Lady Marmalade

Sometimes social media makes me sad, like when I message a friend after not having spoken in a while and they don't reply. Its not like they didn't see it, by whatever witchcraft Facebook has, it detects that the message has been read, they've just chosen not to respond to me. 

Its been several days and I can see that they been sending messages to other people who have messaged them later than I have. So its not like they're enabling a media black out. My only reaction is, of course, to say:

>:

Anyway, just recollecting because of where I'm going next. I love Lady Marmalade, I remember when no one from work went here and it wasn't well known for having awesome sandwiches. Then we launched a pioneering party after our night shifts and everyone went there. I know some of my friends who have moved away from Queensland, who still have very fond memories of this place.

I watched it rise in the public's eyes until every time I went past, the place was absolutely packed. Lady Marmalade, how I've missed you and your awesome, awesome sandwiches. Did you know the owner of Lady Marmalade/Shady Palms are past contestants from My Kitchen Rules? As well as having won best sandwich in Australia for two years running?

They never used to have a specials board. The mismatched furniture and weird placeholders are still there though.

Not sure if want

The bra outlet shut down ):

Its on a weird intersection of two main roads

Pretty

The inside of the shop is very tiny and the dual counter space/kitchen looks like fighting elbow room. Its very bright and welcoming though, they have a very interesting drinks cabinet with more than your usual assortment of Coca-Cola/Pepsi products.

So many bottles

They also have a delectable showcase of baked goodies and premade sandwiches of all sorts. I normally pick out a sandwich and a main meal cause their portions are a little on the small side. The day that we went here however, we had been eating a heck of a lot during our night shifts. If you have no idea what I'm talking out, check out my Instagram account to see how much we pigged out.

Their sandwiches are amazing

Unsure about their sweets though

They have a few sauce caches around, BBQ, tomato and HP

There's a cute little owl in the corner!

They have a great menu and it changes all the time. Their baked eggs, BHT and field mushrooms always stick around though.

Their menu!

A., opted for a flat white. Its a Genovese coffee and she remarked it was a great coffee, she just wished there was more of it haha.

Perfect fern

On the other hand, I decided to pick up this Ti Tonics white tea and nectarine drink. I was enticed by the fact that it was nectarine. It wasn't until after I had opened it that I noticed it was white nectarine and white tea as the flavour base, possible two of the most delicate flavours you could ever combine. It didn't have much taste to be honest, faint white tea scent and that honey like flavour of white nectarines.

Pretty design at least?

I got the savoury mince with roasted tomato, topped with crumbled feta and gremoulata on top of a toasted sourdough sub. It was a very beautiful looking construction when I received it. The mince was quite rich with large nubbly chunks of beef, it was deliciously savoury if a touch dry. The crumbled feta added a nice and creamy saltiness to the mince and the gremoulata add a touch of freshness to the rich flavours. I don't care much for tomatoes as you know but savoury mince and tomatoes is a match made in heaven. The sourdough was lovely but hard enough to knock someone out with. I nearly stabbed A., in the eye, while trying to cut through the thing. I love crunchy/burnt toast, but that was just ridiculous.

So tasty

A., ordered the gringo baked eggs, chorizo, Angus beef, black bean ragu, two poached eggs and some sourdough soldiers. I had a bit of a nibble and the spices reminded me of tacos. A., said she enjoyed it a lot and made a point of mentioning her toast was a lot softer than mine haha.

The feta looks like massive chunks of garlic

I went a second time a few weeks after this. Just going solo because I was staying at my Boyfriends after my night shift as I had something on in the city before work. The photos below are all taken with my new camera!

My cute dragon placeholder!

I ordered their famous B-T-Hal, a wonderful and utterly mouth watering mixture of bacon, tomato and haloumi with kewpie mayonnaise, spinach, allspice chutney on turkish bread. There is a goddamn reason this has been on their menu since the restaurant's inception, it is the most glorious sandwich combination ever. The bacon is fried to crunchy crispness so that the fat renders into this beautiful glass like ribbon. The haloumi is a wonderful fluffy pillow that squeaks with indignity as you bite into it. The tomato as usual I don't care for but it works here to cut through the saltiness of the haloumi and bacon. The kewpie mayo was unneccesary just because it turned quite runny being on top of the bacon, it looks fantastic but maybe under the spinach so it doesn't turn super runny.

So beautiful

I picked two different sandwiches and got a half of each to eat before getting the rest wrapped for later. I took the photos of the signs not only for the pretty signs but also to recall what was in the sandwich if I forgot.
 

