Dapur Dahlia

I love Malaysian food so its a wonder that I hadn't already been to Dapur Dahlia in my travels! I decided that VGirl and her boyfriend, Zbag, JGirl, Dr S., and myself, should all head here for dinner one day.

Dapur Dahlia is a bit hard to spot, its pretty near to the Pizza Hut/Night Owl store in Upper Mount Gravatt so keep an eye out for that. Parking is a bit limited since its not particularly a big shopping lot. This restaurant is super popular, while the Indian restaurant beside it had barely any customers the entire time we were there. Perhaps they should expand that way?

This place!

The restaurant is extremely small by the way, not to mention the furniture is pretty small and uncomfortable to sit on. We had to wait about 20 minutes to get a table simply for the fact that there are only about . . . 8 tables in the entire place, the majority of which end up being put together due to limited tabletop space. In short, I hate this tiny restaurant's atmosphere!

Here is their collection of menus.

We all got random drinks. VGirl got this Soda Bandung, aka iced rose water soda. It's bright pink and icy cold, it also tastes exactly like creaming soda, surprise!

Fave for VGirl

I got the traditional teh ais, thick black tea and condensed milk thats been stretched. Zero stretching here, there is no foamy top at all! That being said its delicious, but what more do you expect from condensed milk drinks?

Love condensed milk

Zbag picked ais limau, a black tea with lime juice added. It was a very refreshing and sweet iced tea flavour.

Yummy

I made VGirl get the Maggi migoreng as opposed to the regular migoreng, this is because I wanted to eat Maggi noodles over hokkien noodles. Also it was the chef's special! This is even though VGirl would only allow me a small mouthful of the noodles. She said it was delicious and finished it before the rest of the dishes were even put down. When I asked her if she wanted another serve, she declined but spent a lot of time inquiring after other peoples meals, so maybe I should have gotten one . . . oh the vegetables in this dish were bean sprouts, carrot, cabbage and gai lan!

Yassss

I got the ayam goreng and beef rendang nasi lemak! I love nasi lemak because it allows me to pick and choose bits off the menu that I want to try without having to actually order that dish as a main! So yeah I picked fried chicken of course and beef rendang! To be truthful, since I started making beef rendang, I've never found one as good as my own. I love the sauce super dense, full of spices and coconut and the beef to fall apart. This was okay. The fried chicken reminds me of home with the way the winglet is still kept on it! That's the good bit, there's so much skin on there to eat! I enjoyed the sambal that they had here as well as the fact that the egg was a medium boil, no dodgy iron grey ring for me thanks!

<3 nasi lemak

Chicken satay, the way it should be! Charred, fat skewers of chicken absolutely doused in finger licking satay sauce accompanied with cucumber and red onion! They come four to a serve, so there was enough for everyone to eat one and get

Ideal number, so easily divisible!

This is their roti telur bawang aka egg and onion flatbread that comes with dahl, lentil curry, and a curry gravy, chicken! I feel like that sentence has a lot of commas in there but I'm too lazy to fix it, so please endure! Dr S., and JGirl both enjoyed this!

!

However, they also ordered roti jala aka net bread, which also came with a curry gravy and chicken curry. I have no idea why they basically ordered the same dish twice to share. I don't understand the appeal of roti jala because its meant to go with curry dishes as a means of sopping or picking up curry. So why would you use a bread that has so many holes in it to do that? Doesn't that seem fundamentally arduous somehow? Like eating soup with a spoon?

?_?

CBoy got the seafood laksa. It is a massive, massive bowl! It comes with lots of prawns, calamari, fish cakes, three types of noodle, flat rice, egg and a homemade rice starch noodle as well as a very rich and flavourful coconut broth! He did not finish this bowl by the way, it defeated him!

Truck size bowl

We got the cendol as our shareable dessert, bright green pandan noodles, shaved ice and palm sugar syrup! I like that they actually used real palm sugar, you can taste the caramel sweetness of it. I had to scoff this down as everyone else was too full and wanted to go home and sleep.

