Category: Food

Food Critique

February 23, 2013

26 months ago, we received a $25 gift card for Red Lobster from JAF. A fine gift it was… but we never used it. Years passed and it had become almost a joke (“Hey, let’s go to Lobster for lunch…?”), since my irrational fear of table service restaurants would prevent us from ever going.

And then, today for lunch, we went!

Ignoring the trash on the patio, we stepped inside to the immediate and depressing site of a tank full of Lobsters waiting to be cooked. Shaming myself for my hypocrisy, we sat in a dark booth with an irritatingly flickering light until – after I’d flagged someone down since we’d seemingly been forgotten – we were moved to a better seat by the window.

With our drinks came cheese biscuits:

As with most foods I’ve never tasted, I assumed I’d hate them. So I was surprised to realize the opposite, and ate two very quickly. Before I could swallow my third – and I was about to! – the extreme saltiness of these things kicked in, which led to me grumbling about drink-selling conspiracies as I tanked my (free refill) diet cokes 🙂

Here were our main dishes. KLS had shrimp tacos:

And I had a fish sandwich:

Now the last fish sandwich I ate, two years ago in Australia with Sue, was frozen in the middle! So this one had to be better surely?

And it was. Not exceptional, but also not bad for the low price of $7.50. I may have made a comment or two (or ten) about it also being salty and tasting like ‘seawater’ but I certainly put it away no problem.

KLS describes her shrimp tacos as “quite good”. In fact, given she has never had shrimp tacos before, she says “they are far and away the best shrimp tacos” she’s ever had. A steal, at $8!

Now the menu at Lobster is enormous, and there is no doubt in my mind that there are many things on there we would have enjoyed much more than what we got. We had set ourselves a goal however, which was to use our gift card and only our gift card!

So how did we do?

Not bad eh? Shameful tightwad that I am, I was prepared to leave only a $2.76 tip and make a clean getaway, but KLS threw an additional dollar on the pile.

So our lunch only cost us $1. And by that definition, it was pretty good 🙂

Boulevarding

January 15, 2013

Back when I was at the Reptile Park, I overheard a parent answer a child’s question “What is a platypus?” with “It’s a type of fish”. At the time I was amazed, and remembered the moment yesterday when I overheard this:

Child: “What *is* a dinosaur?”
Dad: “It’s like a giraffe”

The mind boggles!

Dinosaurs?! These are an installation at Taronga Zoo, which I visited yesterday. They’ve got about a dozen large animatronic dinos scattered around the zoo. I was impressed but the kids were just berserk with joy, especially when they roared or in one case sprayed water 🙂

It had been a couple of years since I’d visited the zoo and either it has seen changes or my memory has gone since I was surprised by how different it seemed. Furthermore I arrived at opening, and since there had been a light rain earlier, the animals were very active.

That’s one of the ‘babies’. He seemed quite interested in me!

A sailfin lizard, a close relative of the Jesus Christ Lizard. This big guy can also run across water! They also had an actual JC lizard in a nearby enclosure.

Looks like a rooster doesn’t it? It’s actually The Lord of all Roosters, aka an African Red Fowl, which is the ancestor of all common chickens. This one had escaped his enclosure, and was crowing like a king.

My $15 lunch. I would later buy a $5 magnum ice cream and a $4 bottle of lift. Believe it or not I didn’t think these prices outrageous, since food is expensive here everywhere!

The free flight bird show here is very special since it uses only Australian birds. After it was over I handed a $2 to a parrot who took it from me with his beak and dropped it into the donation box 🙂

I very much enjoyed the zoo. It took me about 6 hours to see all the animals at a relaxed pace, and it was a fine way to spend my last day in the country.

Right now it’s the morning of the day I leave, and I’ll be heading to the airport in about an hour for a 27-hour trip home. This will be the last blog post covering this trip. I hope you have enjoyed it 🙂

Rubber Duck

January 12, 2013

It was an early start yesterday, on the 6:41 am train from Broadmeadow to Sydney.

As with my previous three train trips, I saw only a single Kangaroo on the trip. Once again the glimpse was fleeting and I was unable to photograph it. Here’s an artists impression:

I was in Sydney early, and after dropping my stuff at Adams set out for the city. I had an inkling to hit the shops!

I did the usual places – Kinokuniya, QVB, Pitt Street – before heading to Darling Harbour. There was something there I had to see…

It’s a 3-storey tall inflatable duck art installation, which is floated in Darling Harbour for the Sydney Festival. I’m lovin it!

As I got closer to Darling Harbour I began to see signs advertising dugongs at Sydney Aquarium. I’d never seen a dugong, so decided it was worth a look.

The cost was $38, and the first few displays were decidedly underwhelming. I’d been to this aquarium several times before and feared it may have gone off a bit.

My fears were unjustified! The displays are now themed, and it was just that the first set – Australian river fishes – were just a bit drab. As I wandered through the next I was treated to a kelp forest, a sunken ship, a steampunk themed crab and lobster display and a remarkable ray tank:

And then, the dugongs! Seeing them float around happily almost brought a year to my eye 🙂

They have two, a male and female, who have been there for three years. They are two of the only six dugongs (a south pacific relative of the manatee) in captivity in the world. They eat 50 kg of lettuce each a day!

They are in one of the giant walk-through tanks at the aquarium, which are submerged under the water level of the Harbour.

It’s a very peaceful and special way to see the animals.

There is a mural painted on the walls of the ramp leading down to the bottom of the dugong tank. It details one aspect of man’s history with these beasts:

Sailors jump from a ship pursuing a lovely mermaid…

But mermaids don’t exist and it’s a dugong!

But then later on we discover there is a real mermaid after all 🙂

Fancy a real dugong? Well that would be difficult, but the shop sells the next best thing:

There wasn’t a price tag 🙂

Overall the aquarium was spectacular, and I’m very pleased I visited.

Changing tack a bit, the above is ‘Dark Escape 4D’, a new light gun shooter I played (for $4 a go!) The game is in 3D (you wear glasses) and has a moving seat, an air gun that blasts your face and even a pulse sensor in the gun handle that makes the gun fail if you panic! It *is* a scary game (you sit enclosed in a dark room), but it’s a bit slow for my taste.

I wandered over to The Star casino, where I would boggle at the variety of machines and how geared to Chinese Tourists they have become. $10 of my hard earned dollars went – in equal portions – into the paired games Ice Horse and Fire Horse, mostly because I was attracted by the pretty fantasy horses galloping through the videos 🙂

A bit later I visited an Uggs shop in which no employees seemed to speak English. Do you think Chinese tourists buy a lot of Uggs: