Menya Mappen Noodle Bar

I'm not religious and Vietnam doesn't have any really cool festivals or anything besides Tet, so I don't really look forward to celebrating anything all yet.

Except Lifeline Book Festival.

Its a nerds call to arms

I attend that with religious fervour. I request the day off, I have trouble sleeping, dreaming of all the books I buy and pack a wheelie bag with a water bottle ready for the day. The day of Lifeline, sees me on the train at 7am to get there by 8am for the grand opening.

It looks the same every year really.

Anyway, I bought a shit ton of books. I think I only spent $97 this year. That's actually not a lot for me, once I left the place with an entire shopping trolley full of books. It was like I was buying stuff for a book burning or something. Its really fun I think, there's an unpriced, a priced and a high quality section, unpriced is like dodgy old books you'd see from before the 70s, they cost about $1-3 each. The priced are books from the last ten or so years in relatively good condition, around the $2.50-5 range. While the wallet destroying high priced section is full of books from the last year or so, costing anywhere between $5-10 dollars a book.

What I love about Lifeline besides the immense amount of books is the feeling of finding a bargain there, time and time again. Most of my books are from there and there's always a sci fi section too. The high quality and priced section are my downfall and I usually buy $30-50 dollars worth of books there at any time. Sometimes books get placed in the wrong place and you can pick up the same book from the high quality section in the priced section for half the price. Or you find a book you've been wanting forever at Lifeline and clutch it to your chest like its the Holy Grail. Or finish off a book series that you wanted to finish but were reluctant to buy at full price.

Ermahgerd cherp berxs

You also discover lots and lots of authors and books you wouldn't otherwise read there too. Just like a library, I tend to recycle my books back to Lifeline the next year. Some of the authors I've read since I started going to Lifeline a few years back include Sarah Zettel, Brent Weeks, J.V Jones, John Grisham, Jilly Cooper, Gail Dayton, Peter V Brett, Glenda Larke, Erich Segal, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Judith Krantz and many, many more. Even with having a Kindle, cheap and an earnest Pastafarian, I still find myself getting lots of books here. I collect books I would find too expensive to buy first hand.

The weird thing is though, that even though the books are so cheap, you get weirdly stingy about buying so many? I would normally spend about $20-35 for a brand new book depending on whether or not I got a paperback or a hardback book and I buy them in groups of 2-5. I find myself going, well I have thirty books now and that's like $60, I better put a few back, yet how does that even make sense.

The last few days are always the best though because the books get heavily discounted, everything becomes fill a bag for $5, or high quality books are $2.50 or something like that. I try and go at least two or three times every time its in town. I go on the first day, work permitting, and a few times later during the week.

As well as the wonder of buying about 20 books for $100/60/20, I always get called around this time to meet up with old friends who also love books. This time I met up with N., one of my friends from uni that I trained with. We had a great day buying books and discussing work and then decided to high tail it home and get some food on the way.

We were walking around for quite a while before we found even a map. The store is outside on the very corner of the building, towards the under storey parking. I wouldn't ever think to walk down that way due to how dark and shady it looks.

Casually pointing you inside

Menya Mappen Noodle Bar was my first choice, cheap, cheerful, high ratings and well spoken of on the blogosphere. I've been meaning to go here for a while but I have no idea which shopping centre in Sunnybank is called what, with the exception of Market Square. I know there is also a Sunny Park and a Sunnybank Plaza, I never remember which is where.

Menya Mappen doesn't have a particularly extensive menu, everything is available in either soba or udon with a choice of hot or cold or with a half boiled egg. They have student discount of 10% off and a loyalty card.

It didn't photograph well

This is apparently new

Anyway, its got an interesting system. You rock up to the counter, order your meal, choose your additional hot toppings such as tempura flakes, a chicken karaage skewer, takoyaki, sausage tempura, vegetable tempura, fish cake tempura, bean curd skin, sweet pancakes and prawn tempura.

L-R, mixed veggie tempura, prawn tempura, fish tempura, chicken karaage, dumplings x4

L-R, Sausage tempura, sweet pancake, takoyaki, sweet bean curd

Same as above just a better picture of the food

There's a cold topping section with the drinks that comprise of picked veggies, kimchi, seaweed salad and pickled jellyfish. Also there's a green tea slushie machine that looks amazing, but I felt like that would be slightly too much.

