The Crosstown Eating House

Crosstown Eating House was the first restaurant I ever went to two trips in a row. The only other restaurants with this distinction was Cafe Wrapture, Little Larder and Moose and Gibson. I think there were some others, but these are the ones I distinctly remember going, I HAVE TO GO BACK THERE AGAIN. I had to review this place again since I started my blog, but I went here after nights with a few friends from work and went there by myself the following day.

One of their many signs.

This is their actual entrance however

Its a nicely decorated little restaurant with a strong nautical theme for some reason.

This is their upstairs bar

Lots of ships

More ships

Not a ship, but that rose is real

So many boats

A nifty well stocked bar

Another set of boats

A stuffed marlin

You can find their menu online as well. Iit is open for lunch and dinner.

Their drinks!

The all important food!

 I got this flat white, the attempted fern collapsed a bit. I found this coffee a bit on the bitter side with a slightly sour/burnt taste. I wasn't particularly impressed. They use Veneziano beans here.

Kaboom!

I ordered the breakfast quesadilla, it was stuffed with avocado, an egg omelet, double smoked ham, cheese, coriander and tomato with a side of lime. I found this to be a bit hard to eat, just because I really wanted a nice sized American style quesadilla that I could pick up in my hands and bite. Instead I had to use my knife and fork like a civilised person and cut up my breakfast.

The double smoked ham was plentiful, had a good smokey taste and a tender texture, there was heaps of it as well. The rest of the meal was a bit ordinary and I'm not 100% sure that I liked the combination of flavours. The ingredients were all good quality and I have nothing to complain about in that aspect. I finished my meal.I also got a side of shoestring fries with aioli, but the aioli wasn't available so I just ate it with tomato sauce. They were long golden brown, crunchy shoestring fries, just as good as the ones you get from MacDonalds and probably just as healthy haha.

A jumbo quesadilla on its jumbo plate!

Golden brown shoestring fries

I went back again for lunch because I love ribs and their pineapple, grape and mint cooler. I normally order this drink every time I go here because of how refreshing and sweet the drink is. The taste is predominantly pineapple but there is still a subtle mint tang to the drink which is restrained but still noticeable.

I ordered the sticky pork spare ribs with barbeque corn on the cob, shoestring fries with a blob of aioli. The stick pork rib were meltingly soft and fell apart when I shook them by the bone. The sauce was a bit too sweet for my liking however, but I still managed to eat it all. The corn was a little bit charry and sweet.

The Crosstown Eating House
Atmosphere: 8, yar, it be full of boats. I'm not sure why, considering Woollongabba is land locked but I was really amused by the nautical theme. Its a very warm, brightly light restaurant with something interesting to look at wherever you go.
Service: 8, wonderful, friendly and very cheerful service. I have no idea how the waiter found me to take my order because as soon as I entered the restaurant and was told to pick a seat, I disappeared. I went upstairs to the bathroom and took photos for about ten minutes before heading back down and picking a window seat. As soon as I sat down, I was presented with a menu and given some water haha.
Food: 6, I didn't enjoy what I had to eat and drink when I came here but purely personal as I'm sure some of my friends would adore it.

RJIE 17: Bagel Boys Bagels

Bagels. Delicious, chewy, immensely dense bagels. Cream cheese loves you. Smoked salmon loves you. My random meatball mix loves you. I love you. 

I also love Bagel Boys Bagels, Noose born and bred, they make awesome bagels. Stalk them at the Wednesday Jan Power Markets at George Square outside the Casino. Join the horde of office workers in their fancy business gear, queuing and salivating over these freshly rolled, baked and boiled bagels. Sometimes you have to wait upwards of ten minutes for these beauties, but I'd wait out those ten minutes for even one of these. They even have gluten free bagels, catch them while you can.

At the time of writing, they average $2 a bagel with $3 for gluten free and six of them for $10. They have a handy guide on their website if you can't stand to wait until next Wednesday. Do yourself a favour and have one today.

Garlic, onion, shy sunflower and rye, everything and poppyseed bagels!

Kadoya

Kadoya is one of my old favourites, I started going here when I was studying nursing in 2008 and have been going here ever since. Its just a casual wall in the hole spot that I enjoy, great service, quick food, cute location and the menu keeps expanding in weird and wonderful ways.

Finding Elizabeth Street arcade was one of the great mysteries of my life back when I was studying university. I rarely ever went into the city being a southside girl, and I once happened upon this narrow alleyway, where there was an arcade of purikura and claw machines, numerous Japanese restaurants, a Korean restaurant, heaps of fashion shops for Asian only sizes and much much more. When I first went down there, I was randomly exploring the city just as things were shutting down for the evening and I vowed to go back during daylight hours.

