Madtongsan I

So one day, Yass from Redefining the Narrative, and I got to talking about blogging. She's had her political/racing/rigs blog going for a few months longer than this hodgepodge food/book thing I've got going here. We talked about how great it was when inspiration struck you and you blogged entire posts in a few minutes, when you were stuck for ideas and had to put up utter crap, forgetting topics you wanted to talk about, guilt over lack of updates, trying futilely to build up a cache of soon-to-be-published blog posts in case times got rough and lastly about fan bases.

 Yass told me she was building up a steady fan base and I would believe it, since she is a very popular girl and whenever she links something on Facebook, she has over a fifty likes and comments. Me? I get friends messaging me telling me that they secretly read and love my blog, like its a drug or something.

I told her I was averaging, at time of writing, anywhere between 50-70 views a day, not huge but fair. I read that one of the food blogs I follow, The Food Pornographer, averages 2000-5000, Not Quite Nigella, has 250, 000 unique views a month and has been blogging full time since 2009. That is ridiculously huge popular amounts, and I can only hope I one day get that popular. Anyway, Yass revealed that her blog doesn't get that many views, which is fair enough, food blogs have more mainstream appeal than political blogs.

I countered with the fact that despite being a mechanical engineer, Yass has been published on quite a few different occasions, she's got a profile over at the Brisbane Times and recently been in a Griffith University publication featuring upcoming women. She's been on the ABC news being interviewed on what it was like as a young female Muslim engineer on the rigs.

We met up for lunch on one of her crazy days off, where she meets like ten people in a day and tries to fit a month of socialization in three days off. I was the third slot of the day at the prized time of noon, by 11.30am, she had already met up with two people and had about five or six more things to do before she went home for the day.

We were politely arguing over where to go to, I was acceding to Yass snce she's eats halal food and I dislike vegetarian food and not the biggest fan of seafood. While Yass insisted I choose since I'm the food blogger and that she is used to eating seafood/vegetarian. She said there was an Indonesian place that she liked that she wanted to show me, it was Satay Club, we'd been there twice together. So we picked this place!

I thought there would be a website for some reason since Madtongsan has three restaurants and all but nope. So here are my blurry window shots, because I thought I wouldn't have to use these photos.

How to BiBimBap

Woah! If you had my original pic, you can zoom in and see all the words lololol

Woah legible words!

We picked a seafood pancake as an entree, hae mul jeon. Yass and I liked the seafood pancake, my Boyfriend didn't. It was really crunchy and the pancake batter was nice and salty, the dipping sauce was vinegary/soy flavoured. There were teeny, tiny clams all throughout the pancake, I've actually never seen ones that small before. They probably only 1cm in size. As well as tiny baby octopus pieces, you can see a tentacle poking out here and there.

Plain looking but crunchy and tasty

We only got two banchan, a very small dish of overly salty cabbage kimchi and those marinated potato cubes that are a bit sweet.

So many carbs!

I recommended Yass get the vegetarian japchae since I thought she would like it and I was right! Her dish arrived first and it oddly came with a side of rice and salad. I don't know, I feel like you get either rice or noodles for your carb serve, rice AND noodles is just overkill. Noodles are generally tastier but rice is so handy for absorbing sauces. This was a lovely japchae, crunchy julienned carrot, capsicum and onion pieces on a darkened, sauce coated sweet potato glass noodle. It was well seasoned, but I think the one I make is better.

THE SOUP IS LAVA!

I got the soon doo bu jji gae, a red hot spicy sofu tofu, seafood and vegetable soup topped with a raw egg. It also came in a stone hot pot which was sizzling hot and causing the sides to bubble when I got it. If you're thinking, woah that looks spicy! You weren't wrong. It was so spicy, I could barely drink the soup. I was fishing out pieces of vegetables and scooping bits onto the little bowl of rice I had to eat it with and then frantically trying to stop my streaming nose from dripping.

This rice is surprisingly cute and well presented

The soup was very flavoursome but overwhelming spicy, it was full of those little tiny clams and baby octopus pieces like the seafood pancake was. The softness of the tofu and egg made it a bit unexciting for me, but it would be good comfort food if your sick stomach loved spicy things! The rice bowl is super cute at least I think so! Its got a perfectly domed top and the grains look nice and fluffy.

Also super spicy.

He got the dol sot kimchi udon, which was the dish I originally wanted. It had large perfectly cooked prawns, fat udon noodles, cucumber, carrot, chunks of cabbage kimchi, onions, tiny clams and tiny baby octopus pieces. Its also a super spicy dish as you can tell from the red hot glow. We ended up swapping food halfway through our meal.

Cute origami box!

They also made a cute box for us to put the prawn shells in.

Madtongsan I
Atmosphere: 6, little alleyway Asian shop. Fast service and a good place to go for a catch up after work, or a quick takeaway business lunch.
Service: 8, I really liked that little box they made. Clever and forward thinking! They were very friendly and made the very good decision of repeating our order back to us to confirm what we had chosen, not many places do that.
Food: 6, super spicy which hard to detect at all flavours at all really. The portions were really large and it had a nice variety of ingredients with every dish. The pancake was delicious as was the japchae I tried, I think if you like your food super spicy, this place is a winner.