L-R, mochi is the blurry white stuff, seaweed salad, pickles, kimchi, pickled jellyfish

At the end of the counters where you pay, there's also a box of green onions which you can only have ONE spoon of. As well as a water fountain with really low water pressure as well as a glimpse of the kitchen and where you have to put your trays back once you're done.

I chose the ontama mentaiko udon, a bowl of udon noodles covered in a light sauce with a half boiled egg and spicy cod roe caviar. I also got like one of each of the hot toppings, well almost, I picked up some takoyaki, a chicken karaage skewer and the fish cake skewer, oh an a little container of seaweed salad. Also helped myself to some boiling hot tempura sauce.

Yum!

The ontama is interesting, there's a bowl of eggs beside where you get the main meals and the guy serving us just cracked it open straight onto the top of our noodles. I was really surprised to see a half cooked egg slide onto my noodles! For some reason I was expecting an semi cooked egg to be placed on my bowl from like a covered dish of them or something. I guess it makes sense that they're just really soft boiled and just need to be cracked open! They are super gooey soft, they're less than soft boiled, the whites are still super blobby.

I swooshed it all together so it looked gross

The mentaiko was interesting, I've never had it before and it was creamy and spicy at the same time. Since the roe were so fine, it didn't have that distinct popping feeling that very large or even medium sized roe do. It was scooped out of a plastic bucket with an ice cream scoop and plopped onto my noodles. It had a faint fishy scent and made a delicious sauce when swirled in with my ontama and the udon sauce.

The hot fried items could've been better since we came just after lunch time peak hour and they'd obviously been sitting out for a little while. The takoyaki had 1-2 scant pieces of octopus and was covered in a flurry of bento flakes and tonkatsu sauce, nicely seasoned though. The golden fried skin was also wrinkly and a bit chewy because of how long it had been left out, lukewarm takoyaki is not as good as mouth scorching takoyaki.

L-R, fish cake tempura, chicken karaage, takoyaki

The fish cake tempura was terrible. I don't think it would've been any better as the fish cake turned super chewy as it was sliced super thin.

Chicken karaage on a skewer were really juicy, lightly marinated and still crispy good. One of the better chicken karaages I've had. N., was super excited to have these and she agreed that they were delicious as well.

Just the right size

The seaweed salad was not the best I've ever had. It could have been sourer but still had good texture, slippery and crunchy at the time.

N. choose number 14, whatever that was with soba, she also got the same hot toppings of chicken karaage, fish cake tempura and takoyaki. Unfortunately, she forgot the first rule of eating with a food blogger, you don't eat until the camera goes away. It was half gone by the time by the time I put away my camera. She was happily slurping down noodles and was telling me that it hitting the spot. We left full and happy. Headed straight home to read books.

On the other hand, I had the same dish again, several days later and had two bouts of vomitting at work. The same side dishes, except I didn't have seaweed salad or the fish cake tempura and I had the green tea slushie. Suspicious, but then I'm lactose intolerant and the slushie tasted like green tea ice cream.

Menya Mappen Noodle Bar
Atmosphere: 7, I would've given this a 10 but the lack of any sort of sunlight makes me inclined to think of this place as cute, charming hole. Its lovely and kitschy cute, but no matter how much you decorate a prison cell, it doesn't stop the fact that you're in prison.
Service: 5, we got greeted and farewelled like in all Japanese restaurants. Service was prompt and efficient. Most of it was self serve though.
Food: 7. It would've gotten an 8 if the food was hot! Really, really cheap food that still is good quality although the serving styles make me laugh

Himalayan Cafe

So I have a terrible sense of direction and so does my Boyfriend. I distrust buses because they go in a billion different directions. I'm also always strapped for time, with heading to work and getting home before dark before I turn into an ogre. This makes it very difficult for us to find somewhere new to go to, cause we don't know where we're going, I pick the wrong bus and by the time we get there and then its time for me to go home/work.

I've never been to New Farm, except that time I went there with H., to go to Cirque after work. I know there is an absolute shit ton of restaurants I want to go to in New Farm, the Smoke BBQ, Anise, Pablo and Ponycat, just to mention a few. If I somehow knew how to get there, I'd have a whole new area to explore.

West End is getting stale for me since I've been constantly going there for the last five months. That was also sort of the solution to my plans. The wonderful 199 bus to West End, on the way out heads to Teneriffe Ferry/the Valley/New Farm. Genius. I had no idea where I really wanted to go to, but I figured according to Urbanspoon maps, I could just wander up the main strip and choose whatevers.

