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

Categories
Instant Noodles

Man Xiao Bao Fat Sauce Ramen (满小饱肥汁拉面) – Instant Noodle Review

Despite all of the effort that I put into reviewing (predominately East Coast) restaurants on this blog, one of the most visited pages on this entire site is this one paragraph review for Uni-President’s King of Tomato instant noodle. I guess if there’s a formula, this works.

Today’s review is about Man Xiao Bao’s Fat Sauce Ramen. There doesn’t appear to be any official English translation for the name, but I think fat sauce, or grease sauce works pretty well.

The packaging is extremely elaborate, with no less than seven individually packed components, consisting of noodles, fried tofu wrapper, dried coriander, ghost chilli powder, bean sprouts in vinegar, more vinegar, meaty greasy sauce, and of course noodles.

The cooking instructions were translated by Google Translate as I’m a bit of a 文盲. Essentially the noodles are cooked separately and drained, then the toppings, then it’s all mixed together. Despite the seven component smorgasbord, the bok choy and egg pictured on the packet was not included, and had to be added separately.

Luckily, I had some bok choy in the fridge, and some of the excellent 78 degree snack eggs from Weilong in the pantry.

Taste wise, I found these noodles to be unfortunately extremely sour. It is probably my fault that I didn’t read the (CHINESE) instructions on the little sauce packets themselves, which if I did I would know that I was meant to adjust the amount to put in by personal preference. Still, I can’t imagine that anyone would want to put all of that vinegar sauce in.

The famed combination of stewed bone soup, fried meat paste, and braised grease sauce, as appetizing as those components once translated into English, were not perceptible to me.

I overall did not enjoy this, despite the journey of putting it all together, and won’t be buying this again willingly.

Man Xiao Bao Fat Sauce Ramen (满小饱肥汁拉面)
UPC 6973279800241

Categories
Chinese

Xi’an Eatery 西安诱惑 – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

It was the last day before the NSW Dine and Discover vouchers were to expire, and we, along with what seemed like half of the inner-West were lined up on Burwood Rd outside a handful of restaurants still enrolled in the program and willing to accept the vouchers.

We decided on Xi’an Eatery, a place recommended to us by a colleague for its good and cheap food with a reasonable line and an incredibly exhausted workforce who looked like they were perhaps having the busiest and worst day of their lives. Our meal was preceded by an inexplicable half hour wait outside the restaurant as no less than half the tables were vacated and cleaned, before we and the next batch of patrons were admitted. Either fortunately or unfortunately for the staff this was a process marked by significant attrition, as some of our previously unknown compatriots left towards the end of the wait to spend their stimulus-bux further down the street.

Though the outside process was unimpressive, the actual process of dining, from ordering to eating, was incredibly rapid and smooth once we set foot into the restaurant. The staff were flustered but absolutely lovely, probably glad that none of our wave felt the need to engage them into what I can only imagine was an in-depth discussion regarding the origins of the ingredients like members of the previous batch. Food arrived rapidly at our table within just minutes of ordering, and consumed with similar rapidity, hunger being the best sauce.

The Signature Xi’an Pulled Pork Burger (roujiamo – $8.30 including optional coriander) was a specialty of the house, and believed by some specialists to be a marker of a Xi’an restaurant’s quality. I’m by no means a roujiamo expert, but I did find this one to be reasonably satisfying. The filling – mixture of fatty and lean pork – had excellent flavour, moistness, and mouthfeel, contrasting to my other most recent roujiamo at Taste of Xi’an in Wollongong, which I felt did not have as adequate and well distributed fatness. I’m surprised that coriander was a 50c addition, as I feel that the flavour it added was too beneficial to be left out. This must be an option because of the minority of inferior humans who find coriander unpleasant, and perhaps in a thousand years this will no longer be the case. Green capsicum is also a 50c addition, and I regret not getting it. Great filling aside, I did not love the bread, which I found to be oddly crumbly in the mouth.

I really enjoyed how lean these Xi’an Lamb Skewers ($10.80) were, but found them a bit underflavoured for my liking. It was not very spicy, even though the menu threatened it. While some online photos suggest that a bit of chilli powder is served on the side, ours didn’t come with any extra to add on, leaving us with a perfectly tender and lean lamb skewer without much flavour. If I could go back in time I would ask for some.

Another Shaanxi specialty, the Signature Biang Biang Noodle with Pork ($14.30) was one of the best I’ve ever had. The thick gravy was nice and tangy, with a good portion of meat and eggs, while the noodles had a nice Q texture. No complaints here.

The Signature Pork Pan Fried Dumplings ($12.80) were another success in a long string of successes, with a very juicy and meaty filling with good umami flavour, clearly housemade. The cooking style of these pan fried dumplings did however unfortunately lead to some jagged and dry wrapper edges, but not enough to ruin the overall good experience.

THOUGHTS
I had a good and inexpensive meal, and I think so will you. Everything we had was pretty good, and the very nice staff rallied hard in the face of adversity. Recommend.

Xi’an Eatery 西安诱惑
183D Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134
(02) 8056 4600

Categories
Café

Beans & Barrels – Parramatta NSW Restaurant Review

As a champion of the local Parramatta food scene and of all-day menus in general, I was excited to hear Beans & Barrels recommended online, and promptly took my sleep-deprived nocturnist crew comprising of CSJPH (and CSJPH’s SRMO), MJT, ES on a long 10 minute drive and 10 minute walk the next opportunity that I had.

Their all-day menu was quite extensive, with a number of highly customisable options that were available at any time of day.

I had the protein salad ($16), oddly named as it essentially featured all that you see above but without the actual protein components. It is a salad of beetroot humus, cherry tomatoes, spiced sweet potato, shaved fennel, dukkah, rocket, green apple, and lemon mustard dressing – completely inoffensive, relatively fresh, but not quite what comes to mind when “protein” is in the headline. To address this deficiency I added to it some very nice and juicy grilled chicken ($6) and two poached egg ($4) making it a good but $26 salad. I did end up leaving some of the greenery on my plate even having finished my additional proteins, which may either be testament to how much greenery there was (a good thing) or how much more protein was needed to balance it out.

I don’t know that I’ll come back, while good it was just a bit difficult to get to after a twelve and a half hour long night shift, but perhaps it will make its way into the rotation alongside our Parramatta favourites.

Beans & Barrels
Shop 6/180 George St, Parramatta NSW 2150
(02) 9635 3877