Tag: beef brisket

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Chinese

Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant (新疆回民手工拉面) – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

To take my mind off some disastrous performance in a practice examination, my friend and I had lunch at this Uyghur Chinese restaurant on Burwood Road towards the top of the street where a number of Uyghur restaurants are.  It was a no-fuss, very straightforward ordeal where we chose a number of the most popular options from the menu.

 The XinJiang Style Stir fried noodles ($24.80) were quite good with tender beef, noodles that were ‘jin doa’, and a slick of oil coating every single mouthful (but in a delicious manner.) The flavours were good and there was a nice variety of vegetables and a balance of flavours, textures, and components.

 The stewed beef with vegetable ($24.80) was delicious and tasty. It came loaded with glass noodles, however it probably would have been good with extra rice, given the sheer quantity of gravy. Despite the fact that some extra rice probably would’ve been optimal, it was however just fine without it, not too salty, and not neccessarily needing a second carb to dilute the flavour. The beef was fatty and flavourful, without too much gameiness or agriculural scent, and the vegetables a mind-trick into pretending we were eating something slightly healthy.

The lamb skewers (4 for $16) were pretty good when they were fresh out of the grill, not too spicy and in fact probably could have actually used a bit more spice. Sadly my friend is a white man and we wonder if that may have affected the amount of spice that was laid onto these skewers, but we wouldn’t want to assume for sure. It’s sad that these skewers did get a bit less appealing towards the end of the meal, once the heat had been radiated away to the environment. It is not physically impossible to avoid degradation of lamb skewer quality throughout the course of a meal, by the application of a heated plate or using a heating element, for example, a candle under a plate, however this was not in practice in this restaurant, or to be fair any other Chinese restaurant I’ve been at. The Koreans have this down though.

Overall
I felt the meal at Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant was quite good and quite a reasonable price for the amount of food that we got. We left quite filled and with leftovers that continued to taste good after a trip to the microwave.

I would recommend this restaurant to a friend or colleague.

Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant (新疆回民手工拉面)
193 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134
(02) 8971 5876

Categories
Chinese

Hong Kong Cafe 港夠味 – Burwood NSW Restaurant Review

A few years ago my partner actually walked into Hong Kong Cafe 港夠味 Burwood, sat down, and then got back up after I decided this was not where I wanted to eat. More recently we were lured back by our friend PMR, a former Burwood local, for a pretty normal lunch.

Pictured is the free soup, something that our friend PMR has never been offered in the 10+ times he dined here with his HK Chinese girlfriend. It was honestly pretty good – much better than the paid soup.

This is a borscht-like paid soup, with two slices of garlic bread. I did not enjoy this, but I did enjoy ticking off borscht as something that I have now tried and no longer want to try (although I suspect the Hong Kong cafe variety may not be as classical as others). The bread was quite good, though.

The iced milk tea was not too sweet – not bad, but not phenomenal – feelings that apply to many of the dishes of our meal.

The club sandwich is a go to for my friend, who has told me about this particular sandwich multiple times before us going here. Whilst initially unenthused, I must admit that they were actually surprisingly pleasant, despite being intensely unspecial. No single part of these sandwiches was worth writing home about, but together the softly toasted bread, the iceberg lettuce and tomato somehow melded with the egg and spam and beef to create a mild in salt but heavy in umami taste in the mouth. Though not something I’d travel for, I agree with PMR that it’s a reliable choice for the undiscerning man.

The braised beef with rice was pretty good, complete with all essential components including bits of tendon and other connective tissue, fascia. The meat had a good flavour, and the rice was essential as a vessel of flavour and sauce. If it hadn’t come with rice we might have stupidly ordered it without, so I’m glad that choice was taken out of our hands this time.

The stir-fried beef noodles/gan chao niu he/干炒牛河 was actually very good. Good amount of beef, good wok hei aroma, soft noodles, and healthy amount of bean sprout and chives. Given all the other stuff we ordered we weren’t able to finish it, but my partner enjoyed the leftovers for lunch at work the next day.

The mixed meat baked rice came surprisingly not as a baked rice but rather as mixed meat slices with Portuguese sauce on top, rice on the side and some almost certainly microwaved chopped vegetables with two pieces of broccoli.

While I’m certain that I asked for baked rice and not this non-baked rice, both my partner and my friend proceeded to gaslight me about this for the rest of the meal.

Points weighing against this dish included the abject lack of effort made to hide the fact that these vegetables more likely than not came pre-diced from a bag from the freezer aisle, though apparently this is fine and expected. This incorrect dish also required us to manually cut up the large slices of over-tender meat into bite sized pieces, making it difficult to share. (the over-tenderness making it difficult to differentiate between the animals of pig and cattle).

