The contents of this blog are matters of opinion formed over one more visits. There has been some artistry applied and metaphors and similes should not necessarily be taken literally.
I wanted to try Duo Duo’s social media hyped Asian-inspired ice cream and desserts for some time, especially as they’re quite close to where I’m currently living, but left sad and disappointed after a moderate wait in wet, cold, and dark conditions.
It’s hard to explain why exactly the things that I tried at Duo Duo didn’t tickle my fancy, but the Pandan Coconut Kaya Filled Donut ($6.50) just didn’t do it for me. I’m certainly not a pandan hater, some of my best friends are pandas, but I think what hurt this the most was more the odd sticky-but-pasty consistency of the icing rather than anything else. Such a weird feeling in my mouth.
The brown butter and caramelised apple deep fried ice cream was actually my first ever experience with deep-fried ice cream, being I think more an American-Chinese restaurant invention than an actual traditional Chinese dessert. The ice cream was quite sweet for my taste, and I didn’t love the batter, though I think that’s probably more of a problem with the format rather than the execution, and I wouldn’t have this again.
THOUGHTS I really wanted to like Duo Duo, but I just didn’t. I think I will try and go back and give it another shot this year, since I live so close by, but I will leave the above thoughts up online regardless of what I find on my next visit.
I had a very difficult time trying to actually get here within their opening hours to have this meal, but I’m glad I was able to. Sadly I came after my last in a run of night shifts, only able to catch the breakfast menu. The following fortnight I woke up from my nap too late to catch the lunch menu. Such is life.
This chilli prawn scramble ($22) was seriously good. It was the only thing on their breakfast menu that really caught my eye (the lunch menu has a number of options that I guess I’ll never have the chance to eat) so I almost didn’t go in, but I’m glad I did and I got to eat it. The scrambled egg was sweet and soft, with a very generous serving of large, juicy, and sweet prawns. The kimchi and pickles were bright and flavourful, working together with the protein to create a highly umami-filled dish. The topping to bread ratio was perfect, and again I can’t emphasise the generous serving size of all the important parts, without too much unnecessary carb (sourdough). I wasn’t the biggest fan of the tumeric mayo, and thought that it was better without it, but I’m glad that it was placed essentially on the side as I guess some people might like it more than me.
In short: A great scrambled egg on toast. I suspect their lunch offerings might be just as good, but sadly the opening hours just don’t work for me. I doubt I’ll be able to make it at an appropriate time over the next month in the Shoalhaven area.
Some restaurants deserve a wholeheartedly lukewarm response, and in my opinion Block145, a cafe we drove half an hour to eat at, is one of them.
We were tempted by the Salmon Okonomiyaki ($20) and a desire to relive some good meals we had overseas. Unfortunately the gap between expectation and reality was quite large in this dish. While the grilled salmon was well cooked with a crispy skin, that was the first and last superlative of the meal. The okonomiyaki itself I found disappointing, with a high flour content. It was sadly not what I was looking for.
After a recent success at Cafe Mckenzie in Randwick we decided to go for yet another Toastie with truffle oil, honey, and parmesan ($14). Sadly this particular toastie was far less exciting than the benchmark set by its competitor, with no great feeling of substance to it. It was quite small, and I would have much rathered more toastie than a salad I didn’t ask for.
These crispy smashed potatoes ($10) continued our breakfasts’ trend of being completely unsatisfying. I don’t really see what made them crispy or smashed. They really were essentially regular roast potatoes with a sprinkling of salt.
Pictured above, a photo of a bloody mary that I did not have. My partner did.
THOUGHTS I’m sad about my trip to Bloc145. Their menu has so many wonderful looking items I am left wondering if I simply chose the wrong things, or if my experience would have been like this regardless of what I chose. I wouldn’t go back.
This lunch at Ante was in temporal proximity to Valentine’s Day but hunger was the only emotion in my mind when I suggested we go. It is a shame because the mere realisation of the date at the time could’ve turned this into a Valentine’s Day celebration rather than another year in which we did nothing for Valentine’s Day.
This travella katsu sandwich with katsu mayo ($17) was pretty good. The katsu fish, apparently minced in the same way as tsukune (the chicken meatball yakitori) had a good crunch but a very light and subtle flavour, and so most of the experience was formed by the sweet and savoury flavour of the light curry mayonnaise. I appreciated the use of a very thin, light, an soft serving of bread, which allowed all the other textures and flavours to be appreciated more clearly.
My partner and I have found ourselves struggling to resist a bit of raw seasoned beef, and Ante’s beef tartare with smoky almond and green olive ($28) was no exception. Similar to situations in which the call is coming from inside the house, the cracker of this tartare dish was coming from inside the meat, with small grains of puffed rice providing the familiar crackery texture in the mouth, whilst not at all aiding one in actually eating it as a cracker normally would. A previous menu found online had specified that their tartare was made of retired dairy cows, which I think is sadder than it is nice. The poor cow’s worked hard all her life making milk and babies, and instead of getting to live out the rest of her postmenopausal days in a nice lush green pasture somewhere, she gets diced up into tiny cubes and eaten raw. I only want to eat palliated end-of-life cow tartare from now on.
The chawanmushi with brown butter crab and herbs ($27) was described to us as large format chawanmushi, though while it turned out to be very large in terms of surface area and circumference, the plate was also much shallower than your standard. The dish was quite oily, owing to the massive amount of brown butter sauce, silky and smooth in texture, and quite sweet, giving it an almost dessert-like quality. Our waiter did say that they used the sweetest possible crab, and we were impressed not only by the sweetness but also the extreme tenderness of the crab. It was pretty good.
