Raining Chaos

Blog

  • Sokyo

    Oh Sokyo, whoever thought that you would be so amazing! Having previously had a mediocre experience at Sake, I wasn’t sure what to expect here, especially since I’ve had sushi from Japan which is pretty impossible to match. That being said, Sydney is probably one of the best places to have Japanese, given the large Japanese population here.

    I totally didn’t realise I could ask for the omakase when I made the booking, and it turns out a week’s notice is required so that the chefs can age the fish. If I can’t get into Raita Noda, I may as well put this on my revisit list!
    (more…)

  • Fix St James

    Fix St James gets its own post! I was originally told about this restaurant years ago, and wanted to go because it had an awesome wine list, but never actually made it there. Over the next few years the restaurant continued to pop up on my radar, mainly on social media and I started thinking that it was a pretty awesome place – especially as it always serves some sort of tartare.

    So, finally, I decided to go, and I wasn’t disappointed!

    (more…)

  • Sepia

    Sepia, the best restaurant in Australia in 2015. And it’s consistently awarded 3 hats. My brother has been before, but I wasn’t there to tag along, so I was trying to find any excuse to visit – and an incredibly convenient and worthy reason presented itself, so along I went with a friend.

    I had spotted on their website that they had a bar area for walk ins, and I assumed that this would just be for their bar menu, but once we got there, we were seated facing the bar and had the option of choosing their full menu, so 9 course degustation it was!

    (more…)

  • Why is the squid blue?!?

    But first, my “not anmitsu.” It’s a dessert that I’ve been thinking about making for a while now, but I could never bother obtaining every ingredient for every element. I knew I wanted to make my own interpretation of it, in fact, I wanted to hipsterise it. But keeping the mochi, red bean and green tea elements there was so difficult. Plus I wanted shiso leaves, but I didn’t want them to go to waste if I had no other plans for them.

    What ended up happening was this:

    (more…)

  • Burj Khalifa

    Ah, the Burj Khalifa. It stands out so much in Dubai due to its sheer height, especially in contrast with the neighbouring buildings. I admit I underestimated the number of visitors somewhat, as I was surprised when the 7PM tickets were sold out by the time my session had started at 5PM, but I’m very glad that I bought the tickets in the morning to secure a trip to the top.


    (more…)

  • Farewell Cape Town, Hello Dubai, Welcome Home

    This will probably turn into a very long post full of very random rambling things. I would put Dubai in its own post, but considering I spent less than 22 hours there, it may as well all be crammed into one!

    In the last couple of weeks, I realised that I had visited a great many restaurants and cafes, so I decided to try and remember all of them, which lead to me on a mad last week scramble to match the number of places eaten with the number of days stayed – 84 – and managed to complete this quite easily. What an amazing achievement considering I’ve probably visited a low 3 digit count of places in Sydney, and high two digit in two years in Adelaide!

    A last minute cafe that I had to visit was Shift Espresso Bar, who had some cool “specialty” coffees with cool names, such as Rebellion (double espresso with condensed milk and whipped cream), Hashtag (double espresso, vanilla gelato, oreo), etc. I went for the Nicaragua single origin and a Rebellion, and they were both quite nice. I’m not a fan of sweet/novelty coffees anymore, but the rebellion didn’t taste too bad at all; I got it more out of curiosity for their presentation.

     
    (more…)

  • All that is posh, hipster, pretentious and classy

    It’s almost time to return home, and I feel that I have eaten through Cape Town with a valiant effort. I finally found some mindblowing places – the first being Hemelhuijs. It’s a weird name that I can barely pronounce, but I had noticed a crowd around the place during my explorations, so I decided to pop in for a visit. The decor is visibly posh, and even has a cute little deer head with leaves sprouting from its head as a piece of wall decoration. The other thing I noticed straight away was the black salt in petri dishes at every table.

    (more…)

  • Happy Easter, etc

    I don’t feel that I did too much over the last couple of weeks – it was a lot of rewatching Person of Interest and thinking up more characters for my amazing world. I also found out that there’s a thing out there called technological singularity, and it’s scarily close to what I was doing for my cyberpunk story, at which point I discovered that I really should read Neuromancer by William Gibson because it sounds amazing!

    In food news, I had my first shakshuka at Origin Artisan Roasters – it wasn’t as salty as I had imagined it, but it had a lot of flavour so I really liked it and felt it was a healthy dish:

    (more…)

  • Frenzy

    PTZS - Frenzy scribble

  • A lot of coffee and hispterish places

    So having visited Oranjezicht City Farm Markets, it was time to do other hipster things, like chase food trucks and find new cool places. Managed to visit Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants which is an amazing place as there’s a room full of carcasses. They specialise in meats, however on the day I went, a food truck called El Burro was also going to be there at night – so why not! It was especially enticing because they had ceviche on the menu as well.

     
    (more…)