Category: Cuisines

Categories
Thai

Bangkok Snap – Northmead NSW Restaurant Review

2021 was a peak food ordering time for me, and as a year probably set us back significantly in terms of our finances and ability to purchase a house. To this day I am still finding photos from delivery meals that we ordered and consumed in our little apartment in Wentworthville 2145. It’s quite strange that whilst I often forget the quality of meals eaten some months back, I seem to still remember the taste and mouthfeel of these particular items that I will briefly describe below. The pricing is going to reflect 2021 prices (pre-post-COVID inflation, but inclusive of delivery app markups).

I can’t believe I literally just said I could still remember the taste and mouthfeel of this meal, because I really don’t have anything memorable for the BBQ Pork with Sticky Rice ($19.90).

Luckily I do remember these Potato Prawn ($10.90), which were all eaten by me because my girlfriend at the time was not a prawn fan. I thought that they were crispy, though underflavoured, with the ratio of potato to prawn too high. The sweet chilli sauce was an absolute neccessity here in helping the potato go down. I think these were even worse the following day.

I love a net spring roll ($9.90), and these were no exception.

I actually really enjoyed this pineapple fried rice ($19.90), even though it was served in a plastic takeaway container and not a half pineapple. The balance of lightly spicy curry powder and sweet pineapple flavour was just right, and I’m craving some more now. Man food is yellow, and it’s delicious.

For a place so close to work, I’m surprised I’ve never been in person. And now that I’ve found these photos and written this post, I’ll probably never have to.

Bangkok Snap Northmead NSW
100B Briens Rd, Northmead NSW 2152

Categories
Vietnamese

Pho Vien – Ashfield NSW Restaurant Review

We’ve eaten at Pho Vien, sister restaurant of Madam Ky (RIP), a couple of times in the last few weeks. Here are my thoughts.

The Pho Dat Biet – special beef pho($19.90) was pretty good, a large bowl with a flavourful soup and a generous helping of rare beef, beef brisket, and beef balls. Missing, unfortunately, was any hint of slightly less widely palatable yet still important inclusions such as tripe and tendon, which would’ve elevated this good bowl to the level of an excellent bowl. The first time I had this at Pho Vien I found that, unlike the time we ate at Madam Ky, the soup was adequately hot to handle the inclusion of mass bean sprouts. The second time we ate here my partner’s dad asked for cooked bean sprouts on the side, which to be honest was revolutionary. They came only slightly cooked, raw enough to remain crispy, but warm enough to not thermodilute the soup. What a next level move.

The Com Suon – tomato rice with grilled pork chop ($19.90) is really more my partner’s thing. It was not bad, just generally not what I’d pick overall. The quality of the tomato rice was good, however. Not too dry.

The Canh Ga Chien – deep fried wing ($7.50) came after a long wait and were very salty. Added to that – though the menu said wings, we got four drumsticks. Respecting that many would prefer drumsticks over mid wings due to their greater meatiness, I am not one of these people. I did not enjoy this.

The Bun Bo Hue ($19.50) that we had on our second visit was tasty and inoffensive, again lacking components like pork trotter and blood jelly that usually round out the dish. My partner, normally someone who doesn’t like bun bo hue, enjoyed this bowl, probably for the same reason that I found it lacking.

The Banh Xeo – pancake pork and prawn ($22.50) was crispy and tasty, well filled on the inside. I didn’t find any bugs in my vegetables, which doesn’t seem like a high bar, but seriously considering the last few banh xeos I have at different restaurants in Sydney, this counts as a plus.

Overall we had a couple of pretty good meals at Pho Vien, but I do wish they would add some of the more controversial ingredients to their soups (or at least the option to have them).

Pho Vien
283 Liverpool Rd, Ashfield NSW 2131
(02) 8057 8668

Categories
Bakery Chinese

Savoy Cake 風月堂 – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

Savoy Cake Shop has been the go-to for our family birthdays since the early 2000s, making an appearance at almost every single family event throughout my childhood and my adulthood. The reach of their taro cake is absolutely inescapable in our extended family and probably, I assume, many families of Chinese descent in the Sydney region.

I ordered a couple of cakes from Savoy, not by choice but out of obligation, for a recent family birthday.

The taro cake ($45 – 6 inch) is primarily made of soft and light chiffon, fresh cream and a taro cream both between the layers of sponge as well as on top. This cake epitomises the concept of ‘not too sweet’ while still being flavourful, and in my old age I have started to see why my family always went back to it, even though as an unprofessional food blogger I am required to sample the many cakes of Sydney.

I was advised by my family that I would have to order ahead of time in order to get fruit on the cake, however even having done so, this cake lacked fruit. It turns out that not only does one have to order ahead of time but also specifically mention fruit in the comments in order to get fruit on their cake, which is upsetting.