Refreshing!

Dapur Dahlia 
Atmosphere: 3, I hate this tiny restaurant. Please expand more!
Service: 5, nothing special.
Food: 7, average! The drinks are pretty good as are the dishes barring the roti. The serving size is solid and the pricing is pretty cheap. Give this place a shot, I'd say! 

The Persian Restaurant

Two Muslim girls joined my work place recently! Shalalah and Ash., I'm really running out of things to call people with the first name starting with A! Since they're both new to Brisbane I've been giving them recommendations of where to go since I've always gone to halal places with my best Yassmin! This place has always been on the list and so when we had the day free, H., Shalalah, Ash., and I decided to go. It was originally Shalalah and H., going but Ash., and I crashed the party haha.

The Persian Restaurant is on the main strip of Sandgate Road. near Mundo Churrasco if you know where that is. Parking is a bit of a pain since the street parking is limited on a main road the the two car parks for the area are pretty underground and not easily visible from the street. Keep a sharp eye out!

Kitchen!

Haha, even though the restaurant doesn't have halal signage, Ash., and Shalalah both instantly knew it was. Apparently it has that ethnic look to the place? It reminds me of when Yass and I went to Arabellas and she knew it was halal upon seeing it.

Ethnic?

Wall to wall carpets.

Here is their menu! We got this freaking amazing eggplant dip called  kashk-e-Bademjan, grilled eggplant with fried mint and whey sauce. The incredible soft melting texture of eggplant and soft caramelised onions, with the fresh coolness of the mint and whey sauce that added an incredible richness to the dip. Oh it was so, so good! Yeah, it looks like vomit but its so delicious, who cares!

<33333

We got this dips assortment to share as well, it came with flat bread that tasted pretty stale as well as hummus, mast-o-khiyar and mirza ghasemi, the last two being a yoghurt and garlic sauce and then a grilled eggplant, chopped tomato and egg dip. These three dishes don't hold a candle to the earlier eggplant dish, so don't even bother! However, that's only my opinion, Ash., loved the hummus, Shalalah and H., both preferred the eggplant and tomato dish. I wasn't able to try the yoghurt and garlic dish, as you know yoghurt gives me rapid onset diarrhoea with my lactose intolerance.

The colours are easy to figure out

This is the King's Choice, one skewer of the barg, joojeh and koobideh kebabs. Barg is marinated lamb backstrap, the joojeh is chicken marinated in lemon juice, olive oil and saffron while the koobideh is flavoured minced lamb! I felt very strongly about the koobideh being the best, it has the best spice mixture to it and was super tender and juicy. If I were to go back, koobideh x2 for me please! I really like how rice is served in Middle Eastern style restaurants, they have super fluffy rice, with very individual granules and normally serve it with a pat of butter on the side to enrich the rice!

I left out Shalalah's meal because she got the double serve of the joojeh and rice.

<3 fit for a king!

H., wanted to eat something vegetarian and light so I said she should pick this, I wasn't really thinking though so she ended up getting most of what we got earlier. Flat bread, hummus, spicy beetroot dip, dolmades, tabbouleh and pickles. I think she was expecting more of a main meal kinda thing rather than endless nibbles, sorry H.,! 

Although the bread here was a lot fluffier and warmed slightly, unlike the tough bread we received earlier. When I mentioned this, everyone else said that they hadn't noticed any difference?

Hmm

Ash., picked a dud dish as well having gotten the tah chin morgh, chicken cooked with saffron and yoghurt, topped with rice and oven baked. It came with a side salad and more of that yoghurt and garlic dip. It was this giant blob of mushy rice that when she broke apart revealed more yoghurt and then chicken finally. It was a really bland dish, I was expecting the yoghurt to be a marinade not to be included as the sauce/main component of the meal. Looking at google, reveals more a rice crust to provide a textural component. She ate most of the chicken and left the rice behind.