Despite these complaints, I must admit that the flavours of the meat, sauce, and rice mixed together quite nicely. It just wasn’t what I asked for and I was too shy to say anything.

UPDATE 25/10/2025
I walked past on today, the day of publishing. It’s been internally demolished. I hope something cool will open in its place.

Hong Kong Cafe 港夠味
123 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134

Categories
Malaysian

New Kreta Ayer – Ashfield NSW Restaurant Review

We ate at New Kreta Ayer (not to be confused with the Old Kreta Ayer) following a long day engaging in the national pastime, directly after seeing the terrace of a former judo champion who had for some reason decided to fill his detached shower with the remnants of a small tree.

The beef brisket roti ($18.90) was alright, though the beef came a bit lukewarm. The roti, however, was fantastic, flaky, oily, and delicious. I’m a big roti fan, and I’m now wondering if I could potentially save some money by just keeping some frozen roti in my freezer at all times.

A further glamour shot of roti.

The combination laksa ($19.90) was big and flavourful, featuring two large prawns and an assortment of other fish balls and proteins. I don’t think it stood out to me as much as the laksa from Ngoodle (just up the road) did, but it was good nonetheless.

The crispy chicken bites in shrimp paste ($24.90) were as tasty as fried chicken can be expected to be, though the portion size really could’ve bene bigger for $25.

Our last choice was a vegetable dish, because we are adults who take care of ourselves sometimes. We had the FuYu KangKung (wok fried water spinach with fermented bean curd) ($19.90), a green dish that my partner said she had had before with her family, but was completely new to me. Though she enjoyed it, I personally did not like the stringy texture, which required many chewstrokes per mouthful to break down into pieces small enough to swallow. A sense of sliminess, possibly a combination of the vegetable itself and the sauce, made the mouthfeel all the less pleasant. That said, it seems likely this was more of a problem with me personally than the dish or the restaurant itself.

New Kreta Ayer
339 Liverpool Rd, Ashfield NSW 2131

Categories
Chinese

Nathan Road Hong Kong Cafe – Waterloo NSW Restaurant Review

In March 2024 we looked a few times at a little terrace in Waterloo, recently renovated, that had exchanged hands 3 times (now 4) in the previous 6 years, mostly in circumstances of relationship breakdown (according to the medical student neighbour). It was nice but felt a bit cramped inside, and though its location was very transit-centric due to the upcoming Metro development, the area just didn’t feel as safe for a couple entering their thirties. This is the story of the meal that we ate afterwards.

The traditional fried sticky rice ($23.80) was quite good. I had never had anything like this before, which seems odd to me since I had thought that I had eaten most types of fried rice by my fourth decade in life. There was plenty of umami little shrimp and bits of sausage inside, and the stickiness helped it to achieve a crispy char on most of the rice. Actually delicious.

The sizzling bean curd beef brisket ($33.80) would’ve been good with some normal steamed white rice, rather than just the already-tasty fried sticky rice. It was a bit expensive in comparison to other restaurants, though the size and flavour was good. The beef came complete with a lot of tendon, and the texture of the meat was soft and juicy as well. I will note that the bean curd it came with was not what I had expected (I had thought it would be fried soft tofu), but ultimately did match well with the rest of the dish.

We ultimately ended up paying about $100,000 more on a place that was more or less just as crowded as the one we looked at. At least the nearby streets feel safer. It is what it is.

Nathan Road Hong Kong Cafe
832 Bourke St, Waterloo NSW 2017
(02) 9194 3770

Categories
Café Chinese

Park Cafe – Campsie NSW Restaurant Review

My PMR friend stopped by Campsie for an impromptu visit, and I found us a place to eat with record decisiveness and in record time. He very kindly allowed me to choose two Taiwanese dishes from their combination Western and Taiwanese menu, which is all available all-day long.

This Taiwanese Braised Pork Rice (卤肉饭 – lu rou fan) ($16.80) was really good, with a mixture of soy braised pork belly and pork mince, plenty of braising fluid as gravy, white rice, and a runny-yolk but solid-albumen sunny side up egg. The fatty pork belly was really soft and delicious, with the minced portions being more lean and providing textural contrast. The supplied braising liquid was enough to flavour the entire mound of rice, which was a generous serve and definitely enough if if you’re a rice lover. I enjoyed this, and may actually have to come back with my partner so that she can enjoy this too.

The Taiwanese Beef Brisket Rice ($18.80) was the lesser of the two dishes. It too featured an egg, which was not pictured on the menu photo, but lacked bok choy, which was. The meat was relatively tender, but the flavours and textures of the more lean beef and its composite sauce were less rich and indulgent than that of the pork belly rice. My friend agreed with me, but still enjoyed it. I will attach below a photo of the menu for photographic comparison of its components.

Park Cafe
Shop 5, 20-22 Anglo Rd, Campsie NSW 2194