Category: Cuisines

Categories
Korean

Pork Over Flowers (꽃보다 삼겹)- Strathfield NSW Restaurant Review

Pork Over Flowers differs from most Korean BBQ restaurants in that it focuses on grilling a majority-pork based menu together with kimchi, bean sprouts, and shallots, allowing the rendered fat and meat juices to soak through the vegetables as they cook.

Banchan selection was broad, but was not refilled even though we fully cleared most of the plates.

We had the fresh pork belly set ($89) with an additional serving of pork neck ($26). The meat was cooked at the table for us, and just as advertised the rendered pork fat and meat juices did combine to add a umami flavour to the mix of kimchi, bean sprouts, and shallots. This was pretty good, and also a pretty novel experience for us three Chinese guys who hadn’t had broad experience in different styles of Korean BBQ.

The Kimchi Pancake ($25) was not as bad as people online indicated it would be. It certainly didn’t stand out, but reading what others hand said you would think that it was poisonous.

There is allegedly soft serve ice cream included for all customers at no extra cost, though the machine was not working during our visit.

One problem I do have is that I noticed while writing this review that this restaurant offers freebies for positive Google reviews, which I feel really defeats the purpose of the review process. It’s already hard enough to find nice places to eat with all the social media influencers with undeclared paid partnerships, but when the Google review system is gamed it makes it really unfair. (On that note we did witness like five Instagram girls spend an extremely long time taking photos of their mountain of food only to not eat it).

Categories
Indian

Kohlis Indian Restaurant – Nowra NSW Restaurant Review

Kohli’s is at least one of my nursing colleagues’ favourite Indian restaurant in Nowra. It is so highly regarded in the local area, that some online reviewers have taken to comparing it to the quality of South Asian food available in the golden 7.5km stretch between Pendle Hill and Harris Park. Keen to fact-check these claims against my hood, I took an unscheduled trip to Kohli’s on one of my last days in town, waiting no less than five minutes at the front of the restaurant in confusion before my existence was acknowledged.

This fish amritsari ($14.50) was not bad. The fish was appropriately soft, tender, and moist, though the batter was grainer than I’m used to. I’m certainly no expert in Indian cuisine though, so perhaps this is just a known normal variant. Not bad.

The cheese-garlic naan ($6.20) was also not bad. What I got matched what was written on the tin, though did not quite reach the dizzying heights of say Mazaidar Foods in Sydney’s subcontinental heartland, with it lacking a certain moistness of freshly tandoored bread.

The butter chicken ($22.90) the dish that Sid and Emma told me I had to try. Imagine their surprise when this review comes out after hanging in the queue for like 2 years in 2024. It was not bad, but again I think it’s probably unfair for me to compare Indian food from regional NSW to a restaurant like Nawaz Flavour of India in Glebe which had one that was exceptional.

OVERALL COMMENTS
I’m sorry that you came to this site for a review of an Indian restaurant in Nowra only to find recommendations for alternate restaurants a 150km detour away. The food at Kohli’s was certainly very normal, I think I am just an extremely picky eater given I grew up in Western Sydney. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Kohli’s if you’re in town and absolutely fanging for a butter chicken, but I also don’t think that it reaches the point where it’s clearly on the top tier of restaurants in and around town. (DTC felt similarly, though we did not eat together)

It might also be worth hiring an extra guy to wait tables around peak periods.

Kohli’s Indian Restaurant Nowra
116 Kinghorne St, Nowra NSW 2541
(02) 4421 0300

Categories
Italian

Bella Brutta – Newtown NSW Restaurant Review

What can I tell you about Bella Brutta, in the haze of six months after our visit, that will add to the online discourse about this already widely known restaurant?

Probably nothing, so let me bore you with some poorly taken photos (the steam is a killer) and some very brief thoughts.

The clam pizza ($32) is very good. I loved the seafood flavour mixed with the zesty citrusy fermented chilli. This is one of their signature pizzas and for good reason.

The sausage pizza ($29), meaty, was good but not in the level of specialty as the clam. It’s a pizza you could get from any good pizza shop, with all the requisite sasuage, tomato (pretentiously named pomodoro on their menu), fior di latte, and fennel seed toppings.

The cavolo nero pizza ($28) was a vegetarian feature, with a lacinato kale apparently traditional in Tuscan cuisine. The flavours were good, vegetably, and I didn’t hate the confit garlic, even though I was worried that I would. Also missable under the shadow of the surf clam.

The casarecce with spanner crab in lobster oil ($28) was an excellent and memorable pasta. I’m really surprised that my seafood averse fiance and her seafood averse brother allowed us to have two seafood dishes, but this was great. Again, so much seafood umami intensity.

Overall thoughts: While the overall quality of food at Bella Brutta is good, the seafood dishes (surf clam pizza and crab pasta) are the unmissable items here.

