Categories
Middle Eastern

Tolo Kabab House – Merrylands NSW Restaurant Review

We didn’t go to Merrylands seeking a Western Sydney cultural immersion experience, but we did find ourselves in the middle of one, as we waded unexpectedly through a sea of people attending a night-time street celebration for Ramadan. I’ve generally aimed to be relatively aware of when Ramadan is so that I can time my visits to halal restaurants to avoid the peak, however I think I was incepted in this instance into going here during this busy period as I had recently finished working with a Muslim colleague who spent a period of time each day either telling me about a hadith or showing me a passage from the Quran.

We had the mixed kebab ($21) featuring two skewers of chicken, one skewer of lamb and one skewer of mince, a gigantic piece of bread and some mixed salad consisting of primarily lettuce, cabbage and a large circle of onion.

This represented extremely good value considering the quantity of meat on offer as well as the gigantic size of the bread. The meat was tender, in particular the chicken, however the lamb and mince kebabs were also good.

We really didn’t need to have anything more than this mixed kebab, however we didn’t know exactly how much food would come and therefore we also ordered a lamb biryani sada ($14). The biryani was quite rice forward, which wouldn’t have been a problem were it not for the gigantic bread with the mixed kebab set. It was an absolutely huge plate which could feed at least one large adult to maximal fullness or two small adults again to maximal fullness.

The quantity of rice was unreal although the flavour was less impressive than some other biryanis I’ve had.

My partner also chose to have a yoghurt drink ($4) which even though internet sources tell me is not the same thing as the yoghurt dip, I’ve never been able to really tell a difference in terms of taste. I think we really need to stop ordering this because we never enjoy it.

On our way back to our car we saw this SUV parked on the side of the street absolutely covered in bird droppings. Perhaps a man had upset a bird by taking its young.

Tolo Kabab House – why is it spelled ‘kebab’ on the sign out front but ‘kabab’ literally everywhere else? What is a man meant to do? We are meant to live in a rules based society.
194 Merrylands Rd, Merrylands NSW 2160


Categories
Chinese Groceries

Sydney Best Dim Sim – Eastwood NSW Restaurant Review

There’s a joke in the beloved but ill-fated Netflix series “The Brothers Sun”, where they talk about going to the “Number 1 Seafood Restaurant in Alhambra,” only to find that this was merely the name of the restaurant and not a reflection at all about the restaurant’s quality.

This is similar to what happened to me, as I fell victim to a puff piece by 7NEWS Australia, and ended up at “Sydney Best Dim Sim” in Eastwood, purchasing a selection of frozen disappointments to steam at home.

While I don’t have photos of every individual thing, I do have a representative sample. I had the scallop dumpling 带子饺 (8 for $9)
, which was unenjoyable. It was difficult to ascertain the presence of scallop, and the texture of the filling was very homogenous, pasty, and sticky – nowhere near the quality of a yum cha restaurant or one of my preferred frozen dim sum suppliers in Sydney. You’re simply not meant to be able to squeeze filling through the tines of a fork like that.

I faced a similar problem with the gow choi gow / prawn and chives dumpling (韭菜饺) (6 for $7.80), again with filling that was a sticky clumped mess, minimal evidence of actual seafood, and this time with not much chive flavour either.

Overall
I am somewhat doubtful that the ones spruiking this place have even tried the dim sum on offer. They are demonstrably inferior to options from Lai Shing Dim Sim Factory, as well as Ho’s Dim Sim Kitchen, both in Marrickville, and both of which provide truly restaurant grade frozen dim sum for the same price.

At the end of the day it’s my own fault for trusting traditional commercial media, when I don’t even trust food influencers who may even take a free meal.

All meals on this blog are paid for independently. Many, like this one, with regret.

Sydney Best Dim Sim
Shop 23/185 Rowe St, Eastwood NSW 2122

Categories
Café Middle Eastern

JUNE – Winston Hills NSW Restaurant Review

A colleague typed in ‘cafe within 10 minutes of work’ into ChatGPT at the end of our run of nights, and through this managed to take us somewhere we’d never been before.

