Tag: roti

Categories
Sri Lankan

Muthu Curry Restaurant – Toongabbie NSW Restaurant Review

We’ve been alternating between Circa and unexciting local cafes within walking distance of work for the past 5 years, and so it was very cool for us to go to a completely different Western Sydney restaurant for a completely different kind of Western Sydney breakfast this past Monday morning after night shift.

We had a bit of an omakase cultural immersion experience, led by our Tamil friend and colleague, for whom Muthu Curry Restaurant has been a frequent haunt ever since his university days. That is, he picked, we ate. Read on to discover what little I understood of the delicious things we had.

We started with some fried foods from the hot fried food counter. I know not what these are – I can only relate them to what I know, which is to say that they were similar to spring rolls or egg rolls on the outside, but filled with potato and proteinaceous filling on the inside. Google tells me these are known as ‘short eats’ or ‘Chinese rolls’. I cannot independently verify.

The different fillings were all pretty similar, and we were able to sample some with fish, mutton, and pure vegetable. Were it not for the discrete chunk of meat in the mutton, I would have thought it identical to the ones without. They were fine. They were not bad. But they were so similar to each other that were it not an omakase experience needing to cater to several different levels of meat and non-meat eaters, I wouldn’t get a bunch of different ones.

We had two dosas that looked externally identical, and so only one photo is provided above. They were served with what was described to me as a selection of sambal, curry dip, and white curry.

Diving into dosa, the paneer dosa ($12.90) was excellent, with a mild creamy paneer filling, a light and slightly crispy pastry, and of course the three flavourings to eat the dosa with. It’s just incredible what they can accomplish in taste, size, and variety, for the price.

The keema dosa ($14.90) had some meat in it, which was fine, but really the paneer dosa is the one to get here. Given the meat was in chunks it was also harder to ensure that each mouthful had some filling, whereas the paneer was more homogeneous and spreadable.

We also had two plates of egg roti and curry. The first to be discussed is egg roti ($8) with lamb curry ($10) and dal. The egg roti was mild – egg sandwiched between layers of soft, non-crispy roti – and a perfect spongy vehicle to soak up both the dal and the curry sauce. The lamb was appropriately tender, non-gristly, though did not excite.

The same dish but with chicken curry ($9) was much more fruitily spicy and exciting, though I guess it was important to have both the flavours.

This is going to sound really uncultured but I prefer prana chai made in my kitchen to this masala chai ($3) that was probably made in the proper art and way.

Overall
We had a lot of food for just $16 per person for a group of five, and I enjoyed the meal overall, even though they didn’t have the kothu roti that I was originally keen on (they only start kothu roti around noon). I’d definitely come back, or otherwise go to a different local restaurant in the area.

Muthu Curry Restaurant
7/8 Portico Parade, Toongabbie NSW 2146
(02) 9688 5990

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
Asian Fusion Fine Dining Indonesian Vietnamese

Sunda – Melbourne VIC Restaurant Review

I don’t know why it’s taken me 9 months to write this review. I don’t have any particularly good excuses, apart from the fact that we had eaten at so many places on our short trip to Melbourne that I had felt a little bit burnt out by all the reviewing, leaving it up to now, when I’ve run out of other things to procrastinate on, to do.

As it’s been nine months, this should not be considered a particularly comprehensive, or even useful piece of writing. It’s more just a few thoughts that I still remember pieced together from notes I jotted down during the meal, and some pictures to prove to myself in later years that I did indeed eat here on the 19th of April 2022.

We started the night with a number of snacks. Featured in the foreground here is oyster, coconut curry vinaigrette, shallot, pepperleaf, prepositions are of course not needed in high end cuisine. I enjoyed this deliciously creamy oyster, with its hint of curry flavouring. One of many creamy oysters we had that trip.

The next snack to discuss is this cracker of carrot, macadamia satay, sunflower, kakadu plum, with a good crispiness and a flavour that I think reminded us of tom yum, unless that was about the oysters.

The caramelised trout, green mango, muntries, prawn cracker was strongly reminiscent of the classic Chinese canned fish known as fried dace with black beans, commonly made by Nanmen Bridge company and sold in a yellow and red oval tin.

