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The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton

Saturday 28 June 2008

Recommended Eats in Cairns, Qld Australia

During our very short stay in Cairns, we ate some good tucker and I feel it's my duty to pass the good word along, because good eats always enhance one's holiday/trip to a different city. (We also had a bad dining experience at one of the restaurants on the Esplanade where you'd expect good service for the price they ask (including having to wait more than 20 minutes for someone to take our payment for the dinner bill - and this was on a weeknight when the restaurant was perhaps only half-full!), but I'm not about to waste my time writing about that.)

Breakfast, brunch or lunch

Head to Hide's Coffee Cafe (Shop 7, 87 Lake Street) for some good breakfast or lunch under $10. We arrived in Cairns hungry and starving at 6:30am because - annoyingly - our flight did not serve us any breakfast! But a huge scone with jam 'n cream (AU$3.50) and a plate of bacon, eggs & toast (AU$7.50) really hit the hunger spot in our bellies. Not a very healthy breakfast choice (although there were healthier options available at this cafe like muesli, yoghurt and fruit), but when you're pregnant and hungry at 7am in the morning when no other shops are open, you'll also want a hearty and satisfying brekkie.

Devonshire-style scone and bacon & eggs at Hide's:


Another good lunch eats was the good ol' doner kebab, which I hadn't eaten for years! In Perth, a fried egg is an optional (delicious) extra in doner kebabs, but in Cairns (and Brisbane) we found that the optional fried egg was absent from the menu. Nevertheless, the doner kebab sans egg was still good - and hummus, garlic sauce and sour cream go really well together on the palate. There are a couple of kebab stalls on the Esplanade (one of which is open for 24 hours), and the kebab pictured below is from Oz Kebab in the food court at the Central Shopping Centre. (This Wikipedia entry gives a good description of the various types of doner kebabs available around the world.)

A doner kebab:


Dinner

We had an excellent meal at Donnini's Ciao Italia at the Pier Marketplace on the Esplanade. Donnini's serves Italian cuisine, and features indoor and outdoor dining options. The atmosphere was wonderfully relaxed, and our waitress' service was commendable - she was friendly, helpful and very good at her job (the others seemed slack compared to her). The menu offered the usual entree options like bruschetta and garlic bread, and there are several options for pizza and pasta as well as non-pizza/pasta main courses of seafood, poultry and meat. There was also a menu of daily specials available.

To start with, we ordered the bruschetta of the day: Roasted Pumpkin Bruschetta (AU$8.90). It didn't come out in the usual style we were used to (slices of bread with toppings), but instead was served pizza-style (see photo). The roasted flavours of the pumpkin was beautiful, and went well with the cheese.

Roasted Pumpkin Bruschetta:


For mains, Rob ordered the Oven-baked Barramundi Rolls (AU$34.90) which had a leek and prawn filling with saffron, chive and butter sauce, served on top sautéed spinach. It was good, although the barramundi was little over-cooked (we've come to expect overcooked fish and seafood outside of Japan). The buttery sauce was a good accompaniment and added extra flavours to the relatively mild barramundi flesh. I ordered the Seafood Linguine containing salmon, scallop, spinach and chunks of tomatoes, and it was satisfyingly good. I opted for the smaller entree-sized portion (AU$17.90) which was a fairly generous portion and I had a little trouble with it. I would definitely not have been able to tackle the mains-sized portion of this pasta dish!

Seafood Linguine and Oven-baked Barramundi Rolls:


We were pretty full by the time we'd finished with our main courses, but we spotted Trio di Cannoli (AU$12.95) on the daily specials menu and were curious about it. So we enquired our friendly waitress about this dessert who highly recommended the dessert ("to die for" were the words she used). Apparently it used to be on the regular menu and people would drop by the restaurant just for these cannoli. Needless to say, we didn't hesitate to order this dessert. I am not usually a big fan of custard- or cream-filled pastries like profiterole because they can become soggy and soggy pastry is not a very nice texture on the tongue. However, these cannoli were very well-made and the waitress was right - they were very good indeed. As the name suggests, there were three types of fillings: strawberry, chocolate and vanilla for each of the cannoli. The cannoli were served three sauces: strawberry sauce, chocolate sauce and runny custard, placed at complementary sections of the plate (e.g. the chocolate sauce was placed between the strawberry and vanilla cannoli). And in the middle of the plate was a scoop of chocolate chip gelato which was heavenly on its own. And the pastry was divine - crisp and perfectly baked, it was the highlight of the dish. Look at me going on and on about the dessert - you'd think that I'm a pastry lover!

