We went to Ikea yesterday morning to look for a sofa cover for our 2-seater couch. Ikea is such a fun place to spend time, don’t you agree? I am sure it is such a playground for many people, men, women and even kids; or at least, to many people I know of, it is. There are always something to admire, to wish for every single time I go to Ikea store.
And of course, a visit to Ikea is not complete without eating something from its cafeteria hehehe. Since we were there in the morning and they were still serving breakfast, we ended up choosing the big breakfast with extra side mushroom. They are not only cheap and cheerful, but also taste not bad at all. With the big breakfast you get one scoop of scrambled egg, 1 sausage, 2 hash browns, 1 big piece of bacon, 5 pieces of their famous meatballs, and half-baked tomato. And all that comes to a bill of $5.99 – that would probably be the cheapest big breakfast meal you could find in Sydney, don’t you think?
The breakfast menu
Big breakfast with extra mushroom side (please pardon the little drop of ketchup on the tray) 😛
In the spirit of the coming of Chinese New Year 2016 which happens to be Monkey Year, they have even decorated their dining area with “monkeys” and chinese lanterns. Check out their cute decoration on the picture below.
How cute are those monkeys? 🙂
You could probably see there were many people in the dining area, a lot of families with little kids. Told you, it is a playground for everyone (☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞
By the way if you curious, we didn’t get the sofa cover we were looking for, instead we came home with new pillows and duvet covers – such a cliche story of Ikea visit eh? ◔̯◔
Suminoya is the sister restaurant of Rengaya (North Sydney) and Koh Ya (now in Randwick) that serves Japanese yakiniku, either buffet style or ala carte. It is located at a little alley way near Martin Place, which may not be easy to find if you haven’t looked it up on map beforehand. I reckon they are almost always busy, so booking ahead is definitely recommended. When I made the booking for dinner buffet option over the phone, I was offered two slots of time: 5.30 pm (when they just open) or 7.30 pm, which of course we chose the earliest 🙂
They offered two options of yakiniku buffet: Gourmet Buffet and Premium Buffet. Gourmet buffet is priced at $45 pp, whereas Premium buffet is priced at $55 pp. As seen on their menu, there are more options to choose from the Premium Buffet option, such as sashimi, wagyu beef loin, pork loin, and many more. Also on the Premium Buffet option, you can get unlimited order of beef tongue which was limited to one per person on the Gourmet option. I think their beef tongue is best, thin, tender and just lightly seasoned.
On our first time visit, we opted for the Premium Buffet, which was not disappointing at all. The salmon sashimi are delicious and very fresh, of course we ordered heaps of those beef tongue, beef harami, wagyu beef loin, beef ribs, marinated chicken pieces, salad, soup, edamame, eel rice, garlic prawn, and many more. Indeed as many people said, the 90 minutes just went by really quick; nevertheless we left the restaurant with super full tummies 😀 But sadly they don’t have gyoza on the menu, we love the gyoza at Koh Ya when in was still located in Double Bay area.
Without further ado, here are some pictures we “remembered” to take on our dining trip to Suminoya. A lot of the time, we were just way into the bbq-ing and forgot to take pictures as the ordered were delivered or as we cooked them.
The entrance and shop front
Various meat on bbq, seaweed salad, garlic butter prawn, eel rice, mashed potato, and green tea-black sesame ice cream
We went to Campsie last weekend to replenish our stash of Indonesian condiments and seasonings. That was the first time we had to since we came back from our Indonesia trip, September last year and mainly due to we finally run out of Sambal ABC Ekstra Pedas 😀 We bought back like three refill packs of those chili sauce from Bali and it finally ran out after about three months and here goes time to replenish our stash again. So, while we were in the area, we decided to have lunch there and try something new. The first option was Cinta Ria but sadly they were still closed for new year holiday and we walked along the street then saw this Tan Thai restaurant. If you followed my blog posts, you’d know we love Thai food – we agreed to try the food there.
Looking briefly from the outside, the restaurant looks small with mainly dark color interior with few tables and chairs and a see-through glass wall to separate the dining area with kitchen area. Then there is a curved archway at the back leading to more seating with a water feature in the middle. The seating at this area is mostly of wooden materials and kind of dim lighting. Then another small seating area with mostly white walls at the far back of the restaurant (see the picture below) with brighter lighting.
The menu on offer are mainly Thai dishes consists of stir fries, noodles, rice, curry, and the usual entrees options. For our lunch, we tried their Duck Red Curry and Crispy Soft Shell Crab Salad with rice.
