Category: Chinese

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Chinese

Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant (新疆回民手工拉面) – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

To take my mind off some disastrous performance in a practice examination, my friend and I had lunch at this Uyghur Chinese restaurant on Burwood Road towards the top of the street where a number of Uyghur restaurants are.  It was a no-fuss, very straightforward ordeal where we chose a number of the most popular options from the menu.

 The XinJiang Style Stir fried noodles ($24.80) were quite good with tender beef, noodles that were ‘jin doa’, and a slick of oil coating every single mouthful (but in a delicious manner.) The flavours were good and there was a nice variety of vegetables and a balance of flavours, textures, and components.

 The stewed beef with vegetable ($24.80) was delicious and tasty. It came loaded with glass noodles, however it probably would have been good with extra rice, given the sheer quantity of gravy. Despite the fact that some extra rice probably would’ve been optimal, it was however just fine without it, not too salty, and not neccessarily needing a second carb to dilute the flavour. The beef was fatty and flavourful, without too much gameiness or agriculural scent, and the vegetables a mind-trick into pretending we were eating something slightly healthy.

The lamb skewers (4 for $16) were pretty good when they were fresh out of the grill, not too spicy and in fact probably could have actually used a bit more spice. Sadly my friend is a white man and we wonder if that may have affected the amount of spice that was laid onto these skewers, but we wouldn’t want to assume for sure. It’s sad that these skewers did get a bit less appealing towards the end of the meal, once the heat had been radiated away to the environment. It is not physically impossible to avoid degradation of lamb skewer quality throughout the course of a meal, by the application of a heated plate or using a heating element, for example, a candle under a plate, however this was not in practice in this restaurant, or to be fair any other Chinese restaurant I’ve been at. The Koreans have this down though.

Overall
I felt the meal at Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant was quite good and quite a reasonable price for the amount of food that we got. We left quite filled and with leftovers that continued to taste good after a trip to the microwave.

I would recommend this restaurant to a friend or colleague.

Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant (新疆回民手工拉面)
193 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134
(02) 8971 5876

Categories
Chinese Groceries

Synear Pork & Crab Meat Soup Dumpling 思念 冷凍鮮美蟹肉小籠包 – Grocery Review

I went a little off script and bought us xiao long bao from a brand that isn’t the one that we have for years established that my wife loves. These are the pork & crab meat soup dumpling 冷凍鮮美蟹肉小籠包 from Synear 思念, which was obviously always going to be a problem because it’s rare for her to have a seafood and enjoy it.

The instructions on the box were clearly written in English. I scalded my right forearm as I was placing them into the steamer and had to run my arm under water for 15 minutes – the perfect time to cook these XLBs and then let them cool a little before eating.

I did not have any particular adverse feelings about these xiao long bao, though my wife had one and immediately did not want to have any more. They didn’t taste extremely crabby to me, though I did think there was some particulate matter inside them, kind of in the texture of a thin prawn shell (though it must have been something else, as this is not in the ingredients list).

Would I buy again? As a single man, maybe. But as a husband of a woman who hates them, no.

Synear Pork & Crab Meat Soup Dumpling (思念 冷凍鮮美蟹肉小籠包)

UPC 9309002168093

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Chinese

Kwafood Fried Skewer Burwood 夸父炸串 – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

I didn’t ask my partner to take me to 6 different places in one night to generate content for pegfeeds, but this she did.

One of the stops on our February trip to Burwood Chinatown (written as if it’s not within 2km of our house) was Kwafood Fried Skewer 夸父炸串, a stall where customers pick out raw foods on a stick (a-la skewer malatang), but instead of being boiled in soup they are deep friend and sprinkled with seasoning.

Each skewer is pretty bite-sized, meaning that a lot of variety in textures can be had for quite a small price. Here you can see that the minimum quantity for mushroom is half, and the minimum quantity for corn, for those who want to try, is a micro-riblet.

What Kwafood doesn’t particularly offer in terms of variety is taste, however, which is generally the same as all are coated in the same mildly spicy seasoning upon serving.

It’s really cheap for a snack, under $3 for the above pictured skewers, but I don’t know how much it would cost to actually fill up an adult and ablate the need for further food.

Kwafood Fried Skewer Burwood 夸父炸串
L1, K11 Murray Place Arcade, 127/133 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134

Categories
Chinese

Peko Peko – South Melbourne VIC Restaurant Review

I took myself to Peko Peko, around the corner from my hotel whilst I was in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago for a workplace based exam. I found this restaurant through a combination of Google Maps but also upon reading a blog post at Sweet and Sour Fork, a new website to me, which seems to fulfil a very similar niche to this one, but with better execution and better results.

