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. All meals are independently paid for - the author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.
In what’s probably a vain attempt to undo 30 years of processedmeatmaxxing, I’ve been trying to minimize my intake of processed and red meats overall – an endeavor that’s probably ruined my experience at the Illawara’s famed panini hub – a place that really specializes in sandwiches filled with the worst and best kinds of processed meat.
Instead of some delicious abomination filled with salami and mortadella, I had a cotaletta ($13.50), featuring a chicken schnitzel, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, Swiss cheese, and Russian sauce between some housemade bread.
Not bad, good size comes to mind. The flavours are muted, and a little bit more dressing could have gone a long way, though the light taste of it all did allow the sweetness of the Swiss cheese to shine through. The schnitzel was pleasntly warm, though the bread, though made in-house, was nothing special.The deli is located within a bottle-o, and co-located with an Italian grocery store, so it’s less of a restaurant and more of a place that sells sandwiches, with a park bench outside – adequate seating for a couple of guys, but probably inadequate during a more busy period of time.
Service, in contrast to what some of the other online reviews have said, was instant near closing, with no wait at all – a completely different experience to Inner West darling Raineri’s. It’s probably not a huge amount more time driving down to the Gong and getting a sandwich from Paninoteca Hub, than waiting in line at Five Dock.
Perhaps a more cured meat forward sandwich, preceded by a psyllium husk bolus, is on the menu for next time.
Paninoteca Hub Shop 1a/20-22 Weringa Ave Lake Heights NSW 2502
It’s rare for me to pay so much attention to the fitout of a cafe or restaurant, but Halfday Deli’s grey and red colour scheme really got me going – looking more like something out of the inner city than a shop on the podium level of a Wollongong apartment building.
The food was good, though our first and second choices were sold out for the day.
The beef & dip ($20) was a sandwich on ciabatta with three key ingredients – roast beef, provolone, and horseradish dressing, and the alleged inclusion of pickled fennel, which was neither here nor there. The tanginess of the mustard dressing was strong and delicious mixed with the roast beef, which, though less pink than in the online marketing photos, was still adequately moist and tender.
I enjoyed every bite of this sandwich both with and without the chicken gravy dip, though my wife thought that the dip was necessary to add saltiness and temper down the strong tangy horseradish taste.
The sausage & egg ($18) with a pork and fennel sausage patty and a slab of egg was the lesser of the two sandwiches (in my opinion), with a relatively mild unexciting flavour and texture carried mostly by the yoghurt ranch and dill pickles. Not something I’d visit for, though the beef and dip definitely was. Seeing as the chicken cotoletta focaccia option was not available, the staff were gracious enough to make this one for us on focaccia rather than the ciabatta that it usually comes with.
We also chose to add a small giardiniera salad and two hashbrowns for $9.50, which was the right choice. My wife enjoyed the crispy pickled vegetables, especially the cauliflower, as well as the sweet roasted walnuts – to name just a couple of the salad’s components.
The dressing of yoghurt ranch was the same white fluid that carried the sausage and egg, and equally enjoyable drizzled on vegetables as it was in the sandwich.
The hash browns were decent – crispy on the outside, unusually soft on the inside, and definitely too salty to eat by themselves.
Overall Really quite a good sandwich, and a good salad, from an outlet with many more options I’d like to try. I’d be open to coming back both for breakfast/lunch and their pizza dinner.
UPDATE –
We returned for a bit of pizza. I didn’t feel the need to go out for dinner, for once in our lives, but my wife feared that we may never have dinner in Wollongong again, and that this would be her last chance.
We will describe both pizzas that we had as a class, first of all. Halfday makes their pizza in a gas oven, and they come out with a great crust which is oily, tasty, and somehow manages to be both light and chewy at the same time. The base is thin but with reasonable structural integrity, though with much blackened burnt bits on the base – room for improvement.
This is the sausage + cavolo nero + scarmoza ($26). The sausage on this pizza had a complex flavour, with spices and a strong fennel taste. I enjoyed the scarmoza, which my wife felt tasted like smoked salmon. One improvement that I could suggest for the toppings would have been more sauce – the tomato felt quite light and difficult to appreciate, especially in the more bare portions.