Bella Brutta
135 King St, Newtown NSW 2042
(02) 9922 5941

Categories
Asian Fusion Café

Leaf Cafe & Co – Clemton Park NSW Restaurant Review

Today we review a cafe local to our new digs in mild-Inner-South-West Sydney, a place where my partner’s consultant once took her to celebrate the end of internship and the beginning of many more years of service.

We had the Chicken Katsu Sando ($18), an unexpectedly large mass of food consisting of thick cut crumbed and deep fried chicken breast, sauce and slaw between similarly thick cut pieces of toast, on a bed of fries. Though the food was not what I expected, I have absolutely no complaints about the quantity provided. This was a mass of carbohydrate, fats, and proteins for only $18, though I do take exception to the vast quantity of bread provided. In my imagination (based on past experience, mind you – see my reviews of Devon, Ippuku, Sandoitchi, Kentaro) the chicken in this sandwich would have come between soft fluffy untoasted white bread, which while I will admit is generally thick, is much more palatable in a malleable, untoasted form. The sandwich otherwise had good saucing with a bit of sweet okonomoyaki style sauce and Kewpie mayonnaise, as well as a surprisingly huge amount of chicken. The chips were fresh and fine.

The Halloumi Benedict ($18), but note the asbence of halloumi in the photo and exchange for ham, was quite a competent benedict with quite a good hollandaise sauce. Readers of this blog will note that we eat probably fewer benedicts than the average brunch-goer, usually opting for a more unusual or diverse item if available on the menu. Though I was not too fond of the eggplant, I did enjoy every other part of this benedict, even if the egg was a little more cooked than I would’ve liked. I particularly enjoyed the English muffin, which had both a nice crispiness on the exterior layer and a good absorbency for the hollandaise sauce on the interior surface. Would be sick to see this muffin used for a sausage and egg muffin like Haberfield’s finest.

$6.50 is no small amount to pay for a chocolate malt milkshake but it was what my partner wanted and I was in no position to resist. It was fine. Quite airy.

THOUGHTS
Nothing really bad happened to me during my visit to Leaf Cafe & Co but I have exhausted all of the things I wanted to try there, and would definitely circle the block to the other local restaurants and cafes before coming back.

Leaf Cafe & Co Clemton Park
12/60 Charlotte St, Clemton Park NSW 2194
(02) 8057 4784

Categories
Chinese

Canton Noodle House – Hurstville NSW Restaurant Review

Canton Noodle House’s Burwood restaurant was a frequent haunt for my family in the early 2000s, and I recently had the chance to relive those memories with my partner, ordering a couple of dishes that I loved as a young teen, as well as one of her choice in an ultra-traditional sit down meal.

My partner and I rarely eat whole fish these days, but my parents were always big fans of Deep Fried Flounder with Salt & Pepper ($21.80), even if they did their best to avoid other deep fried foods in general. This fish was as good as I remembered it, with an extremely crispy exterior, the classic “salt & pepper” mix of mild chillis, garlic, and spring onions, and a thin layer of delicate flesh beneath the batter. It was great, and totally not a low-fat post cholecystectomy dish for me to have.

The diced fillet steak with wasabi sauce ($27.80) was another favourite from childhood, though in this case much saltier than I remembered. The beef was cut into inconsistently sized and shaped pieces, with the cubed pieces clearly more tender than the rectangular ones – a distinction that I also don’t remember making as a kid. The wasabi-cream sauce was still excellent even after all these years, with just a mild nose of wasabi, but with a creaminess that dampened down the saltiness of the beef. Just look at it all glisten in the light. Great with rice.

The sun-dried scallop with chicken and fried Japanese tofu ($21.80) is not a dish from my childhood, but I simply couldn’t subject my partner to Hokkien fried rice in addition to all the other stuff that I wanted. This is a classic gravied dish of fried Japanese egg-style tofu with some chicken mince, baby corn, mushrooms and carrot, not salty enough to need to be eaten with rice, but still great with some rice to soak up the sauce and its flavours. Pretty good, though I honestly think no better than what I’ve made at home?

Rice, probably a few dollars for a bowl. White. Steamed. Good with everything.

OVERALL Canton Noodle House’s rapid service, great food and generous serving sizes are reason enough for its place as one of the top staple Chinese restaurants in Chinese dominated areas of Sydney like Burwood and Hurstville. The Hurstville restaurant is more spacious than the one in Burwood, occupying an entire first floor above the kitchen, though they were still completely full during our weekday lunch visit, with a seemingly long list of regulars who order their bowl of noodles before even sitting down.

Can recommend. I still want to go back for the Hokkien Fried Rice of my childhood. I wish the menu had photos, but in the meantime, blog posts like this will have to do.

Canton Noodle House Hurstville 中發雲吞麵家
3/206 Forest Rd, Hurstville NSW 2220
(02) 9580 0588