RJIE: Re Del Gelato

VGirl and I went here after we had dinner at Jakarta, we just wanted a quick snack before we went home so gelato it was!

This place!

There was a huge variety of different flavours but we were pretty boring and got our stock standard favourites. There's also quite a fair few seats inside where you can sit and chat with friends.

Hazelnut gelato for VGirl!

She gets cups not cones

Salted caramel for me! I found mine to be way too sickly sweet so I don't think I would go back here again.

Salted caramel!

District 1

I went here quite a while ago, just after the Storey Bridge event in fact! I want with Manda to the event thanks to some leftover passes from Dandelion. We walked there from the CBD and were late for our midday session, we barely got through 1/3rd of the Storey Bridge before we had to wrap it up and head home! As a result, we were pretty hungry and I was in maximum seek out mode for the best feed possible. Something that was near impossible considering the sheer size of the crowds that day.

That day was the day I broke my brand new phone as well, I'm not even sure how it happened. One minute I put my phone in my pocket, at the end of the bridge I pulled it out and the screen had fine spiderweb cracks all over it. It's a mystery what on earth happened to it but I was getting super hangry as a result!

So off we went to find food and we stumbled upon District 1, the then darling of Brisbane Instagram for its roast pork belly roll. Manda wanted something light and flavoursome so in we went!

This place!

It's got a mural of all the Instagram photos taken at the restaurant covering their front counter!

I love previewing meals

They also have cute succulent plants in recycled tinned lychee cans.

Lycheesssss

This was their specials menu when we went. Otherwise Zomato has a nice menu.

Manda got the lemongrass beef which came with the usual assortment of Vietnamese herbs, caramelised pineapple, carrot, cucumber, lettuce and bean sprouts as well as a side of nuoc mam. I found the colour of the beef to be quite bland and the flavours used in the marinade to also be quite one dimensional, it had lemongrass, soy sauce and onions. Boom, done. Manda enjoyed her meal but I wasn't impressed.

Meh

Same goes for this roasted pork belly banh mi which consisted of an admittedly great, warm and crusty baguette, mayonnaise, cucumber, coriander, pickled carrot, house made pate, caramelised onion and what I suspected was Sriraicha sauce on top. The pork belly had crunchy crackling but lacked flavour and meat for the rest of it. It was like they had trimmed off most of the meat for another dish and left just the crackling and rendered fat for this dish. Crackling and fat are great but you need that meat in there for contrast and body!

So much fat, and I love fat!

I got their coconut water and lychee frappe as well. As soon as I had a sip, I knew that they used the Thai brand of super sweetened young coconut mixture. I have no idea what its called, but its an iconic drink/cooking ingredient that I'm sure most Vietnamese children would have grown up with. This was blended with lychees, mint, ice to form a chunky lychee and coconut flavoured frappe. Chunky like I stop to chew all the bits of young coconut every few seconds chunky.

Why am I chewing my drinks?

District 1
Atmosphere: 5, tiny little shop packed full of busy tables.
Service: 5, counter service!
Food: 5, passable. I didn't think it was anything special but I'm super, super picky with my Vietnamese food. I wouldn't bring Mama Pham here. You think my complaints are bad, you should hear her in full swing.

Five Sisters: Art House, Cafe and Bar

I went ages and ages ago to Five Sisters Art House Cafe with T., as soon as we finished our night shifts. We drove haphazardly into the Coles in West End and staggered across to this little cafe. I think that might be why all my photos were a little blurry cause I swear they looked fine when I took them.

Much blur, such legible

They have both cute outdoor and indoor seating areas. Take advantage of their cool garden space with a lazy drink or two!

Yassss

Wind corridor! 

Shady outdooors

Even more tables

It's a counter service place and they have a really amazing drink selection! A lot of very unusual drinks stocked here.

Cakes and other takeaway stuff!

Not sure if delicious or not

I liked the interior as well, I have a feeling its a converted house to cafe which explains the rooms and fireplace haha. Here is their menu by the way!

It'd be a pretty neat house

Whats that black gap?

I got a soy based flat white which came with two crumbly, super short and buttery biscuits! They had over heated the soy a bit too much so it did that thing where it becomes a nice solid raft of soy. Not the best soy coffee I've ever had to be sure.

Most defs had worst though

T., got the big brekkie which consisted of your choice of eggs, haloumi, wilted spinach, garlic mushrooms, bacon, roasted tomato, sausages and toasted sourdough. It's a pretty huge feed! T., didn't finish this as she usually does but she said that she especially enjoyed the haloumi, crusty sourdough and poached eggs. On the odd side was the super lemony wilted spinach. I thought I was imaging the taste but T., confirmed it for me and we were both puzzled.

Not bad

I got the brekky stack, smashed avocado, bacon, haloumi, poached eggs, wilted spinach and sourdough bread. It had nearly the same ingredients as what was on T.,'s dish barring the rocket and I thought it was a good sized serve of food.

Good flavours

Obligatory yolk porn

Five Sisters Art House, Cafe and Bar
Atmosphere: 8, breezy house turned cafe. I liked the atmosphere!
Service: 5, counter service!
Food: 6, not bad! Cheap, filling breakfast with solid ingredients and flavour combinations. I would easily go back here again if I wanted somewhere I was sure people would easily enjoy it.

Landmark Restaurant

Oh man Landmark is probably the best known yum cha restaurant in all of Brisbane. I swear if you've ever been to yum cha, you've probably been here before. I don't really like it though, mostly because the food can be a bit hit and miss. If you go there during peak hour, everything is great otherwise it's really average. The fried food can be a bit oily, the calamari can be tough at best and the service is surly at best.