Blergh

The Persian Restaurant
Atmosphere: 7, a lovely place to take photos haha!
Service: 5, average.
Food: 6, what I ate was good, what other people ate wasn't, A bit of a mixed bag! Definitely try the koobideh kebab and that eggplant and fried mint and whey dip!

Purple Olive

It was T.,'s birthday recently! She decided to go the Purple Olive and so there were quite a few of us girls and boys from work who attended her birthday dinner. I had to nip off pretty early on as I had night shifts to go to but it was pretty fun to have a chat with everyone outside of work.

Park on the side streets of James Street's main strip and proceed to leg it to the restaurant! Here is their menu.

I got there late like 45 minutes late because I forgot how bad traffic was coming into the city at that time. Everyone was still happily chatting away though so I managed to get my order in at the same time as everyone else. I decided to go with the special of the day, gnocchi with brown butter sauce, crispy sage, roasted pumpkin bits and shavings of parmesan. The gnocchi were soft and fluffy. I was a bit sad that the brown butter sauce was so bland, it needed a good whack of salt to make it more delicious. There were very small pieces of sweet caramelised pumpkin but I wanted a lot more! It was a delicious entree but I was starving and was definitely a very entree sized entree.

Special of the night!

I got the espresso milkshake as I knew I was going to have to leave for night shifts straight after. Considering it was supposed to be moderately fancy with icecream and cream, it just tasted like a cold milky coffee and not a particularly strong one at that.

Expresso shake!

T., got these zucchini fritters, they were coated in a very little batter. That's all I have to say, they were cooked. I don't see the point of getting this dish, it needs a sauce or something.

Tongs!

W., got this pizza, it was proscuitto and mushroom. He said it was quite salty from the ingredients used. There were only four slices so I didn't bother asking for a slice.

Uneven toppings

I got this quattro fromagi pizza, your classic four cheese pizza with a topping of rocket and it also had proscuitto added on top. I definitely agreed with what W., said, I found this pizza quite salty due to combo of the strong cheese and the proscuitto. Even with the rocket, I found it to be quite salty and I'm a girl who loves her salt. The crust on the pizza is pretty good though.

I've had better

These were the spaghetti con polette della nonna, Nonna's meatballs with spaghetti basically. I think L., ordered these and we were concerned at the giant size of the meatballs that they would be over cooked or even worse under cooked. They were okay, that's kind of all we had to say, not dry, not moist, not salty but not super bland? They were a solid average.

?_?

Purple Olive
Atmosphere: 5, intimate setting as you can see from my dull lighting. 
Service: 6, I was pretty happy that they allowed me to split the bill since I left early. 
Food: 5, I didn't enjoy anything I ate here barring the gnocchi, I felt the portions were quite small and overpriced. I was still hungry on leaving here despite having been the only person to eat an entree, an entire milkshake and a main pizza. I didn't get anything else because I knew I would eat at work later and had already paid about $40~ dollars for an unfilling dinner :(

Roti Chenai - Emporium

Yass was back in town so it was time to feed her up with halal meats to temporarily boost up her iron levels before she departs to the rigs again and becomes a lethargic vegetarian! Well as lethargic as someone as super charged as Yass is, can possibly be. I decided that we should go to this place in the Valley called Roti Chenai! A mix of South Indian foods with a Malaysian twist, Malaysian is near and dear to our hearts, mine because its delicious, hers because of the time she spent over there eating halal nasi lemak every day for breakfast.

Parking is ample . . . depending on what time of day you get there. It can be difficult to find a park on most days though, you should always try your luck I guess? It's right beside the Ginga restaurant.

Thar she blows!

The interior is nothing much to speak up, vinyl? table cloths and surprisingly heavy chairs. We had a bit of a chat with the owners and this is actually a franchise? Or rather an originally New Zealand restaurant that jumped across the ditch, apparently they won New Zealand's best roti chenai award, are one of the oldest Malaysian/South Indian restaurants over there and are widely featured in NZ guide books. Quite the pedigree!  