The capocollo + creme fraiche + fior di latte + cured egg yolk + pecorino ($29) was a maximally umami mixture of ingredients. The processed meat was not large in quantity but high in smoky flavour, and to be honest I felt better about there being not that much, as I’m still trying to live my best low-carcinogen life. The rest of the pizza was quite tasty, savoury, and fatty – a very luxurious representation of a tomato free pizza.
Take a look at this sweet box for takeaway.
Overall – pretty good!
Halfday Deli Shop 1/38 Atchison St, Wollongong NSW 2500
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
This was our first breakfast as a married couple, within line of sight from the NSW Government facility in which we were married.
I don’t know that calling your sandwich Mortadella 2.0 (Better than Bourdain)Ozzo ($22) is a particularly good way to honour a dead man’s legacy. But that is what Eat Ozzo has done for their mortadella sandwich, folded into a wood-fired pizza dough.
The flavour was pretty good, with a relatively healthy serving of LP’s mortadella, which I maintain is the best mortadella around. I enjoyed most of the flavours, with the artichoke and straciatella doing heavily lifting, though I thought that it had an unusually large amount of cabbage hidden under the surface, overpowered most mouthfuls. The surface layer was a strongly positive exerience, but the second half of the meal, mostly of a slightly bitter charred cabbage was unenjoyable, leading me to try making my own at home with a pizza dough ball from Woolworths, straciatella from Paesanella, and mortadella from Harris Farm. In some ways it was not as good (particularly in terms of the bread – I have yet to succeed in making something edible in the Breville Pizzaiolo), but in other ways, especially with the lack of cabbage, it was better..
The Chopped Chook Salad Ozzo ($11) is a smaller sandwich on their breakfast menu, which inspired a similar instinct to make it again at home in my new wife. It featured a cold mixture of avocado and chicken which was marketed as a “NY deli style chopped chicken salad”, which, having never been to New York, I guess we just have to trust. The flavour was pretty good, superior to the Mortadella with the lack of bitter cabbage, and as was the price.
I’ve not had a lot Strawberry Matchas (strawberries matcha?) ($15.40), but this was on the terrible end of things – too sweet, watery feeling, and expensive.
Overall A place where the food leaves you thinking – I could make that at home. All prices noted include a 10% weekend surcharge.
Eat Ozzo Harbourside, The Star L G, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont NSW 2009
My recent wife has decided that my parents’ place is the optimal place for her to study, far away from the cats and other homely distractions, and so I took the opportunity to take us to a semi-local sandwich shop that had been on the radar for some time.
Sadly, the tart display case was near empty by the time we arrived, and so we did not have the opportunity to try the Cacio e Pepe tart, nor any number of other yummy-looking fruit tarts pictured elsewhere on the internet.
We instead had two sandwiches. The hoagie ($19), a cold sandwich of mortadella, salami, lettuce, cheese, beef, red peppers and a sauce that was allegedly mayonnaise but tasted more like Thousand Island was okay but not life-changing.
I enjoyed the ciabatta and especially the sesame seeds which added a nice dimension of flavour, as well as the generous serving of meats, however each bite of this $19 sandwich merely served to remind me of the excellent $15 sandwich we had from Ranieri’s Delicatessen nearer to home. Unfortunately while I have no specific complaints, this sandwich did just fail to amaze, and I do think that sandwiches should be evaluated in their broader context of their alternatives.
The fish burger ($17), featuring a panko crumbed hake fillet, melted American cheese, onion, pickles, and house tartare sauce between a milk bun was my wife’s choice. She quite enjoyed it with its flaky fish fillet and crispy panko crumb, however I personally felt that the tartare sauce could have been applied more generously, a la Kosta.
Again it was difficult not to draw a direct comparison to our nearby fish burger favorite, which in my opinion it falls short of.
Overall, neither of the two sandwiches I had blew me away. It’s a competitive market for sandwich makers out there.
