Eating Out: Ajisen Ramen [Glen Waverley]

85 Kingsway
Glen Waverley, 3150

This post is about a month late =S Been soo caught up in other things (*ahem* tetris addiction).
If you haven't heard Ajisen has also decided to join the Asian empires in Glen Waverley. Has anyone else realised that every restaurant has more than one location in Melbourne? (Petaling Street, Ampang Tofu, RaRamen, Claypot King, Crazy Wing, Monga Dessert)

Like usual all the floor staff speak Chinese, it's incredibly cramped and noisy.

Ajisen Ramen+Corn
For some reason it's cheaper to get the Ajisen Ramen and add corn for $0.50 than to get the Corn Ramen which is a $1 more than the Ajisen Ramen, it applies to all the additional topping and it's just the exact same thing.

Likes:
+ Springy noodles
+ Large serving
+ Decent soup, I think better than Ramen Ya but still not a good tonkotsu.

Dislikes:
- Barely any meat
- No menma (my favourite)


Gyoza Ramen
Nothing special, very average gyozas.


Kari-age
Massive chunks of chicken with a weirdly yellow batter. Nothing special yet nothing bad either.

Food: 7/10 Can't really say anything bad about it (except for generous msg use), but also nothing particularly special. Standard ajisen.
Service/Environment: 7/10 Very cramped but decent renovation.
Value: 7/10 The most basic ramen is under $10 so it's alright however it is the only shop that does it in the area so that must be accounted for. They have entree+ramen deals for around $15 which is what I got. Be warned that it is quite a bit of food. The 2 of us had a bowl of ramen each and shared an entree and left quite full (and we went after an afternoon of badminton and ultimate frisbee)

Verdict? I wouldn't go out of my way for it, if I happened to be in the area and felt like ramen then I would go, otherwise I'd probably pass. Remember it is the only place in the area that does tonkotsu ramen.

Eating Out: Teru Teru Japanese Cafe Revisited [578 Station St Box Hill, 3128]

Came back here to try out their udon. I still love this place. Next time I'm feeling under the weather and it's winter I should probably come here for udon.
Sorry about the camera quality, taken with phone as I left my camera at home that day.

Tonkatsu Udon $10

If it's a weekday $10 will also get you a drink. 

Likes: Springy not mushy udon

Seaweed

Naruto (fishcake slices) 

Dashi broth, nice and light.

Dislikes: Tonkatsu came submerged in the soup =[

Not suitable for a hot summers day.

Food Court Challenge: I ♥ Teppanyaki Revisited[Westfield Doncaster]

I've been craving Unagi (japanese grilled eel) for quite a while. I love the fatty-ness of the fish with the sweet sauce. It is heavenly especially when served with rice. Last week I found out K仔 has never had unagi before so we ordered a unagi don. Except we were both super hungry from looking for a gift for a friend that we dug in before realising that I hadn't taken a picture.

Unagi Don $9.50ish

Generous portion of fish on a big mound of sushi rice. Nice and hot with lots of sauce. Unagi don must have lots of sauce in my opinion as the rice can be quite plain. However to be honest, I really don't think you can stuff up unagi don, that stuff comes out of a packet.

Unfortunately K仔 got a bone stuck in his throat which remained there for the rest of the day. How do you get rid of a fish bone in your throat? As a kid I remember I used to just swallow heaps of rice in a big gulp except that didn't seem to work.

Eating Out: Teru Teru Japanese Cafe [578 Station St Box Hill, 3128]

This place is pretty awesome. It's new, clean and quiet. You are greeted in Japanese when you first walk in the door only to hear them speak mando to customers later. The menu has all the basic Japanese dishes at reasonable prices. We went with the lunch special which was a main meal and soft drink/green tea/coffee/miso soup(meaning pick one not all) for $10. I think almost all the main meals are $10 or less and bentos a few dollars more.

Soft drink but not usual soft drink.

Sashimi Don $10

Tossed between unagi don or sashimi don but due to the 30 degree weather sashimi don won. There were 6 or 7 thin large slices of salmon on a mound of seasoned rice. The salmon had salmon flavour and was seasoned just right.