Sandwich number 1

Sandwich number 2

On the right is the jerk spice chicken sandwich, it has a warmly spiced jerk coating and firm but tender pieces of chicken. The curry mayo flavour was very mild. The caramelized onion was lovely and sweet. Then there was the chunk of well cooked sweet potato, that was so sweet that it reminded me of why you can put sweet potato in sweet stuff. My Boyfriend picked out the sweet potato but he really enjoyed the rest of the sandwich. All in all, it was quite a sweet sandwich from the sweet potato and onion, but it really cut through the spiciness of the chicken and curry, the bitterness from the rocket helped too.


The left is the pulled pork sandwich, this was my pick out of the two. My Boyfriend disagrees and said he disliked it for all the reasons I liked it. The pulled pork was meltingly tender, with small caramelised crunchy bits in there as well. It was drenched in a sweet and quite spicy barbeque sauce that I greatly enjoyed. I didn't seem to notice the sweet chilli jam, kewpie or rocket as much due to the barbeque sauce used.

Chicken on the right, pulled pork on the left

Lady Marmalade
Atmosphere: 6, its cute and all, but its also on the corner of a main road and side alley. The sheer noise is perpetually irritating to me whenever I go.
Service: 8.5, perpetually cheerful, super friendly and enthusiastic. I noticed it especially the second time I went because I wasn't busy chatting to anyone cause I went alone. When I ordered, I broke into a coughing fit when I was ordering several times, my waitress was very patient and tried to guess what I wanted several times. When I asked her to wrap up two sandwiches and split the sandwiches in half and wrap one of each half into a pack for my Boyfriend and one for immediate consumption, she was perfectly happy to do so. As I was waiting for my food to arrive, every five minutes one of the servers came out to do a quick scan to see if anyone had left or was waiting around for something, they cleaned empty tables multiple times as well. When I left I gave my waitress a $10 tip out of a $30 bill, yeah my meal was that good.
Food: 9, I love, love, love Lady Marmalade's food, the portions are a touch small. In the past when I had a much bigger appetite, I used to easy polish off a sandwich as well. Nowadays I was ridiculously full after having that sandwich

All the RJIE: Good Food and Wine Festival Brisbane 2013

The Good Food and Wine Festival is just one big random junk I eat blog post. Its almost a cop out considering the thinness of the material covered here. I felt like big, beautiful pictures of the stalls are going to be on everywhere on the blogosphere, so I decided to go a different path.

For me, I'll just post up pictures of things I think you should eat, a little bit of the spiel that the stall holders gave me and maybe a link or two if you're lucky. For people who frequent delis and things like myself, I find the GFWF, aka Good Food and Wine Festival cause its too long to type constantly, is just a product launching place and a place to eat your weights worth in samples.

My Boyfriend and I were here for about three or four hours, we tried almost all the food samples but skipped the wine section and flagged a bit in the cheese section. I didn't take any pictures in the cheese section as there were no good clear shots, I highly recommended the King's Island smoked cheddar though, that stuff is amazing. Otherwise this photo montage is chronological in sequence.

First up was my breakfast, Maggie Beer's new malted milk and chocolate biscuit ice cream. Everyone got one free with their admission ticket and your hand got stamped with easily washed off ink to show that you had already claimed one. Very easily washed if you do a normal 30 second hand scrub that is. Anyway, it was seriously frozen when we received it, so we were instructed to warm it up in our hands for it to become nice and creamy.

The flavour is good, like a frozen malty milkshake with very small chunks of chocolate biscuit throughout it. The ice cream is very dense and super creamy. I found it to be a good ice cream, but I've had better cookies and cream style ice creams before.

Next we had some of this juice from the Berry Company. Here is their website. They're available in Woolworth's wholefoods section I think. They are no GMO, artificial preservatives/sugar/colouring/ additives free as well as gluten free. They're organic fancy stuff as well as containing lots of super foods. It tastes exactly like a normal berry drink, perhaps a little less sweeter than what you're normally used to. Try it if you're interested.

This is the exact opposite of an energy drink, this drink is made to relax you in a sweet fizzy drink form. It's called Everyday Sunday. Here is their website. All of these drinks contain valerian, rosehip, passion fruit and chamomile extracts to help relax you. They have cute, relaxing holiday designs on all their cans. It tastes like a sweet, fizzy and slightly herbal soft drink.

