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.
My partner’s younger brother took us to his favourite Korean-run Japanese BBQ restaurant in Sydney. We had the $89 pp deluxe BBQ buffet with a 70 minute ordering window and a 90 minute seating time and access to the restaurant’s full selection of meat and non-meat foods. The meat quality was good, and he ordered a literal kilogram of wagyu straight off the bat, which was definitely too much, and kept us well occupied throughout the entire meal.
Alternative meats were of course available, and we did sample some pork jowl as well as some duck. I didn’t love the duck, which I found chewy. but respect that this could’ve been a result of my poor cooking skills.
We did eat other things. We had an unusually large amount of aburi wagyu nigiri (too rare for me), aburi salmon nigiri, one single slice of salmon sashimi (my partner had difficulty understanding the ordering quantities), some mushroom, some garlic butter, and all of the available desserts, of which the calpis jelly was our favourite.
It was overall a good experience, though I have a major complaint about this seemingly unnecessary charge for a new grille. Rather than pay the $2-3 per BBQ grill change on top of our already $267 bill between three, we just chose to have more cancer.
Why nickel and dime?
Suminoya 1 Hosking Pl, Sydney NSW 2000 (02) 9231 2177
Kyo Sushi Bar is a small sushi-train restaurant with a surprising variety of dishes and an even more surprising selection of premium tuna cuts on their specials menu.
The chawanmushi egg custard ($5.90) was delicious, silky, and full of umami, a great warm way to start our meal.
This gunkan ($4.30), I want to say lobster salad, was unmemorable except for the quantity of mayonnaise, which as you will read is a recurring theme at this restaurant.
The salmon uni open roll ($8.40) was really heavily mayonnaised and I don’t think had enough uni to even mention. I would recommend a strong avoidance of this.
The soft shell crab hand roll ($6.30) had a good quantity of crab, but sadly also suffered from the restaurant’s habit of over-mayonnaising.
Why does the grilled salmon nigiri ($4.70) come with mayonnaise?
No complaints about this spicy chicken karaage ($4.70), which came with spicy mayo but appropriately. Pricing was reasonable for the portion size, which I’m glad was small because we really didn’t need this on top of all the other food we had.
In amongst all of the low-tier mayoed-up sushi was this gem of chu-toro nigiri ($10 for 2 pieces), which came with real wasabi and huge slabs of tuna with excellent taste and mouthfeel. Incredible.
The toro nigiri ($10 for a single piece) I actually didn’t find to be as pleasant as the chu-toro, owing to the higher amount of connective tissue. Call me an uncultured fool, but in my opinion the chu-toro is where the price and quality intersect peaks.
OVERALL THOUGHTS I don’t understand how the same restaurant can serve so much badness drenched in mayonnaise, but at the same time serve such good quality fatty tuna from their specials menu at such a good price. Kyo’s Sushi Bar is definitely a restaurant worth visiting, but with a strong caveat. (Though perhaps you can just ask for your food to not be so mayonnised.)
Kyo’s Sushi Bar 2 Burroway Rd, Wentworth Point NSW 2127 (02) 8866 1044
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.
Sushi LAB is a local inter-Sea of Japan collaboration serving a mixture of Korean and Japanese dishes in a family-oriented vibe, complete with children playing on iPads sipping from juice boxes and very nice service.
The deluxe sashimi ($37.50) was a well priced assortment of 15 pieces of seafood. I enjoyed the surprising inclusion of marinated octopus, though was not so fond of the giant oysters. The surf clam I felt was a bit icy at service, so I left my second piece (my partner does not eat such unfamiliar sea creatures without a fight) until the end of the meal to allow it to thaw a bit. Overall I felt this was well priced with good quality of salmon in particular.
I enjoyed this dragon roll ($20.80), though some may scoff at the choice. Sometimes you just need a dirty, non-traditional snack of tempura prawn, crab salad, eel, and teriyaki-mayonnaise to ruin your macros.
This wagyu beef ramyun (spicy, $17.80) was actually great. The flavours of the soup, though not very spicy, were very enjoyable, as was the bean sprout which inspired me to cook some more bean sprout related dishes at home the next few days. The beef was tasty and not too fatty, and the noodles, though probably not super special in and of themselves, were cooked to a degree of perfection unknown to this blogger’s girlfriend who do anything with instant noodles except immerse them in hot water.
OVERALL I think we had quite a nice meal at this small family restaurant, and wouldn’t hesitate to 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.