Curry Katsu Don $9.50

It looks delicious. The katsu was very thick, juicy and crunchy. Generous amount of curry sauce with large chunks of potato and carrot. 

Food: 8/10 Good well seasoned food. Flavours are true.

Service/Environment: 9/10 They don't disturb or pressure you. I love the environment, newly renovated and feels very Japanese-y

Value: 8.5/10 It's pretty decently priced considering the quality of the food. 

Verdict? Definitely going to come back and try other dishes. Maybe on a cooler day for udon and unagi don.    Probably the cleaner and quieter places in Box Hill. 

PS Japanese cuisine is my favourite cuisine so I may be slightly biased =]

Eating Out: Yuki Japanese Restaurant 1901-1903 Malvern Road, Malvern East 3145

It was my 18th birthday a couple of days ago and I wanted to eat Japanese because it's my favourite cuisine. I believe that it is the best cuisine not just because of taste but for skill, refinement, respect for food and culture. But I better not start an argument here, everyone is entitled to their opinions. Friend went here and kept raving about their takoyaki (he loves his takoyaki) except when I asked him about the food here he couldn't remember anything about it (not a good sign). This place has been placing ads in the chinese newspaper for quite some time and they have a birthday special. If you go on the day of your birthday and you have more than 4 adults then the birthday person gets to eat for half price, and if you have more than 6 adults then the birthday person eats for free. Enticing yeah? And if you book 24 hours in advance, you get free oysters (max 6 per person, you have to tell them how many you want) I think I forgot the phrase, "some things are too good to be true", now you know where this is going.

So you can come in and order a la carte or go for the buffet for $27.50 for week nights or $30 for weekends I believe. 

When I first walked in it felt like a cosy motel/lodge feel. Got given a menu and you can pretty much order anything from the menu except for specific sushi rolls...

*warning-half the menu will be described during this post

Tempura Prawns (6)

Relatively large, well battered and crunchy prawns. Not too oily. However prawn quality was a little disappointing. Also the prawn didn't really fit into the dipping sauce bowl (but that can't be helped). Good start to the meal. However the tempura prawns at Surf and Turf were a lot better but that was 2 years ago

Oysters

I love seafood, raw oysters especially. This tray contains 30 oysters for the 5 of us. Very fresh and creamy. No complaints, just a big smile on my face.

Unagi

Ohhhhhh, I didn't realise how much I missed unagi until I took a bite. The unique taste with the fatty skin and sweet sauce is sooooo delicious. However I do believe this comes in a vacuum sealed package and requires little effort except heating up to make. Craving Unagidon now, must get it whenever I get a chance to.

Seaweed Salad

I also believe that this comes pre made and highly doubt it was made in house as it was so green that the sesame seeds turned green. Very crunchy and refreshing, it was gone in no time.

Takoyaki (6)

On first impressions I was a little disappointed, there appeared to be very little takoyaki sauce and no bonito flakes. However after biting into them I was pleasantly surprised, a fluffy ping pong sized ball with more than one octopus piece in it =] My friend was right. Later on we ordered another plate and it was even better than before. Crispy outside, piping hot on the inside and there were tonnes of octupus pieces inside. Best takoyaki I've had in Melbourne, or possibly ever.

Gyoza (6)

Most interesting looking gyoza's I've ever seen, not the usual gyoza or dumpling shape. It was obviously steamed then deep fried or perhaps just deep fried and on the verge of being burnt. The wrapper was very crunchy and the filling was very average.

Wrapped Prawns? (6)

This was a chef special that was not on the menu. Prawns wrapped in spring roll pastry and drizzled with an interesting sauce. Nothing special about it although I felt like it belonged at Yum Cha not at a japanese restaurant, but I could be wrong.

