Dining With Jewelle

As for the rest of our dish, we had the usual :

There is no way will I go to Thiam Hock without their fish curry!

Last weekend, we decided to try the Kaizen Sushi Restaurant in Kiarong.

Both of us have never been here before as to hubby, there is only one place on earth when it comes to Japanese food!

Despite it being a fasting month, the place was busy. There were a few tables occupied but I think we kind of broke the elegant silence the moment we came in with our two very exuberant girls -hopefully we didn’t annoy any of the other patrons too much!

The menu was very thick and I barely had time to really look as I was feeding Qi her lunch and at the same time, trying to quell their excitement with the train. Perhaps even the kitchen staffs could hear Eu when she loudly exclaimed “I wonder what’s in the mysterious red box!“. Many, many times.

After flipping through the menu scores of time, hubby ordered these :

As we were looking for a parking, we passed the back of the restaurant and saw that a kitchen staff was descaling a huge fish, salmon according to hubby. So the salmon sashimi that we had was fresh of the fish. Hubby claimed he could taste the freshness - I couldn’t taste anything too different but if the expert said that it’s good, I believe him.

As hubby is into salad these days, Kaizen received an extra thumbs up when hubby found that they offered this :

I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t look that appetizing to me at all. So this is how it looks like when the salad and the salmon slices were all mixed up :

I supposed the look can be deceiving because according to hubby, it’s palatable - except he’d want to try it without the salad cream next time. Needless to say, I didn’t try as it’s not my kind of thing at all.

I decided to try out their noodle and tempura dish set :

Hubby was impressed with the selections, quality and prices and I think as far as Bandar is concerned, it’s no longer an Excapade Restaurant territory for him.

As for me, my noodle was suprisingly very good. I’ve never had a soba noodle before and I’m not sure if Excapade have this type.

But the best part of my set meal was definitely the tempura. I never knew tempura could taste so good! Bittergourd, brinjal and another vegetable I couldn’t identified tasted so divine that I polished the whole vegetable tempura myself. Eu had the prawn and she said they’re delicious too. At least now I know what I can look forward to whenever I find myself dragged to a Japanese restaurant.

As for the ambiance, I like it. It’s cosy and the staffs were efficient. As I said, it was nicely quiet with not even any annoying non-Japanese songs in the background.

Until we arrived.

Eu, as usual, managed to distract the staffs with her “I LOVE salmon!” or “Here comes the mysterious red box again!“, all ending with exclamation marks. No gentle speech for her. Qi, as usual, flirted with anyone who passed by her chair and I was just happy that she didn’t burst into her boisterous “Go Diego Go!” song which has been her anthem for the past few weeks!

I wondered if the table next to us left because the kids were being too happy!

But I’m happy to concur with you, Sushi Fan. I think Kaizen is definitely another Japanese Restaurant I wouldn’t mind coming to - if I really have to.

*Non Halal Post*

Last Saturday we went to the Hua Ho Department Store at Yayasan to get Eu a bigger car seat. I was pleased to see that Hua Ho now carries the Nicole brand in the ladies clothing sections and had it not been for hubby (being around), I’d surely be stuck there!

We found a car seat for her and then we headed for lunch at the only Chinese non-halal eatery around this around (I think) called Hau Hua.

This is the one along Pizza Hut block and a few stores down from Brunei famous 24 hours cafe and also Coffee Bean.

The place was quite empty when we went in - which is a blessing because I’m still not that thick-faced when taking pictures in a crowded place!

We had the usual Chinese fares - after Eu asked her standard question of “Do they have any salmon?” and her standard indignant response “No salmon?! I think I’m NOT hungry“.

I think their noodles dishes must be better than their rice dishes because that’s what I see most of the patrons ordered. The noodle bowls where large too so that must be their speciality. As for what we ordered, I thought they were ordinary.

But the one saving grace for this place for me is that, they offer herbal or tonic soup!

