Food Review: Zen Oasis
I recently visited a very unique restaurant called Zen Oasis. It is a vegetarian buffet restaurant outside of Sydney, in Berrima. If you think that vegetarian is not for you, you may rethink after visiting this place…
On the outside there were stone garden arrangements and a small dam surrounded by trees, lavender bushes and a path. Although the outside of the building did not look very spectacular, once you stepped inside, you could see that the restaurant was quite large, with polished wooden floors and large tables. Friendly Asian staff greeted us and took us to our table.
The food was thoughtfully prepared and created. You knew you weren’t eating mass made greasy Chinese buffet food, but exquisitely prepared vegetarian dishes with natural flavours, minimal salt and oil, but still with sufficient flavour. There were entrees such as vegetable dumplings, viet rice paper rolls, samosas, bbq ‘pork’ buns; main dishes such as very funky looking sushi, san dong ‘chicken’, beans and mushrooms; and yummy desserts such as yoghurt, something that tasted like cheesecake, sago balls and sugar cane jelly.
It all looked great, it was good value at $25 a head, and the atmosphere was very relaxing with soothing music playing in the background. It just made you want to sit, relax and eat the food thoughtfully so that you could catch all the subtle flavours. I thoroughly recommend visiting this place, even though it’s so far away, it’s worth the 1.5 - 2 hour drive (take a stroll down historic Berrima while you are at it - plenty of interesting shops and things to see).
To summarise…
Food: 9/10
Service: 7/10 (but hard to say since it’s buffet - they just take your plates away)
Atmosphere: 8.5/10
Price: 8/10
Accessibility: 2/10 - plenty of parking, but hard to get to