Matsuki Izakaya, Mount Waverley

We are so blessed to be able to eat out and have a good meal. These days when everything is so expensive, a casual meal in a restaurant can easily cost a week's worth of groceries, let alone to go out for fine dining or even 'casual' fine dining.

To celebrate an ocassion, I found a new restaurant with no weekend surcharge and of a cuisine we like to eat. It is a small Japanese restaurant near the Mount Waverley train station. The downside is the restaurant has limited seats so we only had counter seats even though I had made a booking.

For entree, Gaz chose crispy unagi which was a deconstructed unagi roll atop a deep fried gow gee wrapper. It was very tasty.

We ordered a tempura bento set which came with three tempura shrimp and sweet potato, karaage chicken, salad and salmon sashimi. There was also miso soup, chawan mushi which tasted sweet (not my favourite, when normally I would breathe in Gaz's famous steamed eggs) and rice.

Assorted sashimi. Our favourite is the oysters, and scallops. The salmon is a sure winner too but the fish slices did not have much sweetness.. quite disappointing. 

Matsuki special roll. Gaz thought it was topped by sea urchin but the orange topping was actually spicy tuna with mayo. It is deep fried cucumber sushi, topped with spicy tuna, sprouts and tobiko, sprinkled with shichimi.

Overall, we were happy with the food and service. Price wise, it was not the cheapest of suburban Japanese restaurants but since there are some new and innovative dishes like the crispy unagi, it is probably positioning itself as slightly ahead of other suburban Japanese restaurants with the price to match. There is a 5% discount with cash payments and we used it to our advantage. The total bill came to about $103 with discount.