Yayyyyyyy

We stopped somewhere in Brunswick Street near Shlix, where we also ended up going for dessert afterwards. We were super hungry, or at least I was, I couldn't decide where I wanted to go, everywhere smelt good, and I wanted to eat everything. I wanted to originally try some sort of Nepalese food, but I knew there was an Indonesian place, an American place, it was right near Fortitude Valley where a shit ton of Asian restaurants were. I chose Himalayan Cafe cause it was crazy ass full, like only two tables were empty and I couldn't take an interior shot without taking pictures of like 15 random people.

To avoid awkwardness, he pretended to take a photo of me

We had to wait a while before anyone noticed it but after that we were ushered outside and sat in one of the last tables. Inside was super noisy and full of communal dining tables, the decorations were gorgeous and I really wish I had the time to go back and take more photos because its beautiful really.

I would keptomanically take this

Pretty!

May positive forces be with every single living thing that exists

It was the same outside too, there were these really cool swirly silver lanterns and a heap of prayer flags above us. My Boyfriend also noticed this quote that he said reminded him of a universal form of, May the Force be with you.

We got some interesting looking cutlery, they have little ridged scallops pressed into the handles. They don't show up too well in the photos, but the added detail makes them feel odd in your hands.

Here is the menu, some of it is missing. I forgot to get pictures since I remembered they were already taken.

Bleh

He got a lemonade, turned out to be a bitter sweet lemonade from Phoenix Soda. There was a note that it was meant to be bitter sweet like home made lemonade but the bitterness reminded me of soda water.

Real mature.

On the other hand, I got dared to ordered the salted butter tea. Challenge accepted.

The waitress was very impressed when she heard our order. I did a brief google and apparently its a traditional tea made with lots of yak butter, for the high energy rich, nutritional content of butter and to restore chapped lips in freezing temperatures. You start the day by drinking large amounts of this and if you're at someone's house, the way you're supposed to drink it is a sip at a time and then the host refills your cup after each sip. Its also supposed to have a very distinctive flavour, with one of the mostly commonly used phrases being, "rancid or pungent." This blog I read summed it up nicely. A lot of websites were also saying that it wasn't uncommon for Western palates to be completely thrown off by the taste.

Metal+boiling water = burns

Looks unthreatening enough

When we were staring at the teapot, the waitress gave us this askance look and asked us if we had the drink before. When we said no, she gave this sort of embarrassed laugh and said that we probably wouldn't like it.

The tea tasted like a milky green tea, with a distinct creamy buttery flavour. It had a particular astringency to the flavour, I think that's why I'm thinking green tea, but they probably used a black tea, so maybe I'm thinking of a mix between the two or the fermented taste of pu-erh? Either way, I had a lot more of the tea, but my Boyfriend adds that it was my tea, so he didn't have much of it as he have liked.

We're eating this.

Not this.

I wanted an entrée, so we got the momo meat dumplings. He was making dodgy nerd jokes about it saying, NO NOT MOMO. These looked handmade, very noticeably so, with them all being various shapes and sized, but if you squint they were all vaguely pleated, lumpy and crescent shaped. There were six arranged around a mild curry dipping sauce.

Hmm the verdict is out

I'm unsure of these dumplings, having always grown up with wafer thin yum cha style dumplings. The dumpling skin was very thick, chewy and doughy. There was a spiced beef mince filling, it smelt familiar but I couldn't place the spices. They were pleasant though.

You don't make friends with salad

He ordered the manau khayala, boiled chicken marinated sesame, ginger and garlic paste with lemon juice on a plate of salad. I couldn't even taste these flavours at all and to me it was just boiled chicken. He agrees with me and couldn't taste any additional flavours in the chicken either. The salad was composed of lettuce leaves, skinless tomato, cucumber, coriander and carrot sticks. I didn't see the point of ordering salad at a restaurant, the price doesn't match with the effort involved. Although they did put a rose made out of tomato skin on the top of the dish. I can't do that but I've never tried before, so who knows?

Fan-cy.

On the other hand, I got the bakhara Himalayan, a slow cooked goat curry with a ginger and garlic paste, several other special spices that aren't mentioned as well as pumpkin and potato pieces and jasmine rice. It took a good half hour for this to arrive and my Boyfriend patiently waited despite me harassing him to eat his salad before it got warm.