Now this is something that is hard to get here in Brunei (as I know it). For your information, I love tonic soups and it’s only in recent years (since I have a slow cooker) that I have really began to enjoy eating and cooking this type of Chinese dishes. This was one of the reason I like Singapore - you could get tonic soups everywhere!

So any shops which offers soups like this is always a plus point for me.

Hau Hua’s soup of the day was the herbal chicken which although tasted nice, had a tad too much seasoning - I prefer my food and soups sans AjiNoMoto.

This place seems to have good breakfast selections too. Qi is at a stage right now where she only takes egg and Weetabix/Oats for breakfast so sometimes finding a place for breakfast can be a problem.

Although the decor of the place is nice, I find it a bit dark with the wooden decorations and the atmosphere insides made me feel like I’m in one of those seedy places where those kind of men go to hang out and flirt with the waitresses. Not a place I would go and have meals by myself, if you know what I mean.

A few weekends ago I managed to coaxed hubby to try out a new place called the Red Canopy Cafe at Batu Bersurat.

When we arrived the place was deserted so we picked one of the nice cubicle which even has a curtain door for privacy. The decor was contemporary but the thing that caught my eye was the huge flat screen TV which was playing some South American and Middle Eastern video clips. But the special thing about it was, the restaurant menu and dishes kept appearing on the screen so even if you don’t want to watch the clip, looking at the nice pictures of the curry and burger on the TV were sure interesting.

As for the menu itself, it was huge and thick! They have nearly everything from western to asian to even Latin inspired selections :

After much flipping back and forth, we finally decided on :

I think if you like a lot of choices when it comes to food, this is the place as we got quite a headache figuring out which to order!

We thought that the food was alright, the prices reasonable and the ambience cosy. Except perhaps the TV volume could be lower.

There was a guy who came in earlier than us and had a plate of succulent looking steak. We’d definitely try one of their steaks next time!

Last weekend we decided to try out the Misato, the Japanese restaurant in Kiulap after a prominent local journalist claimed that this is the best Japanese restaurant around.

This place has actually been around for several years but for some reason or others, we never really got to try it (not that I was eager to!).

This place occupied one whole unit of shoplot, with an upstairs and downstairs sections. When we arrived at noon on Saturday, I was a little surprised that it was quite empty.

Hubby ordered these for our lunch :

Food wise, they were ok and I thought the Eel Tempura was good. Hubby thinks the Salmon Sashimi was very good and Eu seems to have no complain with her “fish roe”.

But for some reason, I didn’t quite like the ambience of this place. Perhaps the staffs, friendly and helful that they were, were a bit too coffee-shop type and doesn’t quite suit the feel that this place tries to project.

Manggis Mall is about an hour drive from home so all of us left early for our dim sum breakfast at the Emperor’s Court, the only fancy restaurant located in this place.

We arrived a little after 9 a.m but there were already a few tables occupied.

Since we had the buffet dim sum, the folks in my family took loads of dishes and our table was laden with all sorts of dim sum, from steam to fried.

Being the near-pro-blogger-for-money that I am, I pushed aside all sense of shame and photographed nearly every single dish that arrived on our table.

These were not even all of the food that we had!

Being a halal restaurant, everything was either prawn or chicken. There were other food which we didn’t take, like the noodle soup (beef tendon and wantan soup), porridge (which they did take but no photo), fried noodle and some other other food. The dessert section was not bad, with jellies and fresh fruits.

The ambience was nice too, the decor was elegant and I especially like the imitation terracotta warriors on our side of the wall.

I thought the food were tasty enough. Hubby said most were too salty, Qi “said” she didn’t like anything (she’s not a restaurant-goer) and Eu loves the crispy fried skin, the green jelly but hated the red beans (another weird taste she shared with her papa as I love red beans!)

All these were for B$15.80 and it was no wonder that it was packed by the time we left after 10 a.m.