she was still surprised by the quality and tastiness of this sauce. I’d like to come back for some more traditionally filled dumplings in the near future.

The Xi’an Stewed Pork Burger 肉夹馍 Roujiamo ($8.50) was less good but still not terrible. It featured quite a tasty filling with a mixture of lean and fatty pork, albeit without any chillies or capsicums or other green fillings that these often have. Where it fell down, however, was the bread, which I found to be quite dry, a problem that not even the juicy meat could compensate for. There are better roujiamo in Burwood for sure.

The Xi’an Home-Style Pork Spinach-Noodles 陕西哨子干拌菠菜面 ($18.80) was truly very delicious, some of the best noodles I’ve had in some time. This is a dry bowl of noodles, with vinegar and chilli oil, some cubed celery, potato and carrot (mixed bag of frozen veggies from the supermarket-style, but probably cut in house given the dimensions and irregularity of the cubes), tofu, scallions, green noodles, and fatty pork.

The noodles are clearly made in house, green due to the addition of spinach juice to the dough, and are quite springy without being raw – a distinct feeling of jīn dào (筋道) in opposition to the rawness of some Italian pastas marketed as al dente. Mixed up together before eating, the flavour was extremely good, with each strand of noodle being well coated by oil and sauce and an excellent balance of flavour – spiciness but not too spicy, a bit of tanginess from the vinegar, and a whole lot of umami.

THOUGHTS
Delicious. Skipping Cheng’s Xi’an based purely on external appearance would be a mistake. I’d like to go back.

Cheng’s Xi’an Traditional Foods (程记西安名吃)
9/258 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134

Categories
Middle Eastern

Kebabmia & Pizza – Sydney NSW Restaurant Review

I’ve cleared the backlog of reviews to write, and so here’s a blast from the past that I’ll post outside of the regular queue. Kebabmia & Pizza on Liverpool St used to be a go-to spot for me back in the mid 2010s (RIP, according to Google Maps Streetview, by October 2015 – the venue has since changed hands several times).

This was from an era before the halal snack pack had entered mainstream consciousness, (you will see from the photo of the board above that it does not exist on it), but I will take credit for being an early adopter of a kind of neo-halal snack pack. My order was usually a box of chicken meat with tabouli rather than chips, tabouli being in my opinion the most elite salad accompaniment to kebab meat, even if it’s not of authentically Turkish origin.

The meat was tasty, and from the photos, believably meat. The salad was fresh. I’m sure it was less than $10 at the time, as well.

10/10 no notes. RIP.

Kebabmia & Pizza
79 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000