I took like five blurry pictures, damn steam rising

It was a pretty attractive dish for a curry, with thick glossy sauce and large chunks of meat there. Although there wasn't much of an aroma to it. The meat was very tender, you poked it with a knife and it fell apart. The sauce was quite spicy with a mild additional burn to the sauce after every mouthful, my nose was watering but my Boyfriend disagreed and said it was just right. The potato and pumpkin were ignored.

I didn't particularly like it though, although my Boyfriend thought I did. I had a bit of heart burn afterwards until we got home and I also got a mild bout of food poisoning afterwards.

Himalayan Cafe
Atmosphere: 9, I really liked it, I like crowded places though and the decorations were lovely. 6 1/2 from my Boyfriend as he felt it was too crowded and if we had been sitting inside, we would've almost been sitting on top of other people.
Service: 5. They didn't notice us at all in the beginning, there's wasn't really a clear spot to stand so you be seated. So we were standing at the front desk for about 10 minutes before I got waitresses attention. After that though, we were seated, got our menus, offered drinks and ordered reasonably quickly. They were very quick to clear tables and seemed very friendly.
Food: 6, things were well made, but didn't match my palate, hence my low score. My Boyfriend gives it a 7, he adds the food was interesting.

 

I'll leave the Shlix review for another time, its probably more of a quick RJIE than anything else.

Also here's a book review!

This is the cover we have in Australia. Pretty

At the moment I've just finished read The Red Knight by Miles Cameron, first in the Traitor's Son trilogy. The Red Knight is a heavy fantasy story about an unnamed mercenary group of nasty men and women who get the job done. Nasty doesn't even begin to cover it, considering one of the passages in the book while the town is under siege describes them in no plain terms, as the kind of women raping, town burning pillagers that are only called heroes because they've been hired by the town in question.

They fight against the Wild, a fractious group of demons, wyverns, treants and other nasty beasts keen to destroy mankind unless regularly pushed back. They are lead by a man known only as the Red Knight or to his friends or underlings as the Captain. Young, brilliant, nobly born, well trained and with the luck of the devil himself. The Captain is charming, brash and fights like a cornered demon. He's also been bought up to be a fucking powerful mage and his family is shady as fuck.

The plot starts off with the group being hired to investigate the death of a nun in an attack from the Wild by a powerful Abbess. They get attacked by a wyvern, discovered the nun was a witch and killed with an arrow of witch bane, the only legitimate thing to nullify a mage's power, then shit goes crazy.

The world building is intricate with mystery lurking around every corner and the plot unfolds very smoothly to reveal new plot twists and characters. It really leaves you guessing and throws quite a few red herrings in your face when you're trying to figure out a mystery such as who the traitor is or what is so mysterious about the Captain's past that he's killed before to keep it a secret. I really like the characters in this book, even the villains.

They're all complex, immensely likeable and easy to relate to, even when they're full of huge amounts of wangst, they're mentally bashing themselves for being so pathetic, looking at you Captain. Bad Tom is a riot to read about, a six foot five, or is it six? Tall hill man who happily kills anything and anyone the Captain points him towards. Bad Tom has several fantastic scenes including one where he fights the current master of arms and almost gets them both killed, only to burst out laughing and say "I like you, you mad bastard." Bad Tom also goes into a massive pout when the Captain kill steals an ogre from him. The Queen is a sharp minded super hottie who acts like a dumb skank, her first scene has her lounging around naked admiring herself. Later on she masterminds the supply of the entire North war.

Occasionally the view points swap around from person to person, my favourite being the passages from the golden bear, the different perspectives are intriguing. The magic system is interesting but not really well explored I think, Phantasms are what they're called and they're all set up in "workings", you need to know a working to use magic. These workings are all in storage place in your mind that you shape into an immense building. Its being highly touted around the internets as a very good first novel.

Challenge Accepted.

My friend, the lovely Yassmin of Redefining the Narrative, has challenged me to participate in the Australian Women's Writer 2013 challenge.

Classy

This is a challenge for anyone of any age and gender to publicly post a list of books or book reviews that they want to achieve for the year. Its linked in with Google+ and GoodReads, you nominate your blog and hopefully write down an introductory blog post. Every time you review, if you've opted to review books, you're supposed to link back to their page and insert details about the book. Here are the details by the way.

