Wagaya

I remember when Wagaya first opened, I was so excited to see it here as I had been to its flagship store in Sydney. It was on Urbanspoon talk of the town for almost two years before it finally dropped off. What was special about the Wagaya chain and its sister stores, was that you could do all your ordering on iPad screens where you could see an image of the food, a brief description as well as the price. You could also easily order food and ensure that it was freshly made, especially with dicey things like sushi. The restaurant is set out into corridors of cozy little booths surrounding a iPad, which is slightly dimly light and also quite soundproofed against other diners. The very back of the restaurant contains larger sitting rooms which you can hire and sit anywhere from 10+ people quite comfortably.

Its a bit hard to find

You can check out their entire menu online, although there are a few additions that they always seem to be working on. Brisbane only lunch menu.  Here is their dinner menu. Their extensive drink and cocktail menu.

The screen! Above it are rules to follow.

Jubi was keen for a salad and requested the tofu and seaweed salad. It contains a mass of bonito flakes, rocket, spinach, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, corn, soft blobs of tofu under it all and a mass of slippery green seaweed on top. The combination of flavours was interesting and I quite liked this salad, although the dressing was strong and odd, a mix of seaweed salad dressing and something else. T., has never really eaten Japanese food before so we bullied her into eating some crunchy green seaweed and she said it was quite nice. The tongs that came with this dish however, are stupidly made, they are quite heavy and don't pinch things very well.

Jumbly

I wanted edamame as a snack and Jubi curiously agreed. She said she had never tried it before and that she had seen it on anime and in manga before. Edamame are young hairy soy bean pods boiled in a salt/soy sauce mixture, they are normally served cold, you just pop out the beans and eat them while discarding the pods. Despite the strong sounding taste of having things boiled in soy sauce, the flavour is very subtle in the beans themselves. These were served slightly warm which I disliked, but the flavour was quite good. After some initial hesitation and watching what I did with them, Jubi and T., began eating them as well. They polished off most of them I think. I was busy ordering more food!

Hairy

Takoyaki!You can't really see it to be honest, as there is stupid amounts of bonito and mayonnaise covering them but there were four squishy octopus balls there. I like takoyaki, it has that crisp golden shell, before yielding to a creamy filling with tender bits of octopus throughout it. This one wasn't particularly good as I found the octopus to be particularly chewy. I bullied T., into eating this as well and she said she really liked it but I think found her discretely spitting out the bits of octopus into her tissue.

I've had better ):

We picked out vegetable tempura as well. I'm not really a fan of tempura vegetables, most because they are deceptively fried and sometimes the vegetables chosen are weird. We had carrot, pumpkin, zucchini and lastly red and green capsicum. Jubi ate most of this. It was light, bubbly golden and crunchy.

I got pork gyoza as well. These were quite tiny, their skins weren't as crunchy as I'd like although the filling was quite tasty. They were still a little wet from being boiled despite having being fried.

I thought I had taken more pictures of the drinks we ordered but I guess not. This was the Topaz mocktail, a mixture of calpis, grapefruit juice and some other things I cannot recall. T., had this drink and like it more than my Garnet drink.

Shio ramen was picked next! A soy sauce based soup that was warm and creamy. There was a surprising spice to the soup that caught me off guard at first, I choked on my first swallow and had chilli burn. T., and Jubi were forewarned by me and said it wasn't particularly spicy, guess it was just when you were surprised. There were egg noodles, seaweed, green onion and a soy boiled egg in this stock.

Yakitori, a soy sauce based chicken skewer were tender, juicy and well seasoned. We were getting really full by this stage.

Salmon skewers were gobbled up by Jubi. I passed despite normally liking salmon.

This was the chicken katsu crunch roll, chicken katsu cutlets, avocado, sushi rice and topped with a layer of golden panko crumb. These were tasty but we had had so much, I basically just shredded it to pieces from boredom.

Wagaya:
Atmosphere: 8,
Service: 5, pretty average despite its touch screen ordering. I wish the waiters grabbed more plates when they were clearing tables.
Food: 6, I feel like my standards have increased since I've started going here. It is a very good starting block for people who haven't had Japanese before. The cocktails are still as good as ever however and I'd gladly go back for those alone.