As some of you may know, Keith and I had a short trip to Melbourne recently to see the sights, visit some old friends. When it was dinnertime at Phillip Island on the first day, we shunned the driver’s recommendation to go to a semi-expensive Italian Restaurant with the views, and found an ordinary looking shopfront cafe with a few tables and chairs outside looking out onto the water. Nothing like the sort of cafes you might see at Manly or Bondi — this was just a simple place to eat. However, there was something interesting about this place… Continue Reading »
bluebeary: clinical psychologist; likes good food and music.
droiby: software engineer; likes photography and
classical music.
There are 108 Posts and 165 Comments so far.
As you can see, I’m catching up with my food reviews! La Botte is a restaurant that Keith and I go to often that I haven’t blogged about so I thought I might share it with you all this time. It’s in Carlingford next to Bunnings, so nice and close by. I thought since Keith and I go to it often, it might be a good restaurant to share with you all. Continue Reading »
Zowa is a casusal Korean restaurant in World Square. It features a wide variety of omelette rice dishes (omu rice), ramen type dishes, baked dishes (e.g. seafood, pork chops), plus entrees, desserts and a variety of drinks. Continue Reading »
At around 9:30am this morning, a company-wide announcement was made regarding my departure from CiSRA. (Oh, you were thinking of something else being official? Sorry to disappoint…)
I mentioned in my previous post that one of my aims in 2008 is to “tie up loose ends, and finalise things”, so I’m now at a stage where I’m wrapping up my work here at CiSRA. It’s been a fun 3.5 years here — great working environment, great people, and I get to play with cool stuff 
However, I feel that it’s time for me to take on new challenges. As such, I’ve taken up an offer to work at another software company in the CBD.
In the spirit of tying up loose ends, I’ve also finally put up some photos that I took in 2007. You’ll find nine new albums all in the gallery.
Waqu is a stylish, modern and dimly lit Japanese restaurant located in Crows Nest and features the $45 6 course tasting menu. Delight your palate with sashimi, steak, fish, chicken, beef tataki, soft shell crab, sushi and some sweet sake creme brulee - interesting…
The food was healthy, thoughtfully presented and left you comfortably full (about stage 1.5 on levels of fullness). Each course was served only when you had finished the preceding one which meant that conversation and food were comfortably intertwined with each other.
A highlight was the lemon mustard sauce that accompanied the sashimi. This was a fresh, tangy alternative to the usual soy sauce with wasabi. I wonder if I could make it at home…?
Service was professional - the very Japanesy waitresses explained what the dishes were and let us know how to eat the soft shell crab taco. Even though one of them only gently bumped (or brushed against) Ka-shu’s shoulder, it was followed by a very apologetic “I’m so sorry!” They also asked how we were finding the food a couple of times.
In summary:
Food: 8/10
Service: 8/10
Atmosphere: 8/10
Cost: 7/10
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…
Apparently, according to some people, I don’t blog enough.
I guess I just don’t have as much spare time as I used to — planning for the CCC music team 08, meeting up with people, spending time with Joyce, work-related matters, other stuff…
Anyway, I’m just going to dig up a half-baked blog entry that I started about six months ago but never got around to finishing. Since one of my aims in 2008 (as opposed to new year’s resolutions) is to tie up loose ends and finalise things, this is somewhat fitting.
Note: if you don’t get some of these comments, don’t worry. However, you photogs out there who read this will probably have a good laugh.
*whoosh* … and there goes 2007.
Hope you all have had an enjoyable and productive year. If not, then at least you’ve got a whole new year ahead of you to make the most of. If you’re the type that likes to make resolutions for the new year, best of luck with those! According to a survey, less than a quarter of people actually manage to keep their NY resolutions, with 35% of people giving up by the end of January.
Anyway, Joyce and I would like to wish everyone a Happy ‘08, and all the best for the new year!
As I’m sure many of you know, Joyce and I are really into musicals (or more accurately, Joyce is really really into musicals, and I like musicals a bit less than opera… which happens to be a lot). However, the number of musicals that we’ve actually seen together (as opposed to listening to the recordings in my collection) is pitifully small.
Come to think of it, I think we’ve only seen one musical together (Fiddler on the Roof at Capital Theatre) before Miss Saigon.
Anyway, Joyce and I finally got to see Miss Saigon at Lyric Theatre last Friday. Many thanks to Grace and Chris for shouting us A-reserve seats. We had a pretty good view of the stage (albeit being off to the side), and the theatre itself was quite comfy and cosy.
[Rant: The only problem with where I sat was that I was just a couple of seats away from some uncouth, inconsiderate imbecile who thought that it would be in his best interest disrupt the performance by turning up forty minutes into the musical and then proceed to dig around loudly in a plastic bag of snacks and offering them to his friend who was sitting next to me.
Luckily, she refused or else I would have had no choice but to 'educate' him with some stares of disapproval... maybe even while shaking my head disdainfully at him...
Grr... there should be a rule that enforces the automatic ejection and subsequent banning of patrons who fail to observe signs like 'no food or drinks in the theatre' -- particularly those who do so and consume them loudly...]
Thanks to Shu’s suggestion, we all went to Billy Kwong for a dinner to try out the famous ‘modern Chinese’ dishes. Billy Kwong is a restaurant opened by Kylie Kwong — famous Australian Born Chinese chef. It’s a small restaurant in Surry Hills boasting organic and ‘bio-dynamic’ ingredients (we still don’t know what ‘bio-dynamic’ means). The menu was not very large as it fit on an A5 sheet of paper. In the end, we decided to go for something that was pretty Aussie (Sang Choi Bow), something that was standard Chinese (Crispy Skin Chicken) and something totally new (Caramelised Pumpkin). Here’s what us Asians thought… Continue Reading »