Category: Cuisines

Categories
American

Lenny Briskets – Botany NSW Restaurant Review

I lived in Botany for an entire year, but it was six months after I had left that Lenny Briskets set up shop in their Botany warehouse location, and another six months of mouth-wateringly looking at Instagram posts before I was able to go and see what all the fuss was about for myself.

The strengths and weaknesses of the food truck business model are centred, unsurprisingly, around its mobility. While having your restaurant on wheels might mean that you’re able to service geographically diverse populations and get your product in front of more hungry eyes and mouths, the itinerant lifestyle also means that it’s difficult to establish a home base with a loyal local following and reliable opening times. It’s the balancing act that’s birthed a million SWOT analyses – but eventually we took ourselves to Botany and got our mouths around that beef.

This Pastrami on Martin’s ($17) was perfection. The meat was so incredibly juicy, tender, and flavourful, not to mention generous, absolutely overflowing the soft, tumeric-coloured potato buns. The yellow theme was continued with just a bit of French’s classic yellow mustard, enough to add a second degree of flavour interest, without being overpowering. The three simple flavours of smoked meat, a bit of mustard, and the sweet bun all worked in perfect harmony, so much so that I found the included side pickle (happily not too salty, but ultimately not needed). While Lenny’s offers a similar sandwich with 500g of pastrami, I think the bread to filling ratio of just the regular one (I think it might be 250g?) is the sweet spot.

The New Amsterdam ($18) of BBQ brisket, American cheese, sweet red peppers and Russian dressing, again on a Martin’s potato bun was my second favourite, but still good. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, though I thought that the red capsicum made it just a bit too wet and sweet for my liking. The flavours of the pastrami sandwich just hit the right spot for me. The cheese was nice, and I wonder if it could be added to the original pastrami sandwich.

This samoyed, known as Bibi, is hyper friendly and super soft, and though we ate our meal with our hands we could not resist giving Lenny’s mascot some well-enjoyed pets.

COMMENTS
Good. Catch them if you can.

Lenny Briskets
9 Margate St, Botany NSW 2019
+61 492 907 215

Categories
Chinese

The Alley Lujiaoxiang – Parramatta NSW Bubble Tea Review

This will be brief.

Ah yes, this brown sugar cone was quite bad.

I enjoyed this early grey iced tea, much more so than my partner who hated it.

That’s all.

You’re welcome for the high quality content.

The Alley Lujiaoxiang
Shop 4067, Level 4/175 Church St, Parramatta NSW 2150

Categories
Indian

Mazaidar Foods – North Parramatta NSW Restaurant Review

Finishing work at 9PM in Westmead means that the best food options available are generally Subcontinental in nature. Mazaidar Foods in North Parramatta is a late-closing Pakistani restaurant, offering a variety of Pakistani and Indian dishes paired with really great and welcoming service.

Mazaidar’s naan was very good. I suspect that part of this was us having it fresh instead of having to wait for naan to be delivered, but really it was just so warm and nice right out of the tandoor. We enjoyed the garlic and cheese naan (Left – $4.75), which had cheese between two layers of bread, a little bit more than the butter naan (Right – $3.50), though both are safe choices.

Sadly the papadums ($3.50) were not free. They didn’t have any spices adherent to the dough – rather these were ground into the flour. My partner didn’t like this as much as most other papadums, but I actually liked them more.

The half tandoori chicken ($10.50) was of normal quality. No better or worse than any other, though the price was quite good.

The seekh kebab (4 pieces for $12) were nice, soft, moist, with a little bit of gamey flavour but not enough to overpower us.

The beef nehari ($17.50) featured huge chunks of beef, slow cooked in a only-slightly spicy thick sauce. The beef was quite tender, and it was quite good to eat with the naan. I’m told that this is quite an authentic nehari as far as neharis go, but I wouldn’t be able to confirm or deny this myself.

My partner loved the Aloo Mutter ($15.50), a thick, spicy curry of potatoes and peas. I don’t normally go for a vegetarian curry, but these two legumes worked synergistically to create a good dish with differing mushy textures. Pretty good.

VERDICT
I’m by no means an expert in Pakistani food, but I think that Mazaidar Foods provides both good food and good service for the late night Parramatta market.

Mazaidar Foods
515 Church St, North Parramatta NSW 2151
(02) 9630 0319

Categories
American

Little Weiner – Homebush West Restaurant Review

I’ve driven past Little Weiner’s playful, multicoloured sign many times on my way home from an extra-Western Sydney feed, and each time up until now I’ve been too full to stop. It’s taken, therefore, an actual plan and effort for us to finally cross this Western Sydney food truck off the list.

Service on this rainy Thursday night was brisk. There’s a tiny amount of awning to the food truck, but otherwise Little Weiner’s seating is fully uncovered, and we decided to eat our meals in the car.

Little Weiner’s signature Weiner Roll ($8) is served with your choice of halal certified beef, chicken, lamb, kransky, and lamb chorizo sausages, each freshly cooked to order. We chose the chorizo, listed elsewhere on their menu as their signature sausage. The sandwich was otherwise loaded with garlic, onion, and our choice of sauce and cheese. I thought this was a very adequate sausage sandwich, with all the requisite flavours and textures. My only regret is not adding an additional sausage for $4 to optimise the meat to filling to bread ratio.

Little Weiner’s beef burger ($10) was even better than their weiner roll. The patty, again freshly cooked to order, was extremely succulent and tender, whilst retaining a good, meaty flavour. The fillings were essentially the same as the weiner roll, except for the addition of fresh lettuce, which added a much welcome degree of wetness and freshness. If you can only order one item from this food truck, both my girlfriend and I would recommend you order this one.

VERDICT
It’s heart warming that the two guys at Little Weiner have taken their little weiners and made them work for them. Their weiner inspired food truck is a good, though quite unhealthy halal-friendly option that’s open late into the night. I don’t have any plans to go back, but if I did I make their snack pack with loaded fries my next target.

Little Weiner
199 Parramatta Rd, Homebush West NSW 2140

Categories
Middle Eastern

Jimmy’s Kebab – North Parramatta NSW Restaurant Review

Actively bad.

My beef-only mixed kebab (why?) was one of the worst I’ve had in recent memory. In fact, the only kebab I remember that was worse than this was at Ali Baba’s at Melbourne Tullamarine Airport, which I think I ate in on around 2014-15. Problems with this kebab, aside from getting my order wrong, included the salad and tabouli, which was unusually hard, jagged, and non-fragrant. In addition to this there was just something off about the flavour of the kebab, a certain wrongness that was difficult to put into words. Having had hundreds of kebabs in my day (I used to be quite the connoisseur before I started this blog and broadened my culinary horizons) I know what a kebab should taste like, and this wasn’t it.

“If you hated Jimmy’s so much, why did you go back?” I hear you ask. My second run-in with Jimmy’s was outside of my control. One of my nocturnist colleagues had decided to arrange a kebab run around 1AM, and unfortunately Jimmy’s was one of the only places open at this time with delivery to our workplace. While the salad snack pack wasn’t as bad as the kebab roll I had had a few weeks prior, the same not-rightness remained, with the dry, hard, and nonfragrant tabouli, as well as the weird taste of the chicken meat. Luckily my snack pack was drowned in sufficient sauce to mostly cover up the strange and subpar taste of the meats within.

VERDICT
No stars.
Go somewhere else. Or just skip the meal.

Jimmy’s Kebab
618 Church St, North Parramatta NSW 2151