Cute cans lololol

Below is the Boscastle gourmet party pies! Here is their website. I've never heard of them before but they have really good party pies! You got to buy their tasting plate or frozen packages of the different pie flavours.

From left to right going clockwise, chicken, leek and Swiss cheese pies, butter chicken, beef burgundy and then Morrocan lamb. The chicken, leek and Swiss cheese one was the pick of the lot. I read somewhere that this was based off a cheese fondue, and the flavour is amazing. Smooth, creamy, rich, with large tender chunks of chicken. It was perfectly seasoned too, no sauce was required. Considering how small the pie size is, that's amazing in itself that there are more chicken chunks than there are gravy bits. It would be very easy to skimp on the filling in a tiny party pie. These party pies are about 6-8?cm across and were easily eaten. We were able to very neatly eat them while standing up in four even bites. Probably less bites if you didn't have to share.

 The butter chicken pie was also a strong second, with that rich, aromatic scent of butter chicken. As soon as you bit into it, the smell came flooding out. The butter chicken could've been literally poured from your local Indian takeaway into this pie. I felt like it was an accurate representation of butter chicken with barely noticeable but not intrusive spices floating in the sauce. Just like the first pie, there were huge chunks of chicken in the pie.
 
The beef burgundy could've done with more red wine and mushrooms though. I found this to be the most disappointing in flavour, although it was still quite good. I found it to be quite plain in flavour, and would've guessed generic steak if I hadn't have known what it was. Still, the beef is very good quality and shredded to pieces when so much as looked at, it was very tender.

The Moroccan lamb was neither liked or disliked by either of us. I can't explain it, it was a pretty solid middle ground, we had no complaints but nothing really stand out to mention either. It is still a very well cooked pie.

So tasty

I got some free salt flakes from the Murray Rivers Gourmet company. Here is their website. I actually have no idea where my container of salt went on returning home. The salt from Murray River is a faint pinkish hue and has a wonderful flavour that is hard to describe, its delicate. This goes in all my salted caramel from now on.

Mmmm salt

There was an awful lot of dukkah floating around this year as well as coconut water. I found that this was one of the best ones though, this is from the Thistle Be Good company, located in South Australia. Here is their website. The Bush dukkah was particularly good with a sour/sweet tang and roasted almonds.

There was another one we particularly liked that was headed by a guy in chef whites, the prices were $8 a packet of spice and they were also amazing. I wish I had taken a photo now.

Blurry dukkah!

I really liked the baby baguette garlic and parmesan flavoured bites from the in season company. They had a really pronounced and quite strong flavour that would've done well with smoked meats and creamy dips. They are also super crunchy, which I loved. I don't think they have a website.

Ceres is a South African juice that is imported via Perth into local IGAs. Here is their website. I loved their lychee and pear juice. It's lightly sweet with a delicate blend of the two flavours, you can definitely tell what it is without looking on the box. It's also well balanced alternating between lychee and pear on your palate. They have really interesting flavour combinations although the only other two flavours available at the time were the fruit medley and the mango magic. I tried the mango magic and found it to be less syrupy than other mango nectars

When I went here, I bought both myself and my Boyfriend a litre of lychee and pear juice. The girl who is hiding behind that carton asked where we were in from and she said that if we presented the box to our local IGA, that they could stock it for us. She also gave me a little tetrapack one from the fridge that was in a six pack as well as a bag with a key chain, pen and some pamphlets on the juice.

Sami's Kitchen is a New Zealand based brand of Middle Eastern cuisine that's been around since 1991. I've never seen it before and was very excited to see it. Here is their website. I got two packets of their spice blends, the za'atar pictured below as well as a sharwama spice blend that I intend to use for chicken and lamb in the future.

Wonderful za'atar!

They also had a great za'atar roasted nut medley with bits of smokey almonds and za'atar crusted cashews. It was amazing and I had to resist the urge to pick out the cashews to eat them all! I had to forcibly drag myself away. I remember the gluten free nut mix was also good but I didn't pay much attention to it, as the siren call of that za'atar was calling me.

In the middle is the wine glass I never used

I remember when Bondi Chai was a new thing at the GFWF several years ago. It was an absolutely amazing flavour and sweetness, its still my go to chai latte mix. I adore their vanilla and honey chai, which is light and silky in flavour with a wonderful warm aroma. I mentioned to the stall holder that I wanted the show special including a fancy Bondi Chai hug mug and she gave me a 20 pack of vanilla and honey chai, instead of 2x 8 packs! I was very surprised and eagerly took the extra satchets.Here is their website by the way.