Mussels in Cream Sauce

This isn't on the menu either and is another chef special, however it is on the take away menu. The take away menu seems to offer more than the dine in menu, which is pretty weird. The mussels were medicore but the sauce was quite nice. Creamy onion sauce that had something else but I couldn't figure out what is was, could eat a tonne of these. Maybe it's because I love mussels. Ordered it again later and it wasn't as good as before. The sauce became liquidy...

Sashimi and Sushi Combo platter with Soft Shell Crab handroll.

This was one of the first things we ordered and it took about an hour to come out. Contained salmon sashimi which was alright, not top notch but decent. Only one piece of kingfish (I believe it was kingfish) came with the platter and existed as a nigiri. How do you share one piece of kingfish with 5 people?? The soft shell crab roll was quite good. The batter still crunchy, you could taste the crab. However it fell apart very easily as there was not much rice to hold it together.

Agedashi Tofu (6)

someone ate some already

Since the tofu piece were so small and the sauce almost covered it there was very little if any crunchy parts. However overall it was very good, no complaints.

Seafood Okonomiyaki

 Very battered filled okonomiyaki. Found only traceable amounts of cabbage. Seafood was frozen marinara mix. All together it wasn't too bad, didn't come cut up though so it was a tad hard to eat. It was a pretty good chewy pancake.

Sashimi

According to the menu this should contain salmon and kingfish, however the latter was not present. The salmon was good, crunchy and no sinewy bits. However it looked like the sashimi chef was getting a tad lazy or maybe it was intentional that some slices where very thin and some very thick. Not that it mattered, still sashimi.

Miso Soup

Most disappointing dish of the night. Yes that is how much soup we were given. It was cold and extremely salty. I'm pretty sure it would have been fine if we ordered this earlier in the night when they were actually making it, not at the end of the night when they were just about to close.

Black Sesame Ice Cream

I didn't try this one as I ordered the green tea one. Aunty could only taste vanilla, black sesame pretty much didn't exist except in sight. 

Green Tea Ice Cream

Little scoop of ice cream. Also experienced pure vanilla flavour from green ice cream. The waitress said that the chef personally makes the ice cream....*cough cough* does it require a chef to go down to safeway to buy a tub of ice cream to mix with matcha powder? At least don't be stingy with the green tea powder because you're wasting it since you can't even taste it. 

Food: 6/10 Although there was nothing bad about the food, the quality of ingredients was just disappointing. Also the money saving shortcuts taken made a definite impact. Japanese food should be better because it's all about fresh good quality ingredients and no shortcuts. 

Service: 5/10 A waiter and a waitress did all the work. However the waiter was new and literally had no idea how to many things. He didn't put our order through many times. He didn't know what some of the things on the menu were. At least train him before he starts work, or get him to learn the menu. The waitress was definitely more experienced and quite good at bs-ing her way through stuff. She was very friendly but when she got to excuses, she went round in circles. Asked whether I could have another bowl of ice cream and her answer was "sorry no, we only make enough of each for the night" I'm pretty damn sure you don't make the ice cream everyday and you don't know how many people come in every night AND you can't know how much of each flavour you will need each night because you're giving people a choice. Even the "but she's the birthday girl" trick didn't work. Sorry, tried to refrain from complaining throughout post. 

Environment: 7/10 Very shabby. Seats sank in amazingly. Disposable chopsticks. Flickering light was beyond annoying. A bored and slow sushi chef on display was not pleasing to see. 

Verdict? A lot of work and improvement must go in. I'm not sure whether they have many second time round customers. Because I probably won't be one unless it's a birthday dinner or something special. I can't say whether the $27.50 was worth it or not. In my opinion I'd rather go Surf and Turf if that place still exists.


Photos taken with my new camera which Dad gave me about an hour before we went out for dinner. Still getting used to it. Pretty happy with the pictures since I had no tripod and it was quite low light. Shutter speeds of around 1/8sec-1/15sec were used with no flash.

Eating Out: Don Don 321 Swanston St

Wanted to come here since reading about how cheap and quick their food is, however every time I go to the city I can't seem to find it. Therefore I decided to google map it and it turns out that little bit is not on good maps cos it's Swanston walk? However I did find it on flickr and when I walked by today I realised why I never noticed it. It is like a black hole in the wall.