Delicious Cannoli!


The cost of this dinner for two came to around AU$80, and it was worth every cent we paid. That little extra effort put in by the waitress while serving us made the dining experience that much nicer.

Wednesday 25 June 2008

Back to the daily grind

So we're back in Tokyo after spending 1 week in Queensland: 2 nights in Cairns where there were so many Japanese people (and Japanese signs!) that it felt like we'd never left Japan; and the rest of the time in Brisbane where we met and hung out with lots of wonderful friendly Greek people and ate plenty of Greek food. The main highlight of Cairns for me was spotting crocodiles in the wild, and in Brisbane I experienced my first Greek wedding!

Of course I took hundreds of photos but they will take some time to organise before I can share them on my journal. In the meantime, here's a shot of us atop the canopy of the beautiful Daintree rainforest north of Cairns. (Friends and family back home in Australia have been bugging me to see photos of me looking pregnant, but I don't have many shots of me because my place is behind the camera, not in front of it.)

Enjoying the fresh rainforest air:


Speaking of looking pregnant, here are some amusing things I've noticed:

- I really ought to steer away from wearing light-coloured tops. My protruding belly (which I sometimes forget I have) catches dripping food and juices - a problem because I often don't eat at the table.
- I often bump my protruding belly on table corners, chairs and other waist-high objects as I walk "around" them because I do sometimes forget I have a belly now. And yes, it hurts when that happens!
- I don't really look pregnant if you look at me front-on, but my profile shows a definite pregnant belly. I suppose it's a good thing I'm not growing sideways instead!

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Away for one week...

In Brisbane at the moment for a family wedding. Will be back on in about a week's time. Stay tuned.

Saturday 14 June 2008

Yunnan Cuisine @ Kakyoubei, Tokyo

We were in Akihabara Electric Town on Sunday for some lunch and printer shopping - at the time, we were blissfully unaware of the stabbing incident that had happened in Akihabara shortly before our visit. Thankfully we are not a case of being at the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time.

So we were in the area to try out a Chinese restaurant that was highly recommended to us. One of Rob's Japanese colleagues has been enthusiastically recommending great places to eat in Tokyo and so far we haven't been disappointed with his reccommendations. Kakyoubei specialises in Yunnan cuisine, which in his opinion is one of the best Chinese restaurant around and is very reasonably priced. According to him, it's improbable that we'd have to pay more than 3500yen per person, "or your stomach will explode in happiness" - his words! Great for us, because we've been searching during our two years in Japan for tasty authentically prepared Chinese cuisine in Japan that doesn't cost a bomb. It is located next to the Akihabara electronic district in an area that could easily pass off as a mini-Chinatown - there were countless Chinese restaurants, and there were quite a lot of Chinese people milling about on the streets (I could hear passing pedestrians talking some form of Chinese dialect).

From what I could tell, there were quite a few offal dishes offered at this place. I actually quite like eating Chinese offal dishes, but Rob absolutely detests them. Unfortunately, there wasn't any English menu available, so I was working very hard using what little kanji knowledge I have to decipher the menu items to ensure I do not accidentally order an offal dish. Thank goodness for accompanying photos on the menu, which alerted which were offal dishes, discernible mostly from how I remember what they look like. I am not very familiar with Yunnan cuisine, so I wasn't really sure what would be good to order. Fortunately for us, one of the menu pages was titled (in Japanese) "This month's recommended original cooking" which gave us a good idea of popular Yunnan-style dishes. There was also a lunch menu which listed maybe six or seven set courses that you can choose for around 800yen, and the lunch course included the featured dish as well as soup, rice, vegetables and dessert.