<3~

Organic coconut chips from Banaban, there were like a billion coconut water stalls this year.Here is their website. They were really cheap coconut chips compared to the only brand you really see outside of health food shops, Fruit for Life. Fruit for Life runs anywhere from 2.50-3 for 40g, these were $3 for 70g and cheaper if you wanted a few cans. The purple can on the left is a salt and vinegar, centre is a plain one and the brownish tin are chocolate coated coconut chips.

The Bertolli both was backed onto a cooking stage and was right beside a Campbell's stock both as a well as a tomato sauce booth. The show special they had was a bottle of organic extra virgin olive oil, extra virgin olive oil and extra light olive oil, as well as some random recipes. The cost? $6! Less than half recommended retail price! Here is their website. I just remembered when I googled their name, that they were one of the first companies to be pro-gay after the chairman of Barilla remarked that Barilla was only for traditional families and gay people would never be in their ads. Here is the Bertolli pics.

Cheap!

I got this little dips stall next to a curry stall and wandered over for a look. The stall holder was a very cheerful Middle Eastern man who had a very friendly chat to everyone and actively encouraged you to try everything. I saw his card and he's the regional sales manager, a lovely guy! I did try everything but what really stood out for me was their hummus, super, super creamy with a lovely tang and nutty flavour, I was in love! I got a 500g tube for VGirl who inhales several tubs of the stuff a day. Here is their website.

The hummus with za'atar and olive oil is also good!

The Peppercorn company were frying up random sausages all day, they were all absolutely amazing. You followed your nose right up to their stand and stood there eagerly while the stallholders kept slicing up sausages for you to try. I loved their Welsh dragon sausage, freshly ground pork, leek and cayenne pepper. The sweetness of the pork and leek with that mild spiciness to cut through the fattiness of the pork was a match made in heaven. I tried one of their lean, organic chicken sausages earlier in the day as well and it was beautifully tender and moist, which was great cause chicken sausages have a tendency to dry out a bit. Here is their website.

+_+ so many flavours to try

The Collective Australian/New Zealand company had a wonderful stall on! They had these thick, creamy smoothies that they gave generous samples for, the strawberry one was as thick and creamy as Greek yoghurt. The vanilla and honey one tasted like vanilla and honey shampoo smells, so lusciously sweet and creamy. If I wasn't so heavily lactose intolerant and unsure of when I was going home, I'd have bought some of the 1L bottles to take home! I really should've bought an esky that day. Website here.

They also had muesli and yoghurt tubs you could buy and try. As well as some amazing cheeses.

HALOUMI?

Their haloumi plate was one of the best meals of my day as well as the cheapest! A plate of freshly grilled haloumi on sourdough with rocket and lemon set you back only $5! The haloumi was absolutely beautiful, I eat a lot of haloumi and the Collective's haloumi has now replaced Olympus haloumi as my favourite brand. Its super creamy, just the right amount of salt, with a lovely texture and that perfect squeak. I could've easily had another plate! The rocket was perfect with the mixture as well, just the right amount of bitterness along with the sour lemon to contrast with the haloumi.

I basically Instagram'd this photo as soon as I sat down to eat it. The Collective NZ/AU gave me some really nice feed back about it :).

Amazing haloumi +_+, try it!

I saw this super cute tea set and wandered over, Numi organic tea. This is a US brand of organic, premium, Fair trade tea. It has some really interesting flavours such as toasted rice green tea and rooibos chai. They also had your standard favourites like jasmine green tea, a decaf black vanilla, an aged Earl Grey, Morrocan Mint and a breakfast blend. I tried their breakfast blend at the stall and it was a strong, well scented blend of tea that quickly became pleasantly bitter in the little cup I had. It was gorgeous with a tiny bit of sugar and a dash of milk.

I decided to buy the breakfast blend and when I asked the stallholder if there was a sample pack, she kindly gave me a sampler pack that was part of a different show bag! That show bag had the tea sampler pack, two jars of pesto, some grissini and something else I can't remember, all for $15! I wish I had gotten that instead hahaha.

Cute individually wrapped tea

All the packs!

I decided to have lunch at this Maggie Beer restaurant.

The menu!

I picked the Barossa chicken and mushroom pie with bitter salad greens and Barossa tomato sauce. The pie was wonderful, the pastry was short and flakey, the cubes of chicken, tender and juicy with a wonderfully creamy green herb sauce with chunks of mushrooms everywhere. The filling was perfectly seasoned and didn't need that tomato sauce at all. The bitter salad was too bitter for me and I ignored it, I normally love endive and radicchio but this was too much for me.

