Duck Pier, Wantirna

Celebrating a special occasion recently, we went to Duck Pier to try their Peking Duck. To ensure availability, the restaurant recommends preordering but I saw some diners ordering on the day itself. It comes de-boned and pre-cut so we missed the spectacle of a chef's skill in cutting the whole duck at the table. 

We ordered the Peking Duck set ($55 for half a duck) which came with steamed pancakes, garnish, stir fried garlicky bean sprouts and a massive bowl of duck soup. 

The duck was nice but I enjoyed the bean sprouts the most. It had the most breath of wok and garlic I had tasted in a dish recently. I like garlic so much, I'm like the anti vampire. 

The soup is very tasty as well. There are pieces of tofu in the soup that actually filled me so much it left no room for the next dish.

I had thought that the noodles would equally have the breath of wok as the beansprouts but it was like another chef had cooked the noodles. It was a little too oily for my liking.

After dinner, we had some canned fruits, water chestnut sweet soup, lollies and prawn crackers from the all you can eat dessert bar. Before you get too excited, it is a very basic set up with limited desserts.

The restaurant was full and very noisy, some curtains or noise absorbing materials would help with conversations around the table. The seating arrangements were not the most comfortable for mid sized group because the place is quite small. We were seated along a corridor and in close proximity to the next table so the flurry of waiters carrying food from the kitchen and dirty dishes to the kitchen, and the conversations at the next table were quite distracting. It was not the experience I expected when paying close to $100 for a meal. 

 

Le Feu, Springvale

This is the lemming phenomena! Peer pressured or should I say Facebook pressured into trying a snail dish in a new restaurant, we did not enjoy the dish at all! By the way, the scene where lemmings rushed en masse off a cliff is now known to be an engineered shot. Lemmings are smarter than that, they do not follow other lemmings blindly. They were routed and chased by humans who have vested interests in creating a sensational but fake news. 

Influenced by a review on Facebook, I ordered whelk or sea snail in butter sauce ($26). Some parts of the whelk was fine - they were firm and a bit tough to bite and chew but fully cooked through. The butter sauce actually did not do much to flavour the meat. But the 'pads', the best description I can come up with to describe the part where the whelk presumably use to walk around was like the texture of a fingernail. They were not edible and removing them was not easy. As we slide the whelk out of the shell, it was slimy and it seems like they were not fully cooked through (but could be the nature of the whelks). As we have never eaten whelks, we did not know what to expect. In comparison to escargots we ate in France, these were much less enjoyable and I would not recommend this dish.

Luckily, we also ordered the beef pho ($18). Rare slices of tender beef on rice noodles topped with beansprouts and herbs. Le Feu is a gluten free restaurant and pho is almost always gluten free (unless there is soy sauce with the chilies, but it is optional) so it fits the bill.

If you go to this restaurant, do not order the whelk unless you have had whelk before and liked it!

Enak, Lonsdale St

Oh dear, this is not the best picture but it is the only picture I have of our meal at Enak! It is difficult 'feeding' the camera first for the sake of a blog while friends are waiting for us before taking the first bite of their meal. 

Enak is a new restaurant by the same people who run Nelayan, a long time Indonesian restaurant on Swanston St. The new place also serves Indonesian food minus the nasi campur from the bain marie which will be available only at a later stage.

The decor is simple and new, clean and modern. I get the feel that it aims to be a slightly more upmarket place. 

I ordered the grilled chicken rice set ($19.50) which came with tempeh, tofu, sambal, grilled chicken maryland and rice on the side. The rice was served separately on another dish so we had 4 plates which took up most of the table for two persons.

The grilled chicken was liberally doused with kecap manis which I like, and grilled with a nice char. It was slightly dry but coupled with the spicy sambal it made a nice combo.

My friend had the turmeric fried chicken ($19) which I did not try. It looked very crispy but too bad, she was on a diet so all that crispy skin went to waste! The rest of the items on the plate were the same as mine except she had an onion relish instead of sambal. 

I enjoyed our meal in the quiet restaurant and it would be nice to go back and try other dishes like nasi campur once they have it up and running.

Meanwhile, here's a joke I heard today - I was nicknamed Nobody, because nobody's perfect!