I ordered the second most popular item on the menu, a pork dish called 千張肉 (1280yen) which I translate as One Thousand Pork (any help here from those with Chinese/Japanese abilities?). It's made with fatty pork belly sliced and placed over a mound of sansai (wild vegetables). This was delicious, but we stayed relatively healthy and did what most Chinese wouldn't do: discard the fat. I loved the vegetable underneath the pork - it tasted familiar like I've eaten it many times before in Chinese dishes yet I can't remember when and where and how. Perhaps it's one of those ubiquitous vegetables found in many various dishes as an accompaniment rather than a feature.

The 'One Thousand Pork' as it was served, and close-up of what's underneath:


Mapo Tofu was on the menu, which Rob told me he's never had before. It's such a common Chinese dish that I felt inclined to order it for Rob's sake. I ordered the lunch set (780yen) but you can also order mapo tofu on its own (880yen). It was made with kinu (silk) tofu, which I thought was a bit unusual because usually the firm tofu is preferred for mapo tofu, perhaps because they disintegrated too readily into little pieces during the cooking process. However, the silken tofu cubes in this dish held their shape very well, and I do prefer silken tofu over the firm ones anyway. I didn't think the dish was spicy enough, and the amount of oil in the dish was on the excessive side, yet we enjoyed it well enough. The serving was rather large, and I was surprised when we finished the plate - I would have a lot of trouble finishing this as a set meal on my own. It doesn't contain any meat so it'd be a good vegetarian option.

The final dish we ordered was 老婆洋芋 (980yen) which translates literally to Old Grandma's Western Potatoes - once again, I'm certain my translation is erroneous so I'd be grateful for any help! It's basically fried potatoes, and it was really scrumptious! Completely carbs and fat, it's probably not a very healthy balanced dish to have on its own as a meal, but there's no denying the fact that it was delicious!

Mapo Tofu Lunch Set, and the 'OId Grandma's Western Potatoes':


These dishes really filled us up, but we paid less than 3000yen for everything. The food was pretty good, definitely authentically prepared and not at all Japanised (I also heard the staff and chef conversing in some Chinese dialect, not one I recognise though). The only negative point I would give this restaurant is the unhealthy amount of oil used in the dishes! However, this ranks as one of the better Chinese meals we've had in Japan, and definitely the cheapest!

Thursday 12 June 2008

Lunch @ Gordon Ramsay, Tokyo

On Saturday, we lunched with the lovely Shan and her hubby Leigh at the Gordon Ramsay in the swanky Conrad Hotel. Shan found the restaurant a few weeks ago and suggested that we try the food, to which Rob and I happily agreed. I've never watched Ramsay's shows, but I have heard of him because he is quite prominent in the foodie world. It would probably be true to say that his reputation of possessing a fierce temper and a mouth that uses colourful language is probably more well-known than his chef abilities. He's been awarded a total of 12 Michelin stars, which is reason enough to try yet another celebrity chef's restaurant.

The restaurant atmosphere was sophisticated and elegant to match the hotel's standard. The service was impeccable with attentive waitstaff to ensure that we were comfortable and happy whilst under their care. This restaurant certainly caters well to the foreign clientele. From our table, we enjoyed a view of part of the open kitchen - I love watching hustle and bustle of the kitchen as chefs prepare food and plates them with detail and care. There were set menu priced from 4000yen (~AU$40) and a-la-carte dishes were also available. The Lunch Set Course (4000yen) was a 3-course meal with two options for each course. There was also a Tasting Lunch Menu (6500yen) which include one or two extra course (most of which were available on the lunch course) and a complimentary champagne or fruit juice for the ladies (actually, we couldn't really figure out whether the complimentary drink was for everyone, or ladies' only). And then there were other more expensive set courses available if you feel like indulging in the more expensive ingredients. Unfortunately for me, I forgot to take notes of the menu, so the following (boring, unimaginative) names of the dishes are by yours truly and not the restaurant.