I completely regret ordering the duck and orange pate. It came with cubes of bitter orange, pickles and a rosemary and verjuice cracker. I found the pate to reek of alcohol and be very bitter, the aspic on top tasted exactly like alcoholic shots. The cracker crumbled too much for my liking and one cracker was too big for one bit. I basically had two smears of the pate and asked a waiter to take it away. I personally found this a waste of money and if I had realised what was in the dish, would've gone to the Maggie Beer shop and bought myself a tub of duck and orange pate there for about $5.

This was echoed around me by quite a few people. The other main dish with the lentils was panned for being such a small serve, and I heard quite a few people murmuring that as I was waiting for my pie.

My Boyfriend didn't want anything from the Maggie Beer restaurant so he got a chicken schnitzel wrap from the stand right outside the restaurant. For much cheaper, we both that meal immensely more satisfying. I wish I had taken photos of it, it was just the perfect wrap. It had the perfect filling to wrap ratio, great sauces, fresh ingredients, ahhh it was amazing.

):<

Tasty pie

All my regrets.

I got some Hoyt's popping corn, at $1 a bag of 375g, it was a steal!

I got this packet of 'nduja from the Salumi company. It is crazy spicy and absolutely delicious! Its normally $15 but at the show it was only $5!

I got these roasted chickpeas too. Super crunchy with a great garlicky flavour.

Grill'd Wintergarden

So I got an interesting message over Urbanspoon one day:

Oh em gee

Lots of this message got censored because I got overly excited and had to post it on Facebook. Then I paranoid about leaking details of the launch because I was unsure if this was open to the public at all. So I kept deleting parts of the message out. This is what it eventually ended up looking like, I'm surprised its still so coherent out of context.

This is the first food event I've gone to as a food blogger and guest. So this was a little bit exciting, way more exciting than the first time I got highlighted on Urbanspoon's front page. Is it too early to dream that I'll one day retire from nursing and blog full time? Yeah maybe, calm your tits ThatSeriousGirl.

I was very torn about attending this at all because I had night shifts straight afterwards. If you've ever worked a night shift, anything short of sleeping, before your shift, is not advised. Even for people like me who actually sleep during the day. My friends, work colleagues and patients were all very supportive of me and actively encouraged me to go or call in sick and go. In the end, I went to the event AND went to my night shift.

PUBLIC DISCLOSURE TIME. I WAS INVITED AS A GUEST. THE FOLLOWING OPINION IS PURELY MY OWN. EVEN IF I WAS A GUEST AND THEY PAID FOR MY DINNER. I'M CALLING IT LIKE IT IS.

These guys

What was the event you ask? Grill'd at Wintergarden is having Ping Pong After Hours! Apparently its pretty cool to have ping pong at casual dining places overseas, so we're bringing it to Australia. At the moment, its only available on Thursday nights after 5pm, just rock up and see what its like!

Ooooh~

The Grill'd at Wintergarden is a little bit hard to find, but just look for their giant logo and follow it.

Oh yeah

Up here and to the left

They have an interesting chandelier of spatulas. This was difficult to photograph with my new camera because it has a tendency to overexposure when there are bright reflections. I found that swapping between my camera phone and my camera covered any issues like that. I use my camera for food photos and my camera phone for shiny things like menus.

Just in front of the bar, behind that bookshelf are little booths

They had a lot of random stuff for decoration. I liked all the pictures promoting Melbourne Cup drinks, although its a little late at this stage to be promoting Melbourne Cup events haha, maybe next year?

Too late now

All the wallpaper looks like graffiti and a bit scratchy in some places. It has that look of posters that have been placed on top of one another for band gigs? Or a very active street pole.

You the feel right?

Their bar is very plain. I have nothing to say about it.

Bar

Here is their Queensland menu. I ordered the Hot Mama, grilled grass fed lean beef, tzatziki, roasted capsicums, dill pickles, tasty cheese, lettuce, tomato and harissa paste on a traditional panini bread. The beef pattie was roughly ground and chunky but held its shape well. The tzatziki was not noticeable, when I was eating this, I was firmly convinced it was just sour cream and was eating my Lacteeze by the handful to counteract its effects. Tzatziki should be a much thicker yoghurt, cucumber and herby thing rather than the thin sauce I had. The grilled peppers weren't bad, they did end up sliding out of my burger though. Their dill pickles are good, sharp and crunchy. The harissa paste is super spicy, I liked it but maybe a shade less.