ONE DAY, ONE DAY

 Only problem was, with my terrible sense of direction, I didn't find it again for almost another year. I couldn't figure out where I had gone and whenever I spoke to any of my friends about it, the vagueness of the surrounding shops meant that they had no idea what I was talking about. It was my Room of Requirement, I stumbled upon it by accident one day and I vowed I would memorise its location the next time I found it.  

Never gonna forget it ever again

So what are the random things I know about how to get here? Its up the street at the intersection where Borders used to be and where Dymocks still is. It's near Pancake Manor. Its beside Himawari and right across from Madtongsan II. If that still doesn't make sense, keep going down Elizabeth Street until you see the porn shop, when you see it, you're right next to Elizabeth Street Arcade. If you start seeing Korean grocery stores, Madtongsan III and the comic book store, you've gone too far.

The menu keeps changing, they offer specials as well but they always have solid curry, bento boxes, ramen and some different donburis.

Entrees and different rice bowls aka donburi

Wonderful curry

All the bento!

Their ramen

For some bizarre reason, he ordered grape Fanta. It tastes like grape juice, sort of fizzy and utterly disgusting. It's not artificially grape flavoured, it somehow tastes like authentic grape juice and that's just bad.

My Boyfriend ordered the karaage donburi with rice which is really odd cause its much more like a oyakodon. It actually used to be called that on one of the older menus. Its a combination of egg and chicken on top of rice, it is horrifically called the parent and child combo cause eggs and chicken y'know. He found the sauce to be slightly bitter and the rice to be soggy, however I noted that the sauce just had a huge amount of caramelised onion throughout the dish.

I stuck to my old faithful karaage salad don, I've been ordering this so many times it just rattles off the tongue when I order. Its a large bowl of soft medium grain rice, super crunchy chicken karaage, spinach and curly lettuce leaves, Japanese pickles and Japanese kewpie mayo slathered everywhere. Ir's just a wonderful combination at a cheap price. I can't describe the wonderful flavours that party in your mouth when hot fried chicken, Kewpie mayo, a wonderfully sour lime green pickle and slightly squishy sushi rice are encapsulated in one bite. Pure heaven.

I also picked croquettes as a side, they came already covered in tonkatsu sauce although I squeezed a little more out along with some more kewpie mayo from their self serve station. They're served mouth burning hot straight from the deep fryer, they contain a soft potato mash and that's about it. Deliciously plain though.

Kadoya
Atmosphere: 6, small hole in the wall eatery with uncomfortable chairs and not much decoration. The perfect quick eating place!
Service: 7, quick and cheerful, they always look happy to be there and always ensure they recheck your order.
Food: 7, my old faithful for Japanese food, even after all these years, you still rate highly under my eyes.

 

Cooking with Mum: Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Here is my favourite everyday recipe for red tofu braised chicken. It's made out of a very hard to stomach fermented bean curd mixture, which has an extreme alcoholic pungency and eye watering taste. Considering the mild taste of every other soy product, fermented bean curd tastes like a roundhouse kick to the face. Once cooked however it turns extremely mild and makes a wonderful sauce. If you like blue cheese, you'd probably like this stuff.

Don't worry about this stuff going off, the longer it lives, the more delicious the flavour, I've had a jar for three years that was absolutely delicious. Just keep it in the fridge with the lid firmly screwed on, upside down to prevent mould growth.

With the vague proportions for the sauce, I recommend start small, maybe 4-6 cubes and half a cup of water. Once you start to dissolve the sauce down, you can thin or thicken it up as much as you want. I normally use 10-12 cubes and a cup of water, since I love the sauce on rice.The bean curd we use, normally comes with chilli added, so we don't add any extra.

Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Vague Ingredients:
1-2 tablespoons of sugar for the caraml
1/2 onion, finely diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
500g chicken
Fermented bean curd
1/2-1 cup of water
Sugar
Chopped red chilli

1. Heat up a pot on a steady medium, splash in a tablespoon of oil and once that has heated up, throw in some sugar.

Creating the caramel, essential to thit ko

2. Continue to stir rapidly up the colour changes to a shade of caramel you find agreeable.

Woah! Action shots!

A little bit darker than this

3. Take off the heat immediately and stir in the garlic and onion, stir briskly for about a minute or two, until they have begun to soften and smell fragrant.

Go go go!

4. Throw in the chicken and cook until no paleness shows.
5. Throw in the sugar, as much bean curd as you can stand and the water. The more sauce you want, the more water and bean curd you should put. Add in a little of the liquid that the bean curd was preserved in as well for extra flavour.

