Deep Fry Master

L., D., and I go to dinner after work fairly frequently. Where some may balk at the idea of 10-11pm dinner, we relish it! We always go to Sunnybank, specifically Market Square due to the fact that its always open and the exact middle point between our work and home. Unfortunately that means we're fast running out of spots to try because we're always there.

L., suggested this Taiwanese place at the back of Market Square called Deep Fry Master. It has its own parking lot and looks shady. Here is their menu. They have a very extensive menu, lots of snacks, meal options and fried a la carte option.

L., got this noodle soup number with minced pork, an egg, bean sprouts and chives with rice noodles. It also came with a winter melon iced tea. The soup stock have a very clean and mild flavour. It was a surprisingly palatable soup.

Noodle soup!

If you don't want any of these meal options you can get an assorted stir fried bag of stuff, with levels of heat available. I seriously have no idea why you would go out to eat this when you could do this at home, maybe you're too lazy to get all the veggies yourself? Pick you choice of ingredients and they'll cook it for you, this bag was cauliflower, cabbage and eggplant at the bottom. All the vegetables were cooked perfectly. 

Veggies

This was fish cake, a bay leaf, fried livers on a stick and white bait underneath. The fish cakes were soft and chewy with a good flavour, not overly fishy. The liver was covered in a spicy salt and were a touch rubbery. The white bait were actually very large pieces and were big enough to have soft fillets of flesh on them, rather than the crunchy morsels you receive at many places.

Meats

Fry Chicken Master
Atmosphere: 5, it looks like a dining hall for students.
Service: 5, L., took care of the ordering so nothing went wrong.
Food: 5, nothing bad, nothing great. Probably somewhere good to go if you miss these type of restaurants from Taiwan.

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.

Taiwan Cafe

This was our second last meal in Melbourne from memory. It was almost six months ago at the time of writing! I had another day left of the conference and we were just doing a quick tour of the CBD during its night time shopping hours. I think I just picked this place because it was very full of people and the menu seemed decent. I would've avoided it like the plague if I had been aware of what the reviews were like on Urbanspoon! 57% youch!

This shiny place

The tables are very small and wooden. Every table has a copy of the food and drinks menu, red chopsticks, soy sauce, chilli powder and a steel pot of chilli and garlic oil.

Classic

The place is also ridiculously narrow and they pack tables on both sides of the room which make things extra cramped. So Taiwan authentic to be packed in like sardines!

Ugh

Yeah that gap just fits my legs

I got this massive drink and I can't remember what it was for the life of me. I just remember it was super fruity, super artificially sweet and full of random chunks of fruit. This is what I get for blogging six months after I've gone to a place. I have a vague recollection it was a blackberry and lemon drink but that's all I got going for me.

Mystery drink

I got this Taiwanese fried chicken bento box, it consisted of a serve of Taiwanese fried chicken, poached egg, pea and corn, some lettuce and a serve of rice topped with a black bean and mince sauce. Aki helpfully adds that the Taiwanese fried chicken tasted like fried cardboard. It was crunchy and very little seasoning.

Bento?

These were chilli oil prawn and pork wontons, they were coated in an odd sauce consisting of soy sauce, hoisin perhaps, ground sesame and a mild chilli. It was surprisingly tasty although quite different to what I was expecting. The wontons themselves were good, nice thin skin and meaty, well seasoned insides.

What is going on in this dish?

Aki ordered for herself just some plain wontons in broth since her braces were still aching. They tasted exactly the same as the wontons above except the broth tasted like hot water.

?_?

Taiwan Cafe
Atmosphere: 6, your typical super cramped, super busy Asian cafe!
Service: 5, pretty average. When we were there, a couple dressed up in the Gothic Lolita style stormed out saying they had been waiting over an hour for food.
Food: 4, yeah pretty terrible. I regret choosing this place when there were so many better options around it.