My burger!

I only ate half before I asked for a box to take my burger in.  The many reasons being that I ate more than my fair share of chips, the burger was too hot from the harissa paste, harissa being a very spicy, super red hot chilli paste, I was a little nauseated/anxious from being on nights as my lactose intolerance kicking in and wondering what time I'd leave. I had the rest of it, a little after midnight for my lunch and it was really tasty then, although still a bit hot.

The two sauces at the end were the sweet chilli mayonnaise and the herbed mayonnaise. I had actually only asked for the herbed mayonnaised but hey, free is free. Although technically, all my meal was free, sooooo yeah. The sweet chilli mayonnaise is wonderful, VGirl and I often go to Grill'd and get their chips with this sauce, its sweet, tangy with a milder honeyed sweet chilli sauce with the creaminess of mayonnaise. You could totally get the same flavour by mixing the two sauces at home yourself though. The herbed mayonnaise is also quite good, it gives it a Dutch feel since you're putting mayonnaise on your chips. The sauce is quite green but the flavour is not so strong that you can tell what herbs are in it, probs rosemary and oregano to my taste.

Here is a close up of my burger.

Nice blurry shot there

Here is what it looks like straight down the middle.  I like its mostly even distribution, so you get a fair bit of everything when you bite into it.

Little bit squished too

My Boyfriend got the Big Queenslander as well as the chips put on his side. His burger was the better burger, it had chunky lean beef pattie, fried egg, purple onion, beetroot, tomato, lettuce, crispy bacon, relish and herbed mayo all on a traditional panini roll. It was a much more balanced burger, flavour wise than mine was. The fried egg was cooked all the way through, which I'm not a fan of but he enjoyed it. The beetroot was good and very classic Aussie flavour, egg and beetroot on something is instant Aussie after all.

He also got our bucket of regular rosemary and salt seasoned chips. They were, as always, really crunchy on the outside and fluffy in the centre.

+_+ jealous

Here is a close up of his burger.

Add caption

As well as an interior shot.

He didn't want my knife to cut the burger

We then went to play ping pong, once the slightly tipsy group beside us had finished. They had cleared out a large space to put two tables in as well as their DJ. I completely forgot to take photos of this bit because I was so busy playing ping pong. I went back a few days later during the day to take photos.

Pretend this is a DJ

I'm not great at ping pong because I've played a lot of badminton and my first reaction is always to hit the paddle downwards rather than upwards, so I do a lot of down smashing into the floor. It was pretty even though just because it had been a while since either of us had played. The DJ had fun between songs by throwing additional ping pong balls onto our table from the massive plastic bags they had everywhere.

This is the space that the tables were set up

We had a handful of ping pong balls with us at all times and kept having to hunt around for more, despite the massive bags. I ended up trying to stack them on the bench beside the window. I didn't realise there was a gap between the wall and the window, so a few of the balls escaped and landed a bit too close to some people passing below. The DJ and I were in hysterics and we hid underneath the Grill'd sign, while we giggled over the confused faces of the business people below.

Big gap between the wall and the glass

I think we played about an hour before we decided to head home. It was fun but one of my criticisims of the location is that due to our terrible playing, there were a lot of loose shots ending up in the restaurant area. On more than one occasion, I hit someone with a stray shot and I almost knocked out the son of the waiter looking after us that night. His toddler came up to the table as my Boyfriend hit the ball towards me, and he started trying to pick up the ball, AS I WAS SWINGING MY PADDLE. Remember how I use massive downstrikes? Yeah, that could've been bad. Luckily, I stopped and his mum hurriedly pulled him away.

It does look like you can pull those glass doors together?

I can imagine it would get really annoying to have random ping pong balls hitting you. I wonder if they could install a partition to stop random ping pong balls from hitting other patrons?

Oh and on the second time I went here, I got myself the strawberry and lime Rekorderlig slushie. It was very sweet and tasty, the alcoholic tang was barely noticeable and was very refreshing on the hot day I went!

Yay alcoholic slushies!

Grill'd Wintergarden

Atmosphere: 7, bright and cheerful, a good place for a quick catch up for a friend.
Service: 8, super friendly and very quick to help. All the staff members had a smile on their face and if I asked something, they knew the answer and ran to find out. Even the DJ helped, although I guess throwing ping pong balls is pretty fun without having to be part of your job.
Food: 7, I've been to Grill'd many times before, and I don't doubt I'll go again.