Malacca Malay

I was initially very excited to find that there was a new restaurant opening up at the Hyperdome aka my local shopping centre. I know that I say that Garden City is my local but that is because no one would happily claim the Hyperdome as their local. When I saw that this place had opened, I knew I had to go and try their food.

Parking is easy, its at a major shopping centre. Just park down at the Coles end and leg it. It's right in front of Aldi, its hard to miss. Here is their menu, thanks Zomato!

I got the chicken satay skewers as my entree. I found the chicken to be a touch dry with a very heavy hand on the tumeric in their marinade. I was quite saddened that there was no heavy charring or smokey flavour on the chicken. Their satay sauce was quite sweet. It came chopped onion, cuucmber and sour pineapple on the side.

):

This was the curry pork rib with noodles. I could not finish this dish, both due to the generous portion sizing as well as the taste not being to my liking. The pork rib pieces that they use are the cartilage heavy, tasty pork rib tips that are loved in Asian cooking. They were smothered in a thick, grainy, spice heavy curry that reminded me of fresh curry powder? I'm not sure how to explain it because the flavour was very familiar but I was unable to really place it or describe it besides, "the equivalent of fresh curry powder."

:<

I got the teh tarik which was a gigantic delicious serve.

Another reason I didn't finish my meal was the large slick of oil present.

Pork remnants

Malacca Malay
Atmosphere: 5, nothing fancy.
Service: 5, counter service!
Food: 4, not to my liking. I didn't enjoy anything I ate.

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! 

Kitchen Inn

S* and I usually gossip like crazy during our walk to our cars. We hadn't seen each other in quite a while so we decided to go out to dinner together. S* promised me that this place had the best noodles in Brisbane and she regularly made the trip out to Calamvale from Kangaroo Point just to eat it. So with that in mind, I had to go didn't I?

Steal the menu from Zomato. The restaurant is on the corner of the Calamvale shopping centre, so there's lots of parking! Just don't do what S* did and park on the wrong road. She ended up parking on the road above the shopping centre and had to hop off the rocks to get down.

I got teh C special, I have no idea what it stands for but it tastes delicious! Some type of strong black tea with condensed milk to sweeten it. I really enjoyed this and would drop by for this to takeaway if I'm in the area! On googling, I found it its red tea, evaporated milk and brown sugar mixed in.

<3

S* told me buys the same thing each and every time she goes here. She tried it once and has never gotten anything else since then. It's the kolo mee special! Homemade wheat noodles, barbecue pork, pork mince and prawns. The noodles are the same as the one in my dish, super long, springy, with a slight chew to their texture, they were amazing! The toppings were very generous as well, to the extent that S* ended up taking half of it home, the bowl was endless!

It comes with this generic vegetable soup.

Ah yes

I got the braised pork rib and chili kolo mee, there was a ridiculous amount of dried chili in this dish! I ended up pulling out almost 20 pieces of red chili out, thankfully they just added a good smokiness to the dish and a bit of spice too! It had a thick, dark sauce that coated the noodles very well. I have no idea what you call this cut of pork, Google tells me they're called rib tips! Those knobbly, chewy, white gristly bits are well beloved of most Asians out there.

Mmm pork

I got the fried chicken, juicy, covered in a light battered and brined to perfection. They came with a solid chili sauce and I ate nearly all the plate by mself!

$8 bargain

Kitchen Inn
Atmosphere: 5, your local Asian takeway. 
Service: 5, nothing special.
Food: 8. solid food. Super cheap, huge portions and delicious. Defs go here again.

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.

RJIE Upstairs in Little Taipei: the One Taiwanese cuisine and Yahoo Sunnybank again!

I went on a date with someone and we decided to have a quick lunch in Sunnybank before he went to work one day! We had a bit of ponder and couldn't decide where we wanted to go for sure, so we wandered upstairs to Little Taipei and plonked ourselves down in the aircon to avoid the summer heat.

He picked this spicy pork cutlet bento box from The One Taiwanese Cuisine. I don't think he realised it was a bento box set because he was very surprised when it came out. There was a bowl of plain vegetable broth, a big bowl of rice, a tiny cabbage and carrot spring roll covered in tomato sauce, some candied sweet potato, steamed cabbage and carrot, a side salad of shredded cabbage covered in mayonnaise and then the pork cutlets! They were battered and super crunchy, the meat was still very juicy though. The sauce was odd, we were both expecting a super hot sambal kinda sauce but this was a mild chili and black bean kinda deal.

Aw yiss

Meanwhile I went to Yahoo Sunnybank and chose to get their Mie Goreng, it had pieces of tomato in it which I wasn't happy about not to mention the shredded lettuce component. The noodles had a good charry wok hei flavour to them and there were lots of fish balls and tofu in the noodles so I was happy in that regard.

Hmmm~

I also got us curry puffs to share. He said he liked them, so I got them for us, cause I'm cute like that. I made him eat all but one of them, as you can see they had a wonderful bubbly crust with a sweet filling that I can't recall. I remember thinking that I've had better in Mons Ban Sabai Thai though.

Taste of Penang

I remember when Taste of Penang first opened and I wanted to go to there. We never did of course, it was one of those places that always seemed to get shoved to the back of the list. We, VGirl, Yannikins, Mandy, JGirl, Shishi and myself never made it one time because I got badly lost in Sunnybank by myself and they had to rescue me. To top things off, the restaurant was actually closed so that time we went to Little Singapore which was disastrous.