The second cake I ordered against my parents’ wishes was the matcha cheesecake ($49 – 8 inch). Two cakes was too many for our small family gathering, but I really felt the need to try something different – so the internet could know. The green tea cake was not bad, but much weaker than many cheesecakes I’ve had, and definitely the lesser of the two.

Most importantly I didn’t quite enjoy the texture of it, particularly the bottom 50%, which though appeared macroscopically the same tasted and felt much breadier and drier than the top, I assume due to to a settling process during production. My family pretended to enjoy it but it certainly wasn’t as enjoyed as the OG.

風月堂 Savoy Cake
254A Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134


Categories
Bakery Vietnamese

Happy Snack Cafe House – Homebush West NSW Restaurant Review

I found these photos on my computer from a year and a half ago, and realised I had never written anything about these porks roll. Searching through my Whatsapp chat with my girlfriend where sometimes feelings about banhs mi go, there was nothing noted, suggesting that these were neither memorably good nor memorably bad.

It doesn’t seem particularly fair, therefore, to even put up a post about Happy Snack Cafe, except for a fact that it acts as a reminder to myself that I’ve been here and that I don’t have to ever go back, unless it is to try some of their sit down options.

A completely unrelated flashback from the past is that it looks like we picked up these porks roll as we were actively worried about the possible impending death of our cat Evie. She had started wobbling all over the place, falling over, and had stopped eating. We had taken her to a couple of different vets who had given her IV fluids and each time she seemed to get better, but got worse again post-discharge.

Eventually we took her to the Small Animal Specialist Hospital (SASH) at North Ryde, where for the cost of $8,000 or so they put her in the MRI scanner under GA, took a CSF sample (from just under the occiput in cats!), and a bunch of other specialised tests. Seen by neurology, ophthalmology, dermatology, general surgery, and internal medicine, the presumptive diagnosis was thiamine deficiency based on increased signal intensity of bilateral basal nuclei. Some thiamine supplementation, and she didn’t have to die, and she’s been fine ever since.

These pork rolls were picked up on our way to pick up Evie from SASH. Shere she is, in the car, with her neck all shaved for vascular access. I love her.

I honestly don’t remember enough about the porks roll to recommend Happy Snack Cafe House, but I remember a lot about SASH and can definitely recommend them to a friend or colleague.

Happy Snack Cafe House
104 The Crescent, Homebush West NSW 2140

Categories
Italian

Dom on Bruelli – Wollongong NSW Restaurant Review

My partner and I visited the number one rated (by averages) Italian restaurant in Wollongong last night, with an average of 4.9 stars across 60 reviews. Despite this, we were the only customers at Dom on Bruelli during our meal, with a staff to customer ratio of 2:1, which was maintained by the arrival of another couple just as we were leaving.

Seated in one corner of the extremely narrow but long restaurant, we had our choice of two pizzas and nothing else.

The salsiccia pizza ($28) was the less enjoyable of the two – a very mildly flavoured white pizza with a topping of sliced potato, confit garlic, parsley, fennel sausage, and a mixture of cheeses – ricotta, fior di latte, and parmesan.

Though I’m usually not one to complain about food being untasty, I’m afraid I have to in this case. In what I would consider an unusual move, the sausage was sliced rather than presented as caseless clumps on the pizza, and though this in itself didn’t distract from their flavour, their sparseness as well as their generally mild taste did mean that the pizza overall was less tasty. The different cheeses also were minimally salted, with the ricotta disappeared into the molten amalgamation, further adding to this problem. The potato slices were semi-crispy and again minimally seasoned. Perhaps the saving grace of this pizza was the restaurant’s housemade chilli oil, which added a bit of flavour and complexity to both the pizza at large as well as its voluminous crust.

I found the diavola pizza ($28) much more enjoyable, with bold flavours from the San Marzano tomatoes, fermented chilli, sopressa, nduja, and the rare appearance of guindillas, which I’ve not had before on a diavola. The presence of these little pickled chillis was key to adding an interesting zest and freshness to the pizza, cutting through the fatty fior di latte and meats, and making this a special pizza overall.

Thoughts on the structure
The base of this pizza was thin and floppy, meaning that we found that our slices were best eaten folded. Contrastingly, the crusts were voluminous, comprising a large percentage of the overall surface area of the pizza. Whilst my partner heretically discarded her crusts, I dutifully consumed all of mine with the help of chilli oil. But did there need to be so much?

I also just have no idea how they could possibly make money with 2 customers at a time during our 36 minute snapshot visit. Hopefully it got a bit businer for them as the night went on, but I suspect the huge patronage from the Wollongong Thursday night food market takes away from the local restaurants a bit.

Dom on Burelli
1/63 Burelli St, Wollongong NSW 2500