Veggie Bites

If you are a regular veggie bites reader, then you will know that while I like the concept of Vietnamese food, I am yet to find a Vietnamese restaurant that really thrills me. I am not sure that this place thrilled me, but the food was good and cheap! I am pretty sure that Martin and I ate here a few times a few years ago, but I can’t remember whether we had a bad experience, or whether we just forgot that they existed! Anyway, some of my work colleagues really like this place, so we went here for a work lunch. We all had a veggie spring roll – they are much bigger than your standard spring roll – about 3 times the size actually, and they were really hot (temperature, not chilli). But they were really good! They came with a choice of sweet chilli sauce or hot chilli sauce – of course – being a chilli head, I preferred the later! I ordered the lemongrass and chilli veggies with tofu, while my colleagues ordered meat dishes. The meals were huge, and really quite yummy! I managed to eat most of mine by myself, while three mains were enough for the four others to share! In fact I thought mine was so good that I decided to grab a take away menu on the way out, however, it is a little disappointing as the dish I ordered doesn’t appear on it (in fact I am sure that quite a few dishes that were on the eat in menu do not appear on the take away menu!). Well, maybe I will head back there one day and try a few other veggie dishes and write them onto the take away menu myself!

I think it is fairly clear that we like this place! And, since there are so many veggie dishes on the menu, I have been making a conscious effort to try at least one different dish each time we eat here. This time we had the veggie mussamun curry (one of my favourites!), spicy fried beancurd with beans, zucchini, capsicum, basil and ka chai and the new one was steamed beancurd with chilli paste and coconut milk. I was a little disappointed with the beancurd with beans, zucchini etc – it seemed to have a slightly funny flavour this time, but I really enjoyed the new dish. It was spicy and had a great flavour. It wasn’t overly coconut milky, and I am not usually a fan of the soft and squishy steamed beancurd, but this was really nice. Definitely good for a change!

This was take away with friends. We definitely over catered, but it is so yummy, we couldn’t resist getting all our favourites! We started with the pakoras – which are great – little spicy deep fried balls – you can’t really go wrong with that – although, we could have used a little more of the sauce. We ordered two serves of the pakora, but I think we only got one serve of the sauce. For our mains, we went with all the veggie favourites – palak paneer, aloo gobi (a relatively new favourite!), veggie korma (far too many peas!) and dahl bollywood. Our friends also got a tandoori chicken and we accompanied it all with saffron rice, mixed raita and a selection of naans – cheese, garlic and sun dried tomato. Everything was amazing (as usual), although I was a little disappointed with the cheese naan – I think I will stick to garlic in the future. And despite the fact that we over catered – there really wasn’t a whole lot of food left over!

It has been ages since I have been out with a friend that I regularly have lunch with, and finally we were both free! We decided to try something new and headed down to Gorman House to check out the restaurant there. I have been here a couple of times, but it has changed hands quite a few times, so you never really knew what to expect. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised at the prices for lunch (more than $20 for a main), but then again, the food was quite divine! I had the only veggie thing on the menu – wild mushroom and potato pavé – which was amazing – chopped up mushrooms and potato layered – kind of like a lasagna – with a tomato-y sauce and some greens on top. It was delicious. My only complaint would be that it was a little small for the price! My friend had the fish and chips, but modified it so that the fish was fried instead of battered and deep fried. It came with chips and salad – the chips that I stole from her plate were great! We both opted for dessert – as we tend to do when we are lunching somewhere nice, and had the dark chocolate creme bruleé – which was kind of like chocolate mousse with the toffee top, and a lime curd and meringue napoleon with mandarin sorbet. I think this dish was the highlight of the meal – it was amazing! We also had a peppermint tea and a hot chocolate. Overall the food was great. We had to wait quite a while for our desserts, and luckily we had an entertainment discount card which basically meant we got dessert for nothing – otherwise it would have been quite expensive. But, if you are looking for somewhere really nice to eat and you feel like splurging – then check it out!

An extremely late Christmas party for Martin’s work. It seems that any time there is a work function, they choose this restaurant! It isn’t bad – there is usually an awful lot of food in the banquet and a fair selection of veggie items. This time, however, they brought us out our own veggie platters – which were really just a selection of the veggie dishes that they brought out for the rest of the table plus a couple of little extras. This was kind of good, but also kind of freaky! The platters consisted of garlic mushrooms, salad, potatoes with a special sauce and potato and onion omelette, the extras were a couple of bits of asparagus and artichoke. The platter was pretty big, so I certainly didn’t leave feeling hungry! The highlight was definitely the potatoes – I think I have said that before!

This was an incredibly late dinner after seeing Wil Anderson’s work in progress show – which was only supposed to go for an hour, but actually went for almost two and a half hours! Not that this was really a problem – it just meant that we were starving, since we had decided to eat after the show! Anyway, we had our usual veggie spring rolls, sizzling fried bean curd with Chinese broccoli and needle mushrooms and stir fried green pepper with dry bean curd and chilli bean sauce, as well as a vegetarian chow mein with soft noodles (one of my favourite meals). The food was great – they do a really good veggie chow mein – I wish it was actually on their menu!

I haven’t eaten here for ages, and in the last few weeks, I’ve eaten here twice! This was a quick meal to line our stomachs before some wine tasting. Martin had his usual – the cheeseless pizza base thingy with mushrooms and artichokes. I didn’t feel like any of the pastas, so ordered a small vegetarian pizza instead. I have to say, it wasn’t too bad. It was, however, kind of sloppy, but it had a decent amount of toppings and the base is pretty yummy. I was starving, so it didn’t take me very long to eat it all, however, it is quite large for a small pizza, so unless you are really hungry or are sharing with someone else, I wouldn’t recommend that you go any bigger than a small!

Well, for those of you who know me, or who regularly read these reviews (!!), you’ll know that Bollywood is pretty much my favourite Indian restaurant. And that usually we order the same things, with only a small amount of variation! This time we did order mostly the usual stuff, but we also tried a dish that we have never ordered from here before. Our standard dishes were palak paneer (spinach and cheese), dahl bollywood – both were top notch as usual – although, the palak paneer was quite a lot greener than it usually was – it still tasted good, but it will be interesting to see how it is next time. The new dish we ordered was aloo gobi (potato and cauliflower). I cook this dish a lot at home, but very rarely order it from a restaurant. Having had it, I think it will become one of our standard favourites – it was really good. My only complaint would be that there was not enough of it! It was well cooked, nicely spiced and was kind of creamy (but without the cream!). We also had naans and a mixed raita, and I have to say, once we had eaten most of that, we could barely move – which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing since the only place I was going after an extremely long week was bed!