So we had about 30 mins to find some lunch before our movie started. Went there and got lunch in about 1 min? It was insane, like life was in fast forward. We decided to get takeaway as there was no way all 4 of us were going to fit inside that tiny place. So we crossed the road and sat on the lawn of the state library under the full afternoon sun. Chatting whilst eating our lunch from takeaway boxes.

Curry Chicken Don $6 or 7 

(it was so rushed I don't remember)

I know it doesn't look too flash. But trust me it tastes better than it looks. The curry sauce is sweet and mild but there is definitely curry flavour. The chicken pieces are large, boneless and tender. Brocolli was crunchy and not mushy, gotta eat your vegies. The radioactive red stuff is pickled vegetable of some sort, crunchy, sour, really good contrast to the curry. 

Friends had Sashi Don which was a let down. One friend didn't realise it involved raw fish (which she doesn't eat) and therefore I ate it for her, and boy was that weird sashimi. Looked fine but tasted like nothing. No salmon flavour whatsoever, texture was about right though. For $8.50 is seemed like a bargain but I'm not too sure. Maybe we went on a bad day. 

Another friend had the udon noodle soup. which looked pretty good. Only downside was it is quite hard to eat noodle soup from a takeaway container in your hand.

Food: 7/10 You get what you pay for.

Environment: 6/10 Extremely cramped. 

Service: 8/10 Quick and to the point. You order, collect change and your meal will already be there on the counter for you, even maccas can't beat that. 

Verdict? Sure I'd come here again, might avoid the sashi don though. Best place for REAL fast food.

Cooking: Tonkatsu and Udon in Dashi Broth

Japanese is probably my #1 favourite cuisine. Not just because of tastes but just the whole concept. Everything it so precise, so thought through, everything I'm not but I strive to achieve. So after deciding to make Japanese for dinner last night I dragged K仔 shopping with me for ingredients. Bought some udon and panko from Colonial Fresh Food Market (or what ever that place is called) at Doncaster Shoppingtown. They have an awesome asian section and an incredible Italian section + deli.

Finally learned the difference between Tonkatsu and Tonkotsu. Tonkatsu being the deep fried pork chop and Tonkotsu being my favourite rich creamy pork bone soup ramen.

Ingredients:
Pork: Pork Chops, flour to dust, egg to coat, Panko breadcrumbs (these make the biggest difference, not going back to normal breadcrumbs again), oil to fry
Noodle Soup: Water. Dashi powder. Shitake mushrooms. Corn cobs. Egg (soft boiled). Vegetables. Carrot. Salt. Udon noodles.

Method:
Crumb pork chops by dipping into flour, then egg wash, then panko. Make sure you immediately fry the pork chops after coating with breadcrumbs so the breadcrumbs stay crisp and don't soak up the egg wash and become soggy. Whilst the pork chops are frying. Add dashi powder to boiling water. Add in mushrooms, corn and egg. Fish out eggs after 5 mins and cool. Cook udon noodles according to packet. Place into bowls ready to serve. Chuck in vegies to cook in the dashi broth. Drain pork chops on paper towel. Peel egg. Spoon broth(without the vegies) over noodles. Arrange vegies into bowl. Cut egg in half and place on top. Chop pork chop into strips. Serve.

Cooking: Sesame Crusted Seared Tuna

Second time trying this however it's still not right, the taste is just not good enough, still needs to be a lot of refining to be done. Visually it still needs a bit of work as well. The ones at the Japanese restaurants look so appealing, the contrast between the crusted edges and the deep red of the raw tuna is amazing. Like a piece of art.

Ingredients:
Tuna: Raw tuna steak, tsp of soya sauce, 1/2 tsp of fish sauce + sesame oil, sesame seeds.
Sauce: 1 tbsp sashimi soya sauce, 1/2 tsp of sesame oil.