Then the second time I attempted to go there with Yass, I sent them a FB message asking whether or not they were halal and they never answered us. That time I think we ended up going to Arabellas in Upper Mount Gravatt.

Then the third time it was my birthday in 2013, and we went to Tobaki instead as it was fuller. Also not one of my best ideas.

This time it was just VGirl and myself on a cool autumn night, doing what we do and heading out to dinner in Sunnybank!

Its bright green in the centre of the complex, easy to find!

I didn't get a photograph of the menu, it's completely uploaded to Urbanspoon!  The menu has quite a few options on it and I quite like the self service aspect of the restaurant. You get a little notepad, tick and flick whatever you want and hand it back to them! No mistakes with the order here! 

We got redirected by the waitress and we pondered what we wanted outside. The owner/chef came out to see us and had a long chat with us. He asked us if we had been there before or had Malaysian food before, he recommended a few standout dishes on the menu such as the char kway teow, the chicken satay, the nasi lemak and some other bits and bobs. When I asked him what he recommended for vegetarians, he isolated about five or six dishes, the veggie spring rolls, the laska, char kway teow, deep fried tofu, fried rice, roti with dhal and added that most dishes could be made vegetarian if we wanted. When VGirl hesitated, he started adding more and more dishes haha. She was very pleased by this as she finds that a lot of places if they aren't prepared for vegetarians either make it an afterthought or do anything to make you a vegetarian dish.

As well as what is on the menu, the owner added that if you like their Facebook page, you can keep track of the weekly specials! Usually a few days where they serve a special not usually on their menu, from previous posts they have served asam laksa, lor mee, char kuey kark and nasi kandar. 

So many signs!

They also sell a variety of homemade and ever changing kuih assortment, steamed desserts with a sorta sticky/chewy texture. It's a very interesting texture, we have lots of similar desserts in Vietnamese cuisine so they all look vaguely familiar to my eye. They seem to constantly upload the day's assortment on Facebook, so like them to keep yourself posted!

I ordered a teh tarik for my drink, the cold version! It's famed as being the national drink of Malaysia, a strong black tea with sweetened condensed milk added and poured repeatedly between two cups for a frothy top. I was a little surprised when it came out in a bubble tea container, but that was the flavour I was expecting when I tried it! A very strong and slightly ginger flavoured black tea with the sweetness of condensed milk. I ended up shaking the container to get the bubble effect I wanted.

I'll take it~!

VGirl wasn't in the mood for anything in particular but she wanted a hot soy milk drink to warm up hands. When she recieved it, she said it was mildly sweet, not as much as commercial soy milks that you can find. She said it reminded her of when Mama Pham makes fresh soy milk and she can drink it straight after it's been cooked. She looked very happy as she sat there warming her hands.

In a double insulated cup!

I got the nasi lemak with beef rendang, I always love this dish. I like my food in neat sections and picking at different bits to eat! I got the beef rendang on medium heat, as I was convinced by the owner down from hot heat. He was right, the chillis were spicy but not unbearable. It's not as salty as the one I make but still very tasty, with super tender beef and an excellent gravy to splash on my rice.

Solid

VGirl got the vegetarian char kway teo, from memory it had bean sprouts, button mushrooms, baby corn, carrot, green onion, tofu and another green vegetable. She said it was delicious and polished it off super fast.

This is a really popular plate design

I got the spicy fried chicken as my starter but it arrived after everything else. I'm not sure what the spice mixture they used to marinate it was, but it smelt really familiar like five spice powder or something. I got three drums and flats in total.

Taste of Penang
Atmosphere: 5, pretty standard local takeaway to be honest, all the seating is outside!
Service: 10, really wonderful and super friendly service from the owner. He stopped to have a chat to every patron there before and after their meal.
Food: 6, definitely cheap and interesting food. I would go here again for their specials for sure.

Yahoo Restaurant Sunnybank

 Little Taipei in Sunnybank is a little upstairs floor of small restaurants, all of which sell vastly different foods. D., and L., are frequently seen in this place and its perfect for us nurses, cause its open to quite late and you can stop by after work finishes for a quick bite.

This time, my Boyfriend and I decided to go to Yahoo Restaurant in Sunnybank. I had to emphasise the "in Sunnybank" bit because it also has another restaurant in Waterford and Highgate Hills. Its a small storefront that opens straight into the kitchen. Our server was also our cook!

This place

They had a decent menu full of classic Malaysian cuisine, with each dish having a picture and very cheap price beside it.

All the usual classics

I ordered char kway teow, which came with stir fried flat rice noodles, bean sprouts, garlic chives, egg, prawns and lap cheong sausage. Unfortunately it came without the little cubes of pork fat, but it still had a good smoky flavour with a slight greasiness left behind. It was actually a massive serving and I really struggled to finish it.There was a lot of hidden protein under the initial tumble of noodles..

My Malaysian friends were drooling

My Boyfriend zoned in on their chicken and combination laksa. It had a wonderful fragrance but a slightly lacklustre flavour to the soup with that being said, mildly spicy, super creamy but lacking a certain body to the soup. There was a combination of flat rice noodles, thin vermicelli noodles, eggplant, tofu, poached chicken and curly juicy prawns.

Okayish laksa

Yahoo Restaurant Sunnybank
Atmosphere: 5. Small food court type place. I wouldn't bring a date here.
Service: 6, cheerful and quick service. We watched our meals get made with speed and efficiency, the guy had obviously done this a hundred times before.
Food: 6, I would go back here again. Large portions, super cheap and quite tasty, even if its not the best Malaysian food I've had before.