quest for the best japanese - week 5 (Brisbane edition)

Last week we were lucky enough to be in Brisbane on our usual Japanese Monday.  By chance we had lunch at a Japanese restaurant at Eagle St Pier and think it definitely deserves a mention here!

Sake restaurant
Level 1, 45 Eagle St
Eagle Street Pier
Brisbane QLD

Sake is a contemporary Japanese restaurant which usually leaves me a little wary.  But this place is pretty great.  The decor is stylish and modern - particularly the 'caged' tables that run through the middle of the place.  It was lunch time on a Monday so it was very quiet inside, but the service was good.


Tonkatsu cups

Now, the main thing is that the food was excellent!  The highlight for me were the Tonkatsu cups and the Kingfish jalapeño sashimi.   They have a good selection of small dishes to share, as well as a nice selection of mains.


Kingfish jalapeño sashimi

All in all, it was an excellent lunch with excellent food and excellent people.  I highly recommend it!

Rating = 9 out of 10

quest for the best japanese - week 4

Meiji Japanese Cafe
105 Little Bourke St
Melbourne

After last week's effort I was really hoping for some decent Japanese food this week, and by George we got it!  This place is fabulous!  If you live in Melbourne I urge you to go there right now!  Go on!  This was such a good find and we will most certainly be heading back here soon - with some friends.

The cafe is quite small but has an upstairs area as well (which was empty, being Monday and all but I imagine would fill up on the weekends).  What it lacked in size provided most of the atmosphere in that I almost felt like I was in Japan!  It had a real authentic feel to it, which I just loved.

But...getting onto the important part - FOOD.  The food was YUM! And like most Japanese cafe's, more than affordable.  We had a sizzling plate of Wagyu Steak, Japanese style Fried Rice, stir-fried vegetables and some beef skewers (whose name escapes me but were fantastic!  You can see one of them next to our fried rice in the pic below)

I should've taken more photos of this place (and our food) but I was too engrossed in eating!  There was sadly no Okonomiyaki on the menu, but there was plenty of other things to choose from.  I loved the big menu with pictures which made ordering easy - or difficult, because everything looked so good.

Anyway, this is definitely the best so far in our quest.  We will definitely be going back!

Rating = 8 out of 10

quest for the best japanese - week 3

Izakaya Hachibeh
143-145 Bourke Street
Melbourne


I'm not going to say too much about this place because I was very underwhelmed.  I'm not sure if it was just poor choices on our part, but the food was very bland.  It was a cool day here in Melbourne so we went for the Udon soup options - I had Fried bean curd and Todd went for the Tempura option.

All I have to say about my meal is BLAH.  And we can add another Okinomiyaki fail to the list too. 

My glass of Plum Wine was nice.  The service was pretty good and quick so we might try this one again sometime and choose from the "Japanese Tapas" selection instead.


Rating: 3 out of 10