Anyway, it's still an easy place to go to for a quick catch up with friends. Especially since parking is so easy since its in the shopping centre at Sunny Plaza. The day we went was really a get together for all the parents and me, because I like to eat.

I was on the prowl as soon as we entered the restaurant! My friends normally leave me to order for the table because I usually know whats good, but H., has to rein me in because I usually over order! We started off with har gao, some prawn and coriander dumplings plus siu mai! The har gao and prawn and coriander dumplings had very juicy, plump and flavoursome whole prawns inside, you can pretty much guarantee for all of Landmark's failings that their prawns dishes are pretty good. The siu mai was nothing special, the won ton wrapper was a little tough for some reason but I guess that's because we went a little before lunch time.

We had doubles of this!

You can faintly see in this photo that we had deep fried prawn rolls, salt and pepper calamari, steamed pork buns and crunchy kai lan with a side of oyster sauce. The salt and pepper calamari were a hit with the kids at our table, S.,'s daughter Olivia had one tentacle in each hand and was chewing gleefully. She kept trying to share her food with the other little boy there, Oliver, he was somehow convinced that he was eating chewy chips but tried the calamari anyway. He was a very shy little boy and kept asking his dad for more "chips". That being said, they were rubbery as anything, I don't think there's been a single time that I've had tender calamari here. The steamed pork buns were too sweet for my liking and had very little char siu inside them.

The token vegetable

A slightly different angle

You can't really see through all the steam but this was an interesting dish with eggplant where the hollowed inside was filled with fish paste and prawns before being steamed! Oliver was also gamely trying this considering he hadn't had eggplant or fish paste before. I feel like I shouldn't be allowed near small children cause I'd just feed them exotic foods without telling them what it was. I guess that's no different to how I treat some of my adult friends really.

What's behind that cloud of steam????

These were more deep fried prawns and beside them is a slippery plate of steamed rice noodles with more prawns inside them covered in a sweet soy sauce.

Well at least their prawns are good

Landmark Restaurant
Atmosphere: 5, your usual bright red and gold Chinese restaurant! Complete with tanks full of live seafood for you to pick and consume at your leisure. 
Service: 3, surly and unhelpful. Skip the trolleys and bring your bill straight to where they steam the food. Your variety will be a lot better and the food a lot fresher.
Food: 4. the food is nothing special. Anything with prawns is a safe bet, otherwise gloves are off as to what you're getting.

The Sushi Train and Buffet

I feel like VGirl and I have been going out to eat a lot recently! This time we decided to go out for Japanese food and I remembered that there was a sushi train in Buranda that did a buffet for dinner for about $20. VGirl agreed to go as long as I paid, which I always do being the big sister, and so we were off! Parking is easy at that time of night, just street park or park across the road at the Buranda shopping centre.

It's a simple place, just rock up and pick anything off their menu or train and its included on the buffet pricing. Just pay extra for drinks and set meals like their karaage dons.

The first thing I grabbed was the crab claws. These were a bit cold but they had a great crunch and a sweet interior that tasted vaguely of crab. It thought they were awesomely, terribly delicious in the way that fake food can be, like chicken nuggets and that kind of food.

The craw.

VGirl didn't have many options but she honed in on the avocado rolls as soon as she saw them. I think she had two or three of them. She likes their simplicity.

She's quick when shes hungry

I got the tuna and avocado roll and it was probably the best thing of the night for me. The tuna was moist, well seasoned and holds up quite well considering the length of time it would have been sitting there.

Ye old faithful

I got this soggy tempura prawn roll with avocado and tobiko roe on the outside. It had been sitting there for a while since it was getting a bit on the warm side but it wasn't anything too bad I guess.

Meh

We got a complimentary miso soup as part of our buffet. It had wakame and soft tofu pieces in it. I don't think I finished mine but VGirl drank all of hers.

Miso soup

Kakiage roll! Aka vegetable fritter roll, VGirl pounced on this once we finished puzzling over whether or not this was vegetarian at all. She ate about three of these in total and said it was pretty good.

Aw yiss

This was a particularly thickly riced piece of salmon nigiri. The salmon was quite thinly sliced and I found it to be nothing spectacular.

Its not the prettiest piece of salmon either

I got scorching hot takoyaki ordered, it was absolutely drowned in Japanese mayonnaise! I quite liked this, I suspected it was a frozen takoyaki but it was a good brand as the octopus pieces were still quite tender in the middle.

Classic Aussie sushi train appearance

This was their spicy chicken and avocado roll. The spicy part was literally the drizzle of sriracha sauce on the top of the roll. I don't even think it was the top of the line Cock sauce Sriraicha either but some random knock off brand due to its profound fruity and sweet flavours to the sauce.

Bruh

We got edamame ordered as well and it came out oddly warm.

What did they do to you?

This is their chicken and egg roll, a large piece of chicken, avocado and a very, very thin piece of tamago. I know tamago is a slightly sweetened egg omelet, but this was ridiculously sweet, like I fried off cake batter and ate it. The tamago here has a very odd appearance, rather than the thick, spongey block it usually comes in, this looks like a super thin fried egg.

What

Tamago nigiri, even VGirl with her inability to taste major flavours looked at me questioningly at the sweetness of this dish.

Blergh

You don't need to know where this place is. Seriously.

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.