Eating Out: 1228 Tea House [936 Whitehorse Road, Box Hill 3128]

One more exam to go!!! Then 3 month summer holiday. I can't wait.
So just a quick review.
I don't remember the last time I came here and I wonder if I ever have. I think they're supposed to known for making a good bubble tea but I didn't order one and it was a sunny hot day, what was I thinking? So after flipping through the menu many times I decided on Korean Chicken in Special Sauce but it turned out that it didn't come with rice and rice costs $2 extra. It wasn't exactly the price that made me change the mind but the fact that there would be a large serving of fried chicken that I was certain not to finish. Changed to the Taiwanese Pop Chicken Rice instead, little did I know that that serving would be quite large.

 Taiwanese Pop Chicken Rice $8.90

I know it doesn't look like a lot but it was, just have a look at all that chicken compared to the egg underneath. The chicken was crisp and well seasoned. It wasn't too oily tasting which made eating a lot of it easier. Underneath the chicken lays a soy sauce egg and some preserved vegies. The rice was really plump and oily from the chicken, did I mention there was a heck of a lot of it? In the end I only managed to finish half  and doggy bagged the rest home. K仔 couldn't help me as he conquered his own mound of rice.

Korean Spicy Squid Rice $10

I just made up that name as I have forgotten it. So pretty much it comes on a sizzling plate filled to the point where its going to fall everywhere. The squid was tender but probably out of a frozen packet. The sauce sweet and a little spicy but not as chilli as it looks. It came with kimchi and some potato cubes on the side. 

Food: 7.5/10 Nothing out of the ordinary. Could cut back on the oil.

Value: 8/10 Pretty good considering serving sizes.

Service/Environment: 7/10 Looks relatively new except could be cleaner. 

Verdict? I'd come back to try the bubble tea. It's Box Hill, the list of restaurants I have yet to try is endless.

Eating Out: Korean BBQ Seoulia Box Hill + Random

Went to an all you can eat Korean BBQ for Xiaowei's birthday on Saturday. Went to Seoulia on Whitehorse Road, Box Hill. The night didn't start off too well with the lady telling us we had to wait 15 mins for our table (reasonable right?) except that we ended up waiting for 45 mins outside in the cold instead. Finally got in and we got straight into it. Pretty much you pay $26.50 which includes a can of drink. Then you help yourself to the buffet counter which contains all the meat, seafood, vegies, kimchi, rice. It wasn't too bad, no expensive "good" meats and a pretty limited choice.

Yummy belly pork. After you have stuffed you're face with meat (and in our case only meat and no rice and very limited vegies) you can head to the all you can eat ice cream section for dessert. After 3 ice cream cones I was feeling pretty full.

Food: 6/10 (limited range of food and octopus was extremely salty, however the ice cream was pretty nice)
Service: 6.5/10 (made us stand outside in the cold for way too long, buffet counter wasn't refilled often enough.)
Environment: 6/10 (Cramped as cramped can get which means you can't escape oil splatters. The hot plate is massive so there is almost no space for your bowl/plates. Decently ventilated but it was very hot in there and came home smelling like oily meat)

Verdict? Not extremely bad but if I had a choice I might choose another place next time. Even if it means forking out an extra couple of dollars. The lack of choice and cramped space was not enjoyable. 




Anyways I found this on my receipt from Friday.

Epic name. She was a very nice checkout chick though.

Ever wanted to know what it looks like through the eyes of someone short sighted (e.g me)? But you have to pretty short sighted for it to be this blurry. Way too bored of studying.

Eating Out: 大长今dae jang geum－Chinatown

This blog post is about a week late. Last week I went shopping for an 18th pressie for Mat with Ngoc and Abel. After buying his present we went out for lunch. (Sounds a bit like Ngoc's blog post bout this day..btw check out her blog cos it's funny as and she's one of the most amazing artists --> Ngoc's Blog)
Anyways back to lunch. Ngoc felt like Korean so we ended up walking past this place where they had two ladies dressed in traditional korean outfits holding menus out the front, I felt so sorry for them as it was 35 degrees outside. We walked inside to find a massive flight of stairs (we were so tired from pressie shopping) but awesome aircon. Sat down and they gave us a massive bottle of chilled water : ) and they're teacups were abnormally large....they took forever to fill up.

 

(photo courtesy of Ngoc)

I ordered the beef bulgogi set which is the plate in the top right corner, all the dishes in the middle and a bowl of rice. The beef was quite sweet but I think it's supposed to be like that. Definietly needs to be eaten with rice. The kimchi was quite sour but not extremely chilli which was good. All the rest of the accompaniments were pretty average. Though the chilli cucumber was refreshing on such a hot day. Ngoc and Abel both chose noodles (hence the two bowls in the pic) Both were boiling hot for ages. Bad choice for them on such a hot day (thank god that place had awesome aircon). Ngoc had a Chicken Noodles I think, looked very yummy. And Abel had Seafood Noodles which came with this massive prawn he didn't know how to eat without using his hands. Abel seems to love the noodles (think they were handmade) and ate them in world record time despite the soup being boiling hot.

Verdict? Definitely would go there again to try their noodles. The place was super spacious, very hard to find spacious restaurants in Chinatown. Lunch was under $10 for each of us which I guess is pretty good for us students with little money. And it probably one of the
cleaner places in Chinatown, very clean indeed.

Eating Out: Korean :) at White Tomato (City) and Ice Cream Mochi

Met up with Nals for lunch today. I owed her a korean meal from november last year. Tiff tagged along since she didn't have anything to do after the neap bio lecture in the morning.
We walked through Chinatown and only saw one korean restaurant with 2 waitresses outside holding the menu convincing you to eat there. However that place looked expensive so we walked around for a bit more to find another place. Found one on burke st called White Tomato.
The environment was very nice, spacious but most importantly, it wasn't noisy like some restaurants in the city. Maybe it was because we went at 2:30, past lunch hour. The waitress spoke limited english, wrote in korean and was very pretty. I ordered a beef bibimbab, Nals ordered a chicken bibimbab and Tiff ordered a tofu seafood hotpot with rice which looked insanely chilli.
We managed to watch the chef cook and it looked very cool. Watching him move the wok, throwing it up and catching it again, the flame was fierce.

My meal. There was a tiny bit of beef compared to Nals' massive heap of chicken. I was disappointed at how unfair the different servings of meat was. I feel that a tiny bit more of each ingredient would have been better as after I mixed my rice up there seemed to be very little ingredients mixed in. Taste? Quite nice. A bit like fried rice but better. All the flavours went well together, I particularly liked the egg and mushroom. The beef was a bit on the bland side. Nals complained that it was too oily unlike the one she ate in Korea. But I guess the oil makes everything taste that little bit better.

I would definitely come back but to try a different dish, they had soooo many choices.

After lunch we went to the asian grocery store where they had 90c pocky which Nals got. We bought the mochi ice cream thingos for dessert just like the ones I had in HK.

From left to right.

• The packaging of my chocolate ice cream mochi. $1.60. In HK you get doublt the mochi for that price.
• My icy mochi ball. Tasted NO WHERE near as good as what you get in HK. The ice cream was ROCK HARD and there was ice all over my mochi.
• Nals green one mochi ball. It looked nothing like the picture on the front. Supposedly ice cream with big pieces of walnuts in it, in reality tiny bits of walnut. The skin of the mochi ball did not stick to the ice cream. The ice cream fell apart. It was a fail mochi ball.