Method:
Cut tuna into approx 5 cm wide logs. Marinate the tuna in everything but the sesame seeds. Toast sesame seeds in a dry pan, remove and set aside. Pan fry tuna in a HOT pan with a little oil (must be hot in order to have a decent crunchy crust). about 20-30 secs each side (all 4 sides, 6 if you want). Roll in sesame seeds to coat. Slice on angle. Mix the soya sauce and sesame oil together to make sauce then spoon over sliced tuna.

This was only 1/3 of the tuna steak.

Borrowed a stack of cookbooks from the library today. Off to read them now =) Still waiting for Luke Nguyen's one to be available. But Jamie's Ministry of Food will do for now.

Eating Out: Yoyogi, Eastland, Ringwood

Spent the morning shopping at Eastland in Ringwood trying to find a present for my awesome friend. Managed to walk the entire Eastland then deciding to go with something I found within 5 minutes of walking into the shopping centre =.=" Ooooooo, and I saw Dora the Explorer "in real life" and she looked very very scary. She was taking pics with lots of little kids, some were pretty scared.
So after all that walking, mum and I were pretty tired and hungry, however one round of the food court and nothing particularly interesting appealed to me. I wanted sushi, and food court sushi is probably the worst sushi you can get. Opted for the sushi deluxe at Yoyogi to share for part one of lunch.

Sushi Deluxe $9.80

I have to say it wasn't as bad as I expected. The rice was a little too vinegared and not sweet enough. Everything else was pretty good. The white fish had no taste like usual, however the salmon was pretty good and mum said the tuna was pretty good as well.

Food: 6.5/10 Of course there is much better sushi out there but in food court sushi terms, it's quite good.

Service: 8/10 Very quickly served although it was lunch hour and the man did quite a good job understanding us in the very very noisy environment. But then again, he should be used to it.

Environment: 6/10 It's a food court at lunch hour...what more can i say.

Verdict? Quite impressed considering it is from the food court. If I had to eat at the food court again I would seriously consider coming here again. 

Lunch part two consisted of a CUP NOODLE XD Shrimp Creamy Tom Yum flavour, loved it, sooooooooooo nice except for the msg. And less than $1 for one. Bought 6 yesterday when I was at Box Hill, they're supposed to be for my locker so I can have them at school, I hope they'll last till school starts.

Eating Out: Sushi Izakaya (Doncaster Westfield) and Pancake Parlour

FINALLY OUT OF SCHOOL

so happy =)

And to celebrate I went out with friends after school.

Off to shoppo

Japanese Dinner:

At Sushi Izakaya outside Myer. It's a little restaurant if you can call it that. They sell brown rice sushi which is pretty unique. And their handrolls and similar items are stunning, they look really pretty. 

(Chicken Katsu Bento $9.50)

I originally ordered the tonkatsu bento however they couldn't make any tonkatsu so I changed to Chicken Katsu which essentially was the same. The tofu sat in some light soy with bonito flakes on top, very light taste. They used a short-medium grain rice which was good, funny shape though. The salad was weird, looks like aeroplane food. But the Chicken Katsu was the best, soooooooo crunchy, although quite thin and a slight lack of flavour, I was amazed at how crunchy it was and how the breadcrumbs stayed on. I must learn the secret to their crumbing. 

Ngoc had some handrolls and prawn sushi. 

All the sushi looked really appetising and professional. 

Food: 6.5/10

Service: 5/10 (told me there was no tonkatsu about 5 mins after I ordered)

Environment: 5/10 it's literally in the middle of the shopping centre

Verdict? Alright I guess if you really want Japanese food. However don't expect anything spectacular with their bento's. Their handrolls cabinet/case looks very very appealing. However there are two other Japanese Shops at the food court, both aren't bad either. Hard to choose between them.

Then we went to watch Bounty Hunter (which I thought was pretty average) then headed to Pancake Parlour. 

Pancake Parlour: 

Yummy Pancakes. I don't get how they can make them sooooo fluffy.

Lemon Squash Spider

Weird combination, I don't know what to say about it.

It was just weird. Not bad but not particularly good either.

Pancake parlour is great for just hanging out