So much bean curd

Give it a mush

6. Put on a lid and allow to simmer for 20-30 minutes, until the chicken has cooked through. Taste at this point and add extra bean curd, if you want a stronger taste, or more sugar if you need to balance out the flavours more.

PPP: Cafe O-Mai

Oh hey a PPP, its been a while since one of those huh? This was prompted by Ms L., and myself wanting to get together. We always try and catch up outside of work but it rarely happens despite living pretty close to each other. Ms L., always gets a bit miffed when she hears me going out with other work mates or if I've been to somewhere new without her. She normally says that "TSG, we should go out sometime! When are you next off!" Then it never eventuates haha.

This time I picked out Cafe O-Mai being close to work and her having the day off, while I was off to work in the evening. It has solid rave reviews on Urbanspoon and it has a fusion Vietnamese restaurant. When I was planning this, a lot of friends who lived nearby were saying that it was very nearby and that it was their favourite local location.

I like the layout of this cafe, the tables are very spacious and the the cafe opens up on all sides, flooding the area with sunlight. Its a very brightly lit cafe and the resulting picture quality was amazing.

Despite having the furthest to commute, I was the first person here at about 8am. I was seated and handed some menus before telling the waitress that I was waiting for a few friends. She quickly passed on the message and I wasn't disturbed again until my friends arrived.

Ms Liz, M., and Gill., were the first girls to arrive. We started ordering teas and coffees for ourselves before the other few people arrived. Cafe O-Mai has Toby's Estate coffee.

Gill.,'s cappachino, she really enjoyed it.

These very cute teapot and cups held English Breakfast teas, enough for three cups worth as well as  a pitcher of milk. Everyone loved the cups especially Ms Liz, who turned the cup upside to find out they were from IKEA. She was very excited since she's been moving into her new house and buying things like pretty crockery.

I got Vietnamese style iced coffee aka ca phe phin. Its a dark French roast coffee, that is served with/over a glass of ice, with condensed milk at the bottom and a small amount of hot water dripping down. Condensed milk is normally used as the sweetener and instead of milk in Vietnam, as the high humidity and temperature, make milk go off easily. Its a very sweet, strong, rich drink, ideal for a hot, lazy day.

I got Vietnamese pork meatballs with quail eggs, cooked in a tomato sauce with a baguette. I was intrigued by the quail eggs since they are a firm favourite of mine. They tasted exactly like my mum's recipe, which is a very good thing! Although they made theirs a lot larger, my mum's are about 20 cent piece size and these were golf ball sized. They are a soft pork mince, crunchy jicama cubes, onion, garlic and a very savoury and rich tomato sauce that they swim around in. Delicious mopped up with that crusty baguette.

Wondering where the quail eggs are? I had no idea where they were when I recieved this dish, they were inside like little Scotch eggs!

This was Gill's choice, Aunty Five's claypot baked eggs with Vietnamese lemongrass and chilli pork sausage, spring onions, tamarind sauce with sourdough. I really love the tangy sourness of tamarind so when I had a taste of this I really enjoyed it. Gill was a bit befuddled by the flavour combination but she said she loved it as well. My only complaint was that the lemongrass and chilli pork sausage was a bit lacklustre, I'm used to getting better ones when I go to Inala.

Ms L., got granola, she's boring like there. It had puffed wheat, oats, prunes, dried coconut pieces, pepitas, strawberries, a little pitcher of milk and that's about it. She enjoyed it but she said the mix at the Foxy Bean is still better.

Everyone else, Chelle, Ms M for Megababe and Lis., all ordered the same Phat Breakfast consisting of a choice of eggs, fried tomato, sweet potato hash cake, mushrooms, bacon, sourdough, lemongrass and chilli pork sausage and a side of avocado. I got Lis.,'s sourdough chunk since her teeth were still aching from her brace. All of these ladies enjoyed their meal thoroughly, I did notice that the sausage was left behind on almost everyone's plate however. After eating, we then proceeded to make the entire cafe very uncomfortable with our bawdy nurse talk.

Cafe O-Mai
Atmosphere: 9, a beautiful, well lit and tastefully decorated little cafe with wonderful furniture too. It was a busy little place, but a little out of the way so you weren't listening to the roar of the nearby Ipswich main road.
Service: 9, wonderful service. Good communication, cheerful, enthusiastic and very prompt when we called them over. They accidentally made Chelle's flat white as a double shot cappuccino, which they gave us for free.
Food: 8, very solid Vietnamese food. The meatballs are just as good as my mum's.