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