I see that Yassmin hasn't done this but I will. I don't know how many books I'll read this year, Yass and I read a book in about 2-3 hours. That is a lot of books. The listed most is like 10 books, that's like a weeks reading for us if we have time between work and stuff. Since the beginning of this year I can say I've read at least eight books already that I can recall.

Some of the books I intend to read for this year?

Books I've yet to read, that I own:
Too many to name really.

Books that are eventually coming out:
Legion - Brandon Sanderson (Standalone)
Steelheart - Brandon Sanderson (Standalone)
The Daylight War - Peter V Brett. (Book 3 of the Demon Cycle)
Blood Dragons - Robin Hobb - (Book 4 of the Rain Wilds Chronicles)

Books that I hope will be released:
The third book in the Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch
The third book in the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
The second book in the Stormlight Chronicles by Brandon Sanderson
The third book in the Lightbringer series by Brett Weeks

Malaya Corner

I am in a love/hate relationship with Malaya Corner, when its good the food is fantastic, I dream about it, I've gone here for my birthday and my sister's, it arrives in huge proportions and with such a great price. When its bad, its given me food poisoning in the past, I've been left unsatisfied, the proportions have still been huge but mostly untouched and the price makes me give up my hard earned cash bitterly. 

This time was one of those hate times.

We went here the night my mum came home from Vietnam, one of my aunts came with us too. It was a very busy Thursday night so please excuse the lack of photos, the interior is laid out like a numbered dining hall with the tables in straight lines and all square tables too. There are menus up as decorations. There are help yourself utensils and the water and tea are self service for your own convenience. Its crowded, very noisy and the waiters swoop down on you like hawks. I love it.

Here are the menus. I don't think anyone has blogged a photo of them before, and no wonder because they're your typical Asian diner laminated sticky menus. They reflect light like a pale girls legs in summer and look just as good in a photo. I mean, unless you like that sort of thing.

I was keen for the salt and pepper white bait as a starter but I was a bit reluctant since I've been harassed before, on many occasions, about being greedy and a fattie. My family are never keen for entrees, they just want to get stuck in with eating mains, all business you see. They generously allowed me to order an entrée, a separate main for myself as well as our stock standard plate of crispy brown gravy vegetarian noodles. Really generous of them since I was paying and all.

So delicious

Anyway the salt and pepper white bait was the pick of the day. They were light, crispy while still being soft in the centre and there was a really good salty tang in the batter.The fish used were quite large which was a nice change. There were massive chunks of chilli for garnish though and they were really hot, my aunt accidentally picked one up and was quietly choking on it and downed several glasses of tea to drown the flavour.

My aunt and mum chose the vegetarian spring rolls for their entrée. They told me it was delicious and they had it on several other occasions. It was terrible, my mum makes a better vegetarian spring roll by far. It was really hard to get a good picture of it as it was steaming hot and fogging up. The filling was mostly molten vermicilli noodles with a bit of seaweed, mushroom and carrot mixed in so I felt the filling was terrible. On the other hand, they were crunchy, perfectly proportioned and served with a really good sweet and sour sauce.

So perfect looking

So soggy looking bleh

The char kway teow here, my beloved char kway teow, you were a mistake. There were lap cheong sausage, small prawns, bean sprouts, pork fat, garlic chives, egg, garlic and onion.There was no fragrance, the colour was very pale, it was very bland in texture, the two noodles were confusing for me and I think it should just be rice noodles none of this hokkien noodle stuff. I was very disappointed with this meal.

Blehhhhhhhhhhhh

We always order crispy vegetarian gravy noodles. Always. It first started when my sister, VGirl, came with us, and now its just our standard filler meal. Its a slippery mess of crunchy vegetables, large oyster mushrooms, bok choy, bean curd skin, black cloud fungus, carrot, broccoli, bean sprouts and onion. Its a pretty solid meal, its freaking huge and we nearly always bring home a takeaway container of the stuff with us. When everything else is shit here, the vegetarian noodles are always the same, solid.

Glistening with gravy, thick, unctuous gravy

So even on this bitter note, I still love you Malaya Corner and I'll go visit you again sometime in the future. Be good to me next time.

Malaya Corner
Atmosphere: 8, loud, messy Asian place with help yourself everything, my perfect restaurant for cheap eats.
Service: 6, prompt menus and orders. Really long wait in between meals with the noodles arriving almost 20 minutes behind everything else when we were crazy full with no apology or anything.
Food: 3, it was terrible this time around. I regret wasting my time eating here this time.