Also right beside a pharmacy?

Here is their menu! Yass and I were a bit brainless about ordering and so we ordering a lot of pancake/crepe like things. In our defense, they're often the most delicious of all foods and they all had vastly different meats and textures too!

We got the restaurant's namesake of the roti chenai with a dish of chicken curry, we both loved the roti the best out of all our pancakey/crepe like foods. The buttery, flakey layers of roti burnt our fingers and tongues, they were so hot coming fresh off the grill. Ahhh but it was such a wonderful flavour! I'm drooling just thinking about it. This was Yass's favourite!

Those char marks are beautiful!

We got the chicken murtabak, basically a roti stuffed with chicken pieces, onion and egg pieces. We also burnt our fingers eating this because why use cutlery when you can use your hands? Also why do we have just one slice of cucumber there? I mostly ignored this in favour of our roti and the last dish we opted to choose!

Still ate it all though

The mighty beef dosai! I've always been intrigued by the idea of it since its a fermented rice flour crepe basically, so like an Indian version of Vietnam's banh xeo? It gives me that same feeling with the super crunchy exterior and how it has pieces of onion and beef mince studded on the inside. I also enjoyed the slightly sour taste of the pancake. It came with two dipping sauces, the darker one I can't recall but the white one was a coconut cream based and I ate all of it. Yes, we also burnt our hands eating this one.

So many pancakes

It's kinda like looking at a meat surf wave

Roti Chenai - Emporium
Atmosphere: 5, nothing special.
Service: 7, super friendly people who rescued my fallen cutlery from the floor and replaced it more times than they had to, considering I'm a grown woman. My knife fell on the floor accidentally so many times, I might as well have been throwing it on the ground.
Food: 7, wonderful food! We left absolutely stuffed and were very happy with our choices considering we only got three types of pancakes/crepes.

Jakarta Indonesian Restaurant

True fact, VGirl and I love Malaysian/Indonesian food, its often halal, has a huge emphasis on vegetarian cuisine, massive portions of food, cheap prices, its a wonderful combination of Asian cuisines that we love and also mi goreng is gods gift to noodle lovers. So its a bit of a mystery why we haven't been to Jakarta in New Farm on an earlier occasion.

This place!

We got there so early that they were still opening up the restaurant when we arrived. It got pretty busy as we were leaving, lots of ex-pats and their Indonesian wives from the sound of it! It's pretty easy to spot from Brunswick Street, its pretty close to the Night Owl so its relatively easy to find!

This spot!

It has a really traditional Balinese kinda feel? It reminds me of the Indonesian lote class I had in primary school or at least the way that my teacher decorated the room!

I like it!

Lots and lots of tables

Here is their menu!

I got the ayam goreng tepung as my snack, because an entire dish of fried chicken is a snack of course. This was a described as marinated and deep fried chicken pieces. They look lightly battered to me and were quite salty, I found the proportion to be a bit stingy/lacking for the price of a main dish. I think this would be perfect for a group to sharing but as a complimentary dish, that's all you get!

Hmmmm~

VGirl got vegetarian bakmi goreng, she remarked that this was quite a healthy rendition with lots and lots of vegetables, onions, kai lan, tomato and carrot. We both found that this dish wasn't as flavoursome as the one that we at Sambal Oelek but it had a much greater charry flavour. She also wanted more visible bits of egg and so stole my fried egg from my plate with my blessing.

Not bad though!

I got the nasi goreng istimewa, Indonesian style fried rice topped with a fried egg, two chicken satay skewers and prawn crackers. It was a moderately sized meal but it gave me a good sample of two of the staples you find in any Indonesian restaurant, nasi goreng and chicken satay! I found the fried rice to be pretty good but the chicken satay was much better. It had a lovely sauce that I wish I had a lot more of!