For such a large and busy cafe local to us, it was a surprise that none of us had heard of it before. It was so busy that at 9AM when we arrived on a weekday morning, the warm inside seating was completely full, and we had to sit in the cold outside. There were no patio heaters, as some places have, which was good for the environment but terrible for us.

The large soy flat white ($6.30) did its job, which was to prevent me from experiencing vehicular related trauma on the way home. It tasted extremely homely, which made sense once I saw the bonsoy on the counter as we went to pay. Colleagues commented on the mugs with mismatched handles, which they thought were cute.

The food menu was distinctly Circa-like in nature. I had the spicy shakshuka ($27), though the chilli labneh eggs were also front and centre of my mind. The eggs had appropriately runny yolks, though the white was also a bit runny, which was less ideal. The bowl had a good tomato flavour, though a disappointment in terms of spiciness, which was so difficult to identify that I wouldn’t think it would be worth mentioning it in the name of the dish. The sourdough with zaatar was crusty, kind of hard, and with minimal zataaring. Reading the menu I had envisioned a kind of zaatar manoosh-sourdough hybrid, but this leant very closely to the bread side of things. At least I did not burn myself when I touched the cast iron pan, which is a real risk at Circa, and the chorizo was good, not too salty, as some have been in the past.

THOUGHTS
It’s hard to rate any shakshuka in Western Sydney well when you’ve had Circa’s excellent rendition of it no less than 5 times in the past two years. This combination of baked eggs and a large soy flat white would cost $1.20 more at my favourite Parramatta cafe, but I wouldn’t be flatly opposed to coming back here if the gang calls for it.

JUNE
Shop 3/4/7 Lomond Cres, Winston Hills NSW 2153
(02) 8000 3730

Categories
Chinese 西安/陕西 (Xi'An/Shǎnxī/Shaanxi)

Liang Pi 一碗儿凉皮 – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

We went to the Liang Pi shop in Burwood Chinatown and actually just got a roujiamo – my contribution to a night where we had a LARGE number of different things.

The roujiamo 腊汁肉夹馍 ($9), or “marinated meat in baked bun”, as the tax invoice would have you believe, was really very good. It had been quite a while since I’ve had one, and this really did hit the spot. The bread was so light and airy yet at the same time crispy, and the filling so fatty and moist and delicious.

The ‘mo was filled in a way such that the mouth was much wider than the base – no doubt to make it appear more full and attractive – but also to encourage larger and more satisfying bites to be taken up front.

There was a complete lack of greenery in this bun (one might sometimes expect to find a bit of herbage in a roujiamo, as the photo on the food stall’s online presence has it), but I really did not care.

This was delicious.

Liang Pi 一碗儿凉皮
Shop 13A, Burwood Chinatown, 127/133 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134

Categories
Italian

Vannella Cheese – Marrickville NSW Restaurant Review

Some of our friends asked us if we wanted to go to the Carriageworks Markets, which we kind of assumed was a Christmas thing, but it turns out it was the thing that just happens every single weekend.

In a massive hall lined with probably a hundred vendors we only got one thing to eat, which was this sourdough panzerotto ($7.50), from the Vannella cheese stall, by a Marrickville based cheese factory that apparently does the burrata for a large number of Sydney’s restaurants.

It was basically like a large dumpling or an empanada – a sourdough wrapper with some mozzarella inside, some tomato passata and extra virgin olive oil and dried oregano, all deep fried. It came out hot, even though it wasn’t freshly made, covered in just a little sprinkling of salt and was just so delicious, just like a pizza pocket, with such an unexpectedly stringy cheese pull which was not captured on camera.

The marketing materials harped on about the single origin nature of the Gunnedah flour, but that doesn’t really mean anything to me. All I know is that it tasted good.

Vannella Cheese
27/37 Cadogan St, Marrickville NSW 2204

(At Carriageworks Farmers Markets)
245 Wilson St, Eveleigh NSW 2015