The ‘otak otak’, spanner crab curry, finger lime, rice crisp was yummy, and even though there was plenty of curry it was still easy to appreciate the sweetness and crabbiness of the crab.

The buttermilk roti, Sunda’s vegemite curry, a lauded secret item that you have to know about to order as a $20 supplement really wasn’t all that. The roti was very cripsy but hyper oily, but the flavour of the vegemite was at least pretty mild. We were advised that this was a must-not-miss at Sunda, but really I think you can miss it relatively safely. Not game changing.

This heirloom tomato, white sesame, davidson plum, pomelo salad was very fresh, so much so that I jotted down at the time “So fresh, hits of 2021” (I don’t know why specifically 2021, it was 2022 when I had this meal). There was a bit of a yellow curry-like (we found later that it was the white sesame curry paste) paste at the bottom of the tomatoes that had a night sweet and lightly spicy flavour., and some mouthfuls were a bit like white sugar on tomato, a common Northern Chinese snack dish.

The pork belly, rainforest tamarind, rhubarb, daikon radish was a pretty good entree. The meat was extremely tender, with the meat bits having great mouthfeel but unfortunately with too great a fat to lean pork ratio. The meat, “marinated with rainforest tamarind, coconut sugar and pomegranate molasses” as per Khanh Nguyen’s social media was very tangy, and in fact a bit too tangy for us. The lightly pickled daikon radish sheet, thin to the point of translucency, brought the tang back down a notch into mild enjoyability with a hint of sweetness.

The less good of our two mains was the bannockburn chicken, thai sausage, gai lan, bush apple. The gai lan was pretty good, cooked to a normal degree that you might find in any Chinese restaurant, not extraordinarily special. The chicken wrapped within it was moist and tender, delivered over the course of four or five separate slices, enough volume we thought. The Thai sausage had much ginger flavour. The bush apple went unnoticed. This was not an unreasonable main, but paled in comparison to our other choice.

Though people sing praises about their vegemite roti, I think Sunda’s true star dish is their koshihikari congee in a burnt onion broth with pickled cauliflower, confit egg yolk and paperbark oil. I’ve never enjoyed a congee as much in my entire life. This was such a warm and wholesome bowl, with a high degree of creaminess, soft delicate rice grains, and an almost potato mash-like soupy quality. The texture of the carbohydrate was creamy and the taste was mild, but the pool of broth surrounding it was absurd in its complex mix of sweet, salty, and sour flavours. The crispiness of the mushroom, cauliflower, and greens added great textural variation, whilst the opulent slow egg brought it all together with a third. Such a standout.

The gem lettuce, blood lime, shallot, nasturtium salad was truly an experience in whatever. Some of the leaves were a bit better, we did not enjoy. Unlike lilies, the nasturtium appear to be non-toxic to cats. Would you pay for your kitty to have dialysis?

I think this is the coconut sorbet with pineapple and kaffir lime granita, coconut jelly, desert lime jam, coconut yoghurt and sprinkled with candied green peppercorns. I didn’t love it – I think the pineapple was too pineapple for me.

The our take on pavlova, lychee, pandan, pepperberry was my preferred dessert, my more enjoyed part being the pepperberry ice cream. I am also fond of the Van Diemens Land Pepperberry & Leatherwood Honey ice cream that is available in tubs from some supermarkets though, and I did not think restaurant this was particularly superior. Neither of these two desserts really stood out.

We finished with petit fours, lamington pandan caneles with davidson plum. I am proud to announce that in the time between eating at Sunda and writing this review I now know how to pronounce “canelé” after being schooled by a guy at a bakery in Dulwich Hill NSW.

Quick verdict: We paid $130pp excluding drinks but including the vegemite roti, and I think it would be easy to recommend going back. We already had accommodation, and it would’ve been annoying to move between hotels, but when we ate at Sunda there was a promotion where you could book a night in hotel together with your meal for an extremely cheap price. Might be worth doing for Melbourne suburbanites looking for a nice South-East Asian fusion dinner.

Sunda Dining
18 Punch Ln, Melbourne VIC 3000
(03) 9654 8190