On this particular Tuesday evening there was a varied mix of couples and single Chinese adults eating alone. Food was served rapidly, as was my consumption of it, with the order to food arrival time approximately 5 minutes and the food arrival to payment time approximately 15 minutes.

It’s not usual for me to just order a whole thing of fried rice, however Peko Peko’s sausage fried rice ($20) had particularly good reviews online and I was quite keen to try it. This fried rice had a strong copmonent of wok hei within it with lots of umami from the luncheon meat, shallot, and generous quantity of beaten eggs. Quite unusually this fried rice was also topped wiht these fried wisps of batter that added an extra crunch and textural interest to the meal. While I find that fried rice is often just a commodity stomach filler, Peko Peko really managed to make it something special and worthy of a dish by itself.

I was, of course, not crazy enough to just have fried rice alone, and my giant bowl of fried rice was supplemented with this chili chicken ($21), which was really more like a slightly spicy sweet and sour chicken The actual depth and strength of spiciness was not very much, and I think it could have been more, with the whole chilies included really adding more of a fragrance than a spice itself. The sweetness and sourness was slightly unlike your regular bright-red dyed sweet and sour chicken, and probably had a bit more of a zhejiang vinegar kind of sourness to it. The batter was extremely crunchy despite the whole dish being doused in sauce, and remained crunchy throughout the meal.

I was unable to finish all of my food for the low price that was charged, and packed up my leftovers in complimentary takeaway boxes, though I did eat a bit more of it the moment I got home, because it was just so yummy. The restauranteurs said “see you next time” as I was leaving, and while it’s unlikely that I’ll come back due to it being not where I live, I honestly wouldn’t rule it out. The whole meal was quite good.

Peko Peko
190 Wells St, South Melbourne VIC 3205


Categories
Chinese

Hong Kong Cafe 港夠味 – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

A few years ago my partner actually walked into Hong Kong Cafe 港夠味 Burwood, sat down, and then got back up after I decided this was not where I wanted to eat. More recently we were lured back by our friend PMR, a former Burwood local, for a pretty normal lunch.

Pictured is the free soup, something that our friend PMR has never been offered in the 10+ times he dined here with his HK Chinese girlfriend. It was honestly pretty good – much better than the paid soup.

This is a borscht-like paid soup, with two slices of garlic bread. I did not enjoy this, but I did enjoy ticking off borscht as something that I have now tried and no longer want to try (although I suspect the Hong Kong cafe variety may not be as classical as others). The bread was quite good, though.

The iced milk tea was not too sweet – not bad, but not phenomenal – feelings that apply to many of the dishes of our meal.

The club sandwich is a go to for my friend, who has told me about this particular sandwich multiple times before us going here. Whilst initially unenthused, I must admit that they were actually surprisingly pleasant, despite being intensely unspecial. No single part of these sandwiches was worth writing home about, but together the softly toasted bread, the iceberg lettuce and tomato somehow melded with the egg and spam and beef to create a mild in salt but heavy in umami taste in the mouth. Though not something I’d travel for, I agree with PMR that it’s a reliable choice for the undiscerning man.

The braised beef with rice was pretty good, complete with all essential components including bits of tendon and other connective tissue, fascia. The meat had a good flavour, and the rice was essential as a vessel of flavour and sauce. If it hadn’t come with rice we might have stupidly ordered it without, so I’m glad that choice was taken out of our hands this time.

The stir-fried beef noodles/gan chao niu he/干炒牛河 was actually very good. Good amount of beef, good wok hei aroma, soft noodles, and healthy amount of bean sprout and chives. Given all the other stuff we ordered we weren’t able to finish it, but my partner enjoyed the leftovers for lunch at work the next day.

The mixed meat baked rice came surprisingly not as a baked rice but rather as mixed meat slices with Portuguese sauce on top, rice on the side and some almost certainly microwaved chopped vegetables with two pieces of broccoli.

While I’m certain that I asked for baked rice and not this non-baked rice, both my partner and my friend proceeded to gaslight me about this for the rest of the meal.

Points weighing against this dish included the abject lack of effort made to hide the fact that these vegetables more likely than not came pre-diced from a bag from the freezer aisle, though apparently this is fine and expected. This incorrect dish also required us to manually cut up the large slices of over-tender meat into bite sized pieces, making it difficult to share. (the over-tenderness making it difficult to differentiate between the animals of pig and cattle).

Despite these complaints, I must admit that the flavours of the meat, sauce, and rice mixed together quite nicely. It just wasn’t what I asked for and I was too shy to say anything.

UPDATE 25/10/2025
I walked past on today, the day of publishing. It’s been internally demolished. I hope something cool will open in its place.

Hong Kong Cafe 港夠味
123 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134