View of the kitchen from our table; and arguably the lovelier half of our table:


The four of us liked the look of the Lunch Set, and between Rob and me, we ordered both options for each course except for the entree. Somehow we'd unknowingly ordered the same entree, so unfortunately we couldn't try the Quail Egg creation that was the other option. However, the Asparagus Salad was pretty good, carefully assembled and beautifully presented in a geometric kinda way. The leafy salad ring had scatterings of hazelnuts which gave a pleasant contrast of texture. Simple is best for asparagus, which was the treatment given to these stalks, and it was a great start to the meal. Throughout the meal, we were served warmed bread which was a great filler for those with bigger appetites.

Entree: Asparagus Salad:


For the main course, we had the option of the Ocean Trout Pavé or the Chicken Medallions. The trout was deliciously crispy, and served with minimal sauce and seasoning which is the best way I like to enjoy a good fish fillet. The cubes of beetroot and rounds of fried potatoes were also delicious, and contributed nicely to the gorgeous geometric presentation. The chicken was served with a creamy foie gras sauce which was a nice way to update a fairly common meat. The chicken breast meat was tender and moist, and we wondered briefly how the medallions were so neatly carved out of the chicken breast.

Ocean Trout Pavé; and Chicken Medallions:


Dessert was either Earl Grey Parfait with Granita or Banana Pannacotta. The parfait was really gorgeously assembled, and once again I love the geometrical presentation. It was delicious, with the panes of crunchy caramel providing a lovely contrast of texture to the softer parfait filling. The parfait filling comprised of a fairly solid custard base, cream of earl grey and topped with red granita. All these were a delight on the tongue from the custard base to the smooth cream to the cool frozen granita chunks. The banana pannacotta strangely did not have much banana flavouring. Rob reckons it tasted more like passionfruit. The thin crisp chocolate layer on top of the pannacotta was fun to break through, but I thought that this dessert option paled in comparison to the Earl Grey Parfait, both in taste and presentation. We were then served our coffees and teas.

Earl Grey Parfait; and Banana Pannacotta:


We had a great time with wonderful company. Time flew by quickly and before we knew it, we'd already spent almost 3 hours eating and chatting. Topics of food, careers, babies and living the expat life in Tokyo dominated our conversation. Thanks Shan and Leigh! It's our turn next time :)

Friday 6 June 2008

Birthday party

On Sunday, Rob and I were invited to my former student's house for lunch to celebrate her son's first birthday. I was informed that it was a family affair, but I didn't realise that we were going to be the only guests! We felt very honoured and special. Mariko prepared an amazing spread of food and we ate so much, ranging from a delicious home-made soup and hambagu (hamburg) steak to a yummy seafood paella fare. The food were really good, and Mariko should really be commended for her efforts because she recently returned back to the workforce full-time (hence the status of 'former student'). She is what I call a super-mum! It was also my first time meeting her husband, who also spoke really good English.

Her baby son is gorgeous, and is always so happy to see me whenever I came around for weekly lessons. Apparently he loves women but dislikes men, but Rob - with his charisma and charms, of course - managed to get this baby smiling and giggling in no time (lots of funny faces were pulled). At one point after the meal, the baby was taken out of his baby chair and put on the table. He crawled towards Rob and repeatedly touched his forehead to Rob's forehead - babies love doing that to Rob for some reason. Anyway, it made for some good shots, taken with Mariko's camera.

The little boy bonding with Rob, and the delicious birthday cake which was a light fluffy Japanese-style cheesecake (next to the box of brownies I brought)


We had a great time getting to know yet another Japanese family. I think it's important to widen our network in Japan with Japanese people, especially if we're intending to stay here long-term.

