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 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.
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.
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
Whilst Xibei (西贝餐饮), one of China’s largest restaurant chains is embroiled in a nationwide scandal involving the overreliance of pre-packaged, frozen, and parcooked ingredients in their restaurants, I have no problem enjoying their deeply and obviously and intentionally pre-prepared roujiamo.
I found this microwave, airfry, and eat roujiamou at a local Chinese grocery store a couple of months ago, before all the controversy. It is made by Xibei’s 西贝 放心早餐 divison, focused on heat-and-eat breakfast foods. This particular roujiamo (酥皮腊汁肉夹馍), purchased for around $6, was really good.
The filling is advertised as having greater than 50% meat by mass, and encompassing a mixture of 30% fatty and 70% lean meat. Both these claims appear likely to be true, as I found the filling to be both meaty and tasty, with the other 50% made up of spices, capsicum, chillies, and other vegetables.
The mixture of the fatty and lean pork was excellent, producing a melt-in-your-mouth texture whilst retaining a degree of bite and chewiness.
The pastry, cooked in the prescribed method of microwave then airfry, was thin, crispy, and not at all too bready – more than can be said for some of the lesser restaurant roujiamos I’ve had and reviewed on this blog.
I honestly think this $6 roujiamo is superior to a good number of restaurant alternatives, and would not be that offended if it were served in one.
Sadly on a subsequent return to the grocery store this was nowhere to be found.
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.