Glamorous Wok

They don't actually have a cool sign, just a lot of photos

I wanted to hit up Sunnybank and get some food one night. We wandered around for a while before heading to Sunny Park. I remembered this spot because L., had recommended somewhere in Sunnybank that served authentic Taiwanese food and I think this was it!

The glamorous entrance

The menu looked really good with multiple glossy pages, low prices, a large vegetarian section and lots and lots of badly spelled translations.

Drinks!

All the drinks, along with their names in Mandarin

More drinks

This is interesting?

Yowza 400 dollars for a meal?

There was a large drinks menu of teas/bubble teas but we just got a boring lemon, lime and bitters as well as the usual Sprite. Not sure why I got so much ice in my drink. The waiter who gave us this drink, was shocked when the straw bounced out due to the bubbles, apologised in this very startled manner and went running off to get another straw.

Lemon limes on the left, Sprite on the right

I think like most people who enjoy eating, I am obsessed with fried chicken. I was unsure which one to get but ended up getting the salt and pepper deep fried chicken cause it was cheaper and the picture looked so sparkly delicious. It was a good choice, every table in the restaurant had a basket of this stuff. It was a lovely golden brown crunchy batter, with the salt and pepper inside the batter itself, the chicken was moist and used all sorts of dark and white chunks of meat. I would go back here just for the chicken.

So good.

I picked the spainach with satay sauce, that was exactly how it was spelled on the menu. It was a decent water spinach, there were strips of tofu which weren't great and lots and lots of ginger. There was so much ginger, huge chunks of the stuff absolutely everywhere. I appreciate subtle ginger, I hate large bits of it and I ate more ginger accidentally in this dish than I have had all year.

So much ginger. There are at least 11 pieces in this photo

Fuzhou fried rice was next on the agenda, fluffy fried rice with eggs, scallop, prawn and oyster mushroom pieces drowned in a thick brown gravy. Delicious! It was very interesting to go from the different textures of the seafood and I love the thickness of that gravy soaking into the rice. Probably not the best thing to go with absorbing sauces and stuff since it had its own sauce. I did scoop off the sauce thought which revealed a layer of eggy fried rice, that was good.

Dat gravy.

My Boyfriend picked black pepper chicken on a sizzling plate. I've got mixed feelings about sizzling plates, I like the smell and the enticing sounds when they arrive at your table, but I'm also the kind of impatient fool who goes grabbing at the hot plate to bring it much closer.The chicken was good, moist and tasty if even randomly sized chunks, the capsicum was good quality still crunchy despite being briefly cooked in the sauce and huge chunks of onion as you can see. The sauce was interesting, I'm not sure if good or bad, it was very peppery, evidence enough from the myriad of black pepper shards throughout the dish and had a good bite. I really liked that you could easily detect the freshness of that cracked pepper. The rest of the sauce had an unusual sweetness that I couldn't put my finger on, but it reminded me of a not so sour, sweet and sour sauce.

Tasty, I think.

This was our bill by the way. Can you see why I thought it was so amusing I had to take a photo?

Check out the items.

On reviewing the pictures for this, my Boyfriend commented that my picture taking is getting much better which makes me happy as his father is, amongst many, many other talents, an award winning nature photographer. Then I look back and notice all the incredibly blurry shots I've also uploaded. Ah well, win some, you lose some.

Glamorous Wok
Atmosphere: 6, typical Asian restaurant with a little bar area. Very, very bright, I really disliked how shiny the lights made everything look but that's only because it interferes with taking photos.
Service: 6, very, very, very enthusiastic waiters and waitresses. Also a little bit pushy, I think we were asked about 5 times whether we were ready to order while we were getting photos and perusing the menu. They thanked us for moving things around the table, got our plates off the table early on, put away our leftovers in doggy bags without being asked and were just very energetic people.We were ignored at the end however when we were trying to get our bill.
Food: 8, both of those chicken, that fried rice. Amazing. The spainach? Not so much so. I would go here again with VGirl and hopefully she can try some new veggo food.