Wednesday 4 June 2008

Malaysian @ Mahathir Restaurant, Tokyo

After I wrote a series of journal entries to give an introduction to the Malaysian food we ate on our February trip to Malaysia, a couple of my friends in Japan expressed they'd never had Malaysian food before, and that they'd love to try it. Unfortunately, Malaysian restaurants are a bit of a rarity in Japan so it wasn't like we could bring them to the closest one to sample Malaysian dishes. My friend Shan did a little internet search for Malaysian restaurants in Tokyo, and she found Mahathir Restaurant, interestingly named after the former Prime Minister of Malaysia (read this article for more information on the restaurant's name). The restaurant is in Shinjuku district, but tucked away from the busiest areas and is located close to Shin Okubo station which is only one stop from Shinjuku station on the Yamanote Line.

Two weekends ago (yeah, I know, I'm a bit behind in blogging), Kim was in Tokyo for the weekend, and we were meeting up for dinner on Sunday. Since I was craving for some Malaysian noodles, and since Kim was one of my friends who'd expressed an interest in trying Malaysian food, it wasn't difficult deciding where to go for dinner. We were greeted by an orangutan toy hanging near the entrance, and there were several more orangutans hanging on the wall of the dining area. It's a small, cozy restaurant that could sit about 30, and it got pretty full pretty during the peak dinner hour that Sunday. The owner showed us to our table and since we were the first customers for the day, I had a chance to chat and find out more about the owner's background (it was really so that I could suss out what type of dishes to order, for example, if they were from Penang, then Penang dishes would be safe to order). The restaurant is run by a Malaysian Chinese man and his wife, from the northern states of the west Malaysia. From what I could hear, they speak the Hokkien dialect, so I knew that at least their noodles would be good! However, the menu offerings were not limited to Malaysian Chinese dishes, and many Malay, Indian and even Nonya dishes were available for us to choose from. The prices of each dish start from 1200yen (~AU$12), and there were many meat, vegetables, rice and noodle dishes to choose from. So many, in fact, that Kim was amazed at how big the menu was considering the relatively small size of the restaurant.

This group shot gives an idea of the restaurant's interior:


We ordered Char Kuey Teow (fried flat rice noodles) which had some prawns but unfortunately no seeham (cockles). It was well-seasoned and greasy, just as it ought to be. Next came Beef Rendang, which is a type of dry curry stew with beef, a popular and delicious Malay dish. This one not as dry as ones I'm used to, nor was the meat cooked to the point of falling apart, but it was still delicious and spicy.

Char Kuey Teow and Beef Rendang:


For vegetables, we ordered some Kangkung Sambal (at 1200yen, it was the most expensive kangkung I've ever ordered!) which was spicy but also quite oily. We also wanted some fish, and the Nonya Fish was recommended by the owner himself. Crispy deep-fried fish with a tangy sweet sauce - I'm not certain what makes this dish Nonya-style (my mum is of Nonya), but it was a good dish. We ordered some plain nasi lemak (coconut rice) to eat with the food - it was very fragrant and full of coconut flavour.

Kangkung Sambal and Nonya-style Fish (the plate of coconut rice is peeking at the top left corner of the fish shot:


For dessert, we ordered the Durian Ice-cream which is made on premises with real durian! We were really excited because we hadn't eaten durians for ages, and we weren't disappointed. It was really good, and we could taste bits and pieces of durian flesh in the ice cream. I'm surprised that the owner could source the fruit inside Japan as I'm certain that the smell would be far too strong for the sensitive Japanese palates. Sigh, I want to eat some durian. We also ordered some Momo Cha-Cha (the correct term is actually bubur cha-cha, I think "momo" is a Chinese slang), which is a popular Nonya dessert made with taro, sweet potatoes and tapioca pearls in a sweet coconut soup. We had the choice of having it warm or chilled, and we went with cold. It was nice, but I still prefer the ones my parents use to make at home.

Durian Ice-cream and Bubur Cha-Cha:


The bill came to around 8500yen (including drinks) which is probably the most I've paid for a Malaysian meal. I guess rarity comes with a price, and it's a price I'm willing to pay to satisfy my cravings for spicy, robust Malaysian fare.