Jakarta:
Atmosphere: 8, a cute little slice of Indonesia! I really liked the layout and warm setting of the restaurant.
Service: 8, super friendly and insightful service, The young waitress was probably about the same age of us but was very professional.
Food: 7, solid food for a cheap price. This would be great for a get together with friends, where you sit around, share food and chat for ages, not to mention its BYO so a cheap way to get wasted.

Sambal Oelek

So my updates haven't been as frequent as I liked, it's seriously straying into the 5-7 day mark rather than the 4-5 that I like. Lots of things have been happening in my life. As you probably guessed, I broke up with my Boyfriend, I also started going to the gym pretty intensely and dating guys again on Tinder recently. I've been going out lots, as seem on my Instagram account @ThatSeriousGirl, and not doing much writing. Or bothering to post many pictures on my Instagram either come to think of it.

Anyway, I'm trying to do half as much writing as I do gym work, considering I've been going 1-2 hours a day, I better get cracking! I just wish I was able to write my blog and do stuff at the gym at the same time. I suppose I could type and cycle at the same time but there's not good enough internet at my gym!

So here I was at Sambal Oelek, the new Indonesian restaurant in Brisbane, handily located in Underwood right off the highway besides my favourite butchers Big Gun!

The menu!

Another menu!

The interior is all bright red plastic furniture, nothing too fancy!

Noice

That being said, they did have these lovely lanterns. I like the interlaced pattern.

Pretty!

I got this tea both times I was here, teh kotak, or a strong, sweetened jasmine tea with a mildly bitter aftertaste. I found it refreshing and super sweet, it was also super cheap for only $2 a box! I highly recommend trying this if you're used to the taste of bubble teas and the like.

50% extra? Bargain!

I got the pangsit goreng ayam the first time I went here, basically deep fried chicken mince fritters! The filling was very reminiscent of a chicken version of the filling you get in prawn wontons, that slightly gingery, moussey and green onion flavoured combination. The wrapper was deep fried perfection, it had that immensely satisfying crunch like a prawn cracker. It was so wonderfully bubbly and the crispy exterior melted on the tongue, I took great delight in eating each fritter. It came with some sweet chili sauce that was a good contrast.

Tasty!

I got the sop buntut or oxtail soup as well! All the main dishes come with a side of rice or coconut rice depending on your preference. This was listed as being the famous, hearty and comforting dish of Indonesia, tender slow cooked oxtail with potato and carrot chunks in a clear soup.

Oxtail soup!

It tasted like home, like those thick, slowly cooked bone in soups that you get when you were younger as a meal, or at least I did. I could taste the greasy film from the soup on my lips and it reminded me of a warm winter's day. It was a very basic but comforting dish that was very well made. I quite enjoyed it! It came with a little dish of sambal that was mildly spicy but nothing spectacular.

It tastes like home even if I'm not Indonesian :P

I came back about a week later to try the rendang sapi, a beef rendang done in the Indonesian style. There was a huge dish of the beef stew with a thick but very oily sauce. It had all the sauce mostly absorbed by the shredded coconut but I suspected it wasn't pan fried off because it was put it because it was quite chewy and didn't have the same aroma. As beef rendang goes, its not as good as the one I make at home, two or three pieces were horrifically chewy although most of them were quite soft and tender. As far as restaurant ones go, its probably the best one I've had. Good level of spice, well balanced spices and mostly tender meat. I got coconut rice as my pick this time as well.

Someone at work saw this and said ITS A BOOB

Yum~!

Sambal Oelek
Atmosphere: 5, basic little Asian eatery. Clean with laminated menus hurray!
Service: 8, very friendly service. The first time I was here, the owner walked me through the menu and highly recommended the oxtail soup, fried chicken and beef rendang and they were good!
Food: 7.5, tasty and cheap food! Plus close to where I love, what else is there in life hahaha