Last but not least was the casarecce with prawns, kanzuri, and clementine ($36). I think the one sentence description of this pasta dish would be a ‘very good, wet garlic bread’. Certainly garlic bread was the first taste that came to me, followed by a sweetness, punctuated in some mouthfuls by a hint of fresh citrus and a base of mild spiciness. Texturally the pasta was quite al dente, with harder, chewier prawns that contrasted with that of the pasta, but not to their detriment. This was a real plate licker of a dish. It was an act of cruelty to only give us one spoon.
I don’t know why it’s taken me 9 months to write this review. I don’t have any particularly good excuses, apart from the fact that we had eaten at so many places on our short trip to Melbourne that I had felt a little bit burnt out by all the reviewing, leaving it up to now, when I’ve run out of other things to procrastinate on, to do.
As it’s been nine months, this should not be considered a particularly comprehensive, or even useful piece of writing. It’s more just a few thoughts that I still remember pieced together from notes I jotted down during the meal, and some pictures to prove to myself in later years that I did indeed eat here on the 19th of April 2022.
We started the night with a number of snacks. Featured in the foreground here is oyster, coconut curry vinaigrette, shallot, pepperleaf, prepositions are of course not needed in high end cuisine. I enjoyed this deliciously creamy oyster, with its hint of curry flavouring. One of many creamy oysters we had that trip.
The next snack to discuss is this cracker of carrot, macadamia satay, sunflower, kakadu plum, with a good crispiness and a flavour that I think reminded us of tom yum, unless that was about the oysters.
The caramelised trout, green mango, muntries, prawn cracker was strongly reminiscent of the classic Chinese canned fish known as fried dace with black beans, commonly made by Nanmen Bridge company and sold in a yellow and red oval tin.
The ‘otak otak’, spanner crab curry, finger lime, rice crisp was yummy, and even though there was plenty of curry it was still easy to appreciate the sweetness and crabbiness of the crab.
The buttermilk roti, Sunda’s vegemite curry, a lauded secret item that you have to know about to order as a $20 supplement really wasn’t all that. The roti was very cripsy but hyper oily, but the flavour of the vegemite was at least pretty mild. We were advised that this was a must-not-miss at Sunda, but really I think you can miss it relatively safely. Not game changing.
This heirloom tomato, white sesame, davidson plum, pomelo salad was very fresh, so much so that I jotted down at the time “So fresh, hits of 2021” (I don’t know why specifically 2021, it was 2022 when I had this meal). There was a bit of a yellow curry-like (we found later that it was the white sesame curry paste) paste at the bottom of the tomatoes that had a night sweet and lightly spicy flavour., and some mouthfuls were a bit like white sugar on tomato, a common Northern Chinese snack dish.
The pork belly, rainforest tamarind, rhubarb, daikon radish was a pretty good entree. The meat was extremely tender, with the meat bits having great mouthfeel but unfortunately with too great a fat to lean pork ratio. The meat, “marinated with rainforest tamarind, coconut sugar and pomegranate molasses” as per Khanh Nguyen’s social media was very tangy, and in fact a bit too tangy for us. The lightly pickled daikon radish sheet, thin to the point of translucency, brought the tang back down a notch into mild enjoyability with a hint of sweetness.
The less good of our two mains was the bannockburn chicken, thai sausage, gai lan, bush apple. The gai lan was pretty good, cooked to a normal degree that you might find in any Chinese restaurant, not extraordinarily special. The chicken wrapped within it was moist and tender, delivered over the course of four or five separate slices, enough volume we thought. The Thai sausage had much ginger flavour. The bush apple went unnoticed. This was not an unreasonable main, but paled in comparison to our other choice.
Though people sing praises about their vegemite roti, I think Sunda’s true star dish is their koshihikari congee in a burnt onion broth with pickled cauliflower, confit egg yolk and paperbark oil. I’ve never enjoyed a congee as much in my entire life. This was such a warm and wholesome bowl, with a high degree of creaminess, soft delicate rice grains, and an almost potato mash-like soupy quality. The texture of the carbohydrate was creamy and the taste was mild, but the pool of broth surrounding it was absurd in its complex mix of sweet, salty, and sour flavours. The crispiness of the mushroom, cauliflower, and greens added great textural variation, whilst the opulent slow egg brought it all together with a third. Such a standout.
The gem lettuce, blood lime, shallot, nasturtium salad was truly an experience in whatever. Some of the leaves were a bit better, we did not enjoy. Unlike lilies, the nasturtium appear to be non-toxic to cats. Would you pay for your kitty to have dialysis?
I think this is the coconut sorbet with pineapple and kaffir lime granita, coconut jelly, desert lime jam, coconut yoghurt and sprinkled with candied green peppercorns. I didn’t love it – I think the pineapple was too pineapple for me.
The our take on pavlova, lychee, pandan, pepperberry was my preferred dessert, my more enjoyed part being the pepperberry ice cream. I am also fond of the Van Diemens Land Pepperberry & Leatherwood Honey ice cream that is available in tubs from some supermarkets though, and I did not think restaurant this was particularly superior. Neither of these two desserts really stood out.
We finished with petit fours, lamington pandan caneles with davidson plum. I am proud to announce that in the time between eating at Sunda and writing this review I now know how to pronounce “canelé” after being schooled by a guy at a bakery in Dulwich Hill NSW.
Quick verdict: We paid $130pp excluding drinks but including the vegemite roti, and I think it would be easy to recommend going back. We already had accommodation, and it would’ve been annoying to move between hotels, but when we ate at Sunda there was a promotion where you could book a night in hotel together with your meal for an extremely cheap price. Might be worth doing for Melbourne suburbanites looking for a nice South-East Asian fusion dinner.