Ichiro Izakaya, Burwood

Mini dishes, many of them, are my favourite meals. I imagine I must have been a hamster in a past life. Coincidentally I also like watching youtube videos of hamsters eat miniature human food in human normal settings. 

My wish came true (oh, how easy it is to please me!), we ordered the deluxe set at Ichiro Izakaya ($40). It had agedashi tofu, chicken karaage, salmon sashimi, oyster fry with a dollop of wasabi mayo, braised pork with sprinkling of shichimi, kingfish sashimi with tobiko, cold salad of mushrooms and capsicum, endamame and surf clam and scallop sashimi.

The set also comes with rice and miso soup. The best dishes in this set is the pork and the mushroom salad. The pork had a bouncy firm texture but not too hard, which was surprising at first because it was difficult to tell what type of meat it was. Once we figured out it was pork, we marvelled that it was cooked so well.

The mushroom dish was also delicious because of the sauce which was some kind of soy or bean based sauce.

Interestingly, none of the sashimi tasted sweet or tasty. They were bland and did not have even the subtle seafood smell. It was puzzling. 

Since it was a signature dish, we ordered a chashu ramen ($19). The soup is light. To my unrefined palate, it could have been a slightly watered down stock from Nissin's tonkotsu instant noodles pack. But of course, I'm sure the restaurant would be making their own stock and tare!

 There is nothing that jumps out in this dish (and I don't mean the insect variety!). If this was the restaurant's signature dish then I wonder what the other dishes besides the ones we had are like?

We noticed many people had ordered the set meals which are like bento boxes ($23). The restaurant was busier than some of the other restaurants in the Brickworks community. The price is more expensive, which is expected for the location though I think they should invest some of the profits towards sound absorption in the restaurant. The bare concrete floors and ceiling and glass walls do not facilitate audible conversations but I have heard that this is a trick in the hospitality. People get bored of not being able to talk to each other so they would order copious amounts of alcohol, and the restaurant would make more margin from drink sales.

This restaurant is rated Restaurant Guru's top Japanese restaurant in Burwood and we are happy to have tried a new restaurant.

Roses are Red, Roses for Me!

Look at these beautiful roses I was given! They are just so perfect and helps me remember that people are thoughtful and kind. Do you know that people are intrinsically trusting but over time and through their life experiences, they can become less trusting. This can be a problem when one automatically picks up on the negatives in people all the time and distrusts everyone. One cannot do life all by themselves. Gratitude is the best way to combat this way of thinking.

I too have to practise gratitude. It is too easy to pick on negatives but it only exacerbates the problem. Recently someone was made redundant which turned out to be a good payout for the said person, but caused a lot of angst for the remaining people because of the injustice of it (they hoped someone else would go instead) and the extra workload. I have been focusing on all the negative emotions which is wearing me down.

The receipt of these roses make me take a step back, and remind me to stop and smell the roses.

 

Vegify, Knoxfield

Many people were surprised when I told them that we had gone to a vegetarian restaurant for a celebration. I suppose it is a small subset of a wider group of food so why limit oneself to a small range of food when one can have the choice of eating vegetables and also meat on a special day? Vegetarian food actually need not be bland or simple. It can be very flavourful and special, as Vegify has shown.

We ordered the salt and pepper fish ($23). This is a mock fish dish, of course. No animals were harmed in the making of this dish! There were about 8 or 9 pieces of mock fish made of processed beancurd, deep fried in a very light and crispy batter and presented atop a bed of salad leaves. There were some very crispy rice krispies of some sort as garnish.

I did not expect too much but this dish was really delicious. Again, deep fried food is usually delicious. Oh dear, time to go on a cholestorol check again, I think!

We also ordered truo vege sambal ($22). This dish is a bit oily because usually sambal or chilli paste need to be bloomed in oil to release its fragrance. The veges in this dish were okra, snake beans and eggplant. The sambal did not have belacan or shrimp paste or dried shrimp so it taste a little different from the non vege version but it was good enough. 

 The menu is relatively small but since there is only 1 chef it is understandable. The food were delicious and varied enough to be able to select at least something you'll enjoy from the menu.

There is also a lunch menu of noodles and rice dishes which we have vowed to come back to try. This is probably one of the best Malaysian vegetarian restaurant we have been to in recent times. 

The place is small and busy so if you would like to try out this restaurant, be sure to make a booking.