Duck Red Curry $15.90Crispy Soft Shell Crab Salad $15.90
We think the red curry is more of sweet tone than our favorite at Green Peppercorn also the duck itself is not as tender. But the crispy soft shell crab salad is awesome, pack with flavors and the soft shell crab was truly crispy and huge! We love the sauce on the salad, just a nice balance of sweet, salty, sour, spicy and generous coriander-mint on top. Overall we had a nice meal at Tan Thai and may come back again for the soft shell crab salad (っ˘ڡ˘ς)
One of many popular Balinese dishes is nasi ayam (or chicken rice), a dish that gains just more fans these days. As most Balinese are Hindus, which allows them to eat pork, you will find so many Balinese dishes that contains pork. This makes Bali as one of very few places in whole Indonesia that serves non-halal food publicly.
Nasi ayam, however is one of the halal dish that can also be easily found in Bali and is definitely attracts many people, especially those who loves spicy food. One serving of nasi ayam Bali usually contains rice, spicy chicken, sate lilit, sayur urap, egg, roasted/fried peanuts, some crispy fried chicken pieces (may include skin or intestines), and of course the spicy sambal. Urap sayur is a mixed vegetables (typically long beans and bean sprouts) with shredded coconut side dish. Some also serve their nasi ayam with a bowl of spicy chicken broth. By the description above, I hope you get the point that this dish is truly hot and spicy! Nevertheless it is still a very tasty and delicious dish, one that hubby and I crave for.
After our Gianyar night market experience, we decided we wanted to go to other night markets just for comparison of what’s on offer (especially in term of food, of course!). So we went to three more night markets during our stay in Bali: Sanur, Kereneng, and Nakula. Keep reading below for our review of each night market! Essentially, pricing and serving size are fairly the same in all these night markets; the differences that we can tell were on the size of the markets, the crowds, and type of things/food on offer.
Pasar Sindu, Sanur
It is located on Jalan Danau Toba, Sindu, Sanur. Apparently during morning and day time, they sell groceries and what not; then at night (around 6 pm) turn to mostly food stalls. There are so many food options available here, but there are all halal food (no pork) – we walked around and could not find pork satay or balinese pork rice aka babi guling.
Still, it is a very live market, a lot of vendors to choose from and definitely many tourists in here as many as local residents. We bought sweet martabak, chicken satay, and some mixed fried goodies (tofu, tempe, mixed vegetables). All of them were priced reasonably, in fact we got some bonus pieces of those deep fried stuffs as the seller came from the same hometown as my hubby (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ)
Pasar Kereneng, Denpasar
We came here based on recommendations from villa staffs and Sundari Spa staffs. It is said to be the largest night market in Bali and is located on Jalan Kamboja, East Denpasar, which is geographically closer to Sanur area than Seminyak. I think it took us almost one hour from Petitenget to this market with traffic. And it is true, this place is so huge that we didn’t get to explore the whole area. In the front section was clothing stalls then towards the back you’ll find toys and house hold kind of things and more and more of the food sellers up to the very end of the market. On its side street, there are more fruit and food sellers – and we ended our adventure about there. Truth was I was bursting to find a toilet and whilst they do have toilet at the back of the market but it’s the unisex kind of toilet and there are a lot of guys surrounding it so kind of putting me off.
You can find halal and non halal food in here and after walking a while I got confused as because there are so many people and felt a bit cramped on each aisles. That’s another reason we didn’t explore the whole area, but we did some take away food – the almost same selections as we did in Pasar Sindu. Hubby was going to get the babi guling but we just had babi guling for lunch, therefore we skipped that for dinner. We added plecing kangkung here as well, for more vegies intake 🙂 By the way, I only realized we had no pictures of the front part of the market, where there were a lot of clothing stalls. I think we walked past through those stalls towards the food stalls at the back 😀
Nakula Night Market, Legian
The last night market we went to while in Bali is Nakula night market, which is located on Jalan Nakula, Legian. Unfortunately, being the last night of our holiday trip, we have totally forgotten to take pictures. It has similar vibe as Pasar Sindu, Sanur; only food stalls and all halal food on offer. Size wise, this is the smallest one of all four night markets that we went to and has a lot less vendors in the market.
We tried grilled seafood here and they were not too bad, but a little too salty to our liking; also well priced. Also bought some sweet martabaks, very yummy. We tried the chicken satay stall which located slightly outside the market, it’s on the same side of the street – there were many people waiting/eating there, so we assumed that must be good and they were delicious!
Night market adventure in Bali has been exciting for us, eye candies, belly filler for sure, and it feels really nice to blend in with the locals. We are looking forward much to be back to those night markets again, especially Gianyar Night Market.
