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.
Legend has it that if you go to enough random market stalls across the city of Sydney, you can hit a large number of Grazeland stalls without ever leaving the 2000s.
Eaten simultaneously with our raclette from Frencheese was our meal from Oceania, trading as Orleans Moules-Frites for the day.
We had these great coquille St Jacques grilled scallops ($18 for 3), cooked to order under searzall, which such a creamy and umami cheese sauce with wine and parsley that left us wanting another and another.
I was less fond of the mussels in the classic mussels & chips ($22) because it turns out I don’t actually love mussels, but the freshly fried chips in their creamy wine sauce was actually excellent.
I’m glad we ate at Tianjin Bun Shop after walking past it, on the merit of its offerings and without having read any reviews online beforehand. It’s the sort of place that people who don’t understand the nature of Chinese fast food love to criticise about brusque (read: hyper-efficient) service, whilst conveniently forgetting every time they’ve gone through a KFC drive through or purchased a quarter pounder from a touch-screen rather than even a real human.
As an illiterate 文盲 who is reliant on Google Translate for basically any Chinese text in this entire blog including these two preceding characters, I’m often very hesitant to order in my limited Mandarin because I never know if what I’m calling a menu item based on the pictures is actually what is written down next to it. Unluckily for me the woman at the counter serving me spoke even less English than I do Chinese, and even asked the customer waiting in line next to me if he could translate, to which he replied that he also did not speak English. Rather than let this be a problem, however, the woman serving me was able to intuit what I wanted based on a bit of broken Chinese and finger pointing, which I think is ultimately good customer service, rather than bad.
I had this chive pancake ($5) which was huge, and filled with fresh and fragrant chives, egg, and vermicelli. The wrapping was thin enough to not bore (some competitors are guilty of using a thicker wrapper, which puts off the filling-to-wrapper ratio), and the whole thing came out piping hot and delicious.
The Chinese burger (jianbing guozi) ($7) was also freshly made, featuring a cracker rather than a youtiao by default. It was pretty good with a classic sweet bean paste sauce, but compared to others was on the drier side, and ultimately in my opinion inferior to the one at Jinweigu Foods across and down the road.
This pork bun ($2.50) was pretty classic, soft bao with adequate filling and classic taste, not too salty, but with just the right amount of flavour. The filling was bitey enough, and not loose like some of the ones around. My partner thought there was too much bread to filling, which I agree with, but no one is holding a gun to your head to make you eat all of it.
Overall verdict: Pretty good, especially the chive pancake.
For years I’ve walked past skewer hot pot restaurants, not really understanding how they worked, until now.
The concept of a skewer hot pot, as I learned through my visit to Six Po Hot Pot in Burwood, is similar to that of a sushi train. All items are arranged on skewers, collected in a self-serve fashion from a central fridge, with items of greater quality or expense attracting a higher skewerage or simply coming in a smaller quantity. Patrons collect their food, boil them at the table, the cost of their meal is calculated afterwards based on the number of empty skewers collected as well as any soup base, sauce, and other cover charges. This was not the experience that I had, because being quite hungry I led my friends down the path of a buffet with unlimited skewerage as well as unskewered foods for the princely sum of $50 pp.
Despite the buffet format of the meal, I did enjoy the pure utility of the skewers in being able to portion out reasonably small quantities of each particular item. Where at a normal hot pot restaurant you would hardly be able to order a single piece of broccoli or a single meat ball, a per-skewer cost of 70 to 90 cents meant that it was absolutely possible to just get a little morsel of something that caught your fancy.
For soup bases we had the chicken and mushroom soup combo ($19.80 paid separately above the $45pp buffet price), which we did not feel were particularly different from one another. Certainly they were topped up from the same kettle.
The beef skewers that came with entire chillis on them were actually quite spicy
Beyond the ample skewer selection we were also able to choose an all-you-can-eat quantity of cooked foods. We partook in some deep fried pork belly (pictured), as well as some deep fried rice cake with brown sugar and sweet ice jelly, all of which were not bad.
OVERALL All you can eat is certainly a draw card for this restaurant, though for $45 per person we could’ve had 64 skewers each or 320 skewers in total, so I think I ultimately led our group down the wrong path. That’s ok though, the last time we had hot pot together it was like $90 pp.
Featured diners CJP HWJ XWO
Six Po Hot Pot 146 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134 0416 477 881
Taste of Xi’an (西安风味) is a nice and clean Chinese restaurant serving up Xi’an favourites in the middle of the Wollongong CBD. I arrived in scrubs on a Saturday morning (borrowed from my girlfriend, having forgotten to bring clothes from Sydney) and was greeted in friendly Chinese. I responded in kind, but to the disappointment of everyone (including, I imagine, my parents) had to order in English.
The Five Spicy Egg ($1.30) is a low cost boiled egg, with a slightly cracked shell that promotes the absorbance of tea, soy sauce and spices. This particular egg had absorbed a good amount of tea scent, but its absorbance of soy sauce flavour or saltiness could’ve been greater. It was fully hard boiled.
The Xi’an Style PorkBurger ($6 – roujiamo) is a sandwich of long-stewed pork in bread. Legend has it that this particular dish is one of humanity’s original hamburgers. I enjoyed the fragrant flavours of the meat, as well as the generous meat to bread ratio. The addition of some fatty meat within the mixture of mostly lean pork added a nice juiciness to some bites. My last roujiamo was at least three years ago in Hurstville, and thus I cannot compare this directly with any others that I have had.
The Pork Minced Noodles with Soup ($11) was nice, umami, and warming. The noodles had a pleasant “Q”like texture, and I suspect though have not confirmed that they are handmade on site, The soup was nice and moist, and synergised well with the roujiamo. I have read online commentors complain about the quantity of meat (though to too little) and soy sauce (thought to be too much) in this noodle dish, though I think both are quite appropriate, as someone who enjoys meat and dislikes too heavily flavoured foods. This noodle bowl straddles the line well. In terms of greenery, this bowl offers some undisclosed leaves, as well as a quantity of peas, and diced carrot and potato, in a manner reminiscent of a supermarket frozen diced vegetable mix, though surprisingly not to its detriment. Not bad.
COMMENTS I will return for the dumplings at a later date.
Taste of Xi’an (西安风味) 230 Crown St, Wollongong NSW 2500
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
