It’s dark.

Why is it so dark?

A tall man in black is approaching. What is he saying? I can see his lips moving but nothing seems to be reaching my ears. My eyes are fixed on an object that descends in front of me.

What IS that?

Oh gawd. It’s a lit-up singing plastic cake!

Wait. Wait.

Rewind.

We are at Randwick on a mild Saturday evening. The mission is for 8 of us to meet up for dinner at Restaurant Balzac. Upon entering, we are not greeted, but manage to find our friends at the bar, and later make our way to the table. The room is cosy, moodily lit, with beautiful sandstone walls and little corners that made me think : classic Italian restaurant, on any Valentine’s Day. The waiter caught wind of the fact that I was celebrating my birthday, and promised a surprise later on. Meanwhile, we had another 4 1/2 hours of dining ahead of us, so I thought the easiest way would be to sum up the evening in point form.

The misses:

1. The service – Maybe it was because we were a table of 8, but we had quite long pauses between each course.

2. The dry bread

3. The complimentary demitasse of pumpkin soup, with parmesan oil and pumpkin seeds – While I love a little cup of soup to kickstart the evening, I thought the parmesan oil was a little heavy handed in this case. A little less of it would have allowed the flavour of the pumpkin to come through more.

The hits:

1. The service – Despite the wait for our meals, the waiter assigned to our table was very nice and friendly.

2. The Scallop Cassoulet – Sausage, pork, white beans and small, plump and juicy scallops, swimming in a wonderfully flavoursome broth.

3. The pre-dessert – a demitasse of lemon and vanilla bean pannacotta (I think) with rhubarb – Beautifully light and tangy, with a slight crunch in the rhubarb.

4.The James Squire Porter Ice-cream, accompanying the chocolate fondant – This was actually only available on the degustation menu, but we managed to persuade the waiter to let us have a scoop of it. Nevermind how many pairs of tweezers it takes to milk a grain of rice, the rice milk ice-cream on the a la carte menu was not nearly as nice as the James Squire one. Tastier, and a seemingly better pair with the dark chocolate fondant.

And what of the promised surprise? Well, when the desserts came out, one of the waiters sang, and they also brought out a kitschy little dancing birthday cake – kind of like the dancing Coke can, only more pink and loud. When it had finished it’s song (which took forever), we tried to move it away but that only triggered it to start singing and dancing again. The horror. The horror.

Overall, there’s quite a bit to like about Restaurant Balzac. I had been looking forward to eating here, having once enjoyed eating at their previous location. The rustic, cheaper Balzac is gone. In it’s new(er) location, it is more stylish, with food that can be just as tasty, with the exception of a few misses.

Apologies for the terrible photos, but it was so very dark.

Restaurant Balzac
141 Belmore Road
Randwick 2031.

(Read also: Australian Gourmet Pages’ review.)

This week I entered a new decade. To celebrate, B got me a box of chocolates, a couple of DVDs and a stack of books that I look forward to devouring, whilst inspecting the chocolates.

We have already marked out the chocolates we like the look of : I picked the pink heart, and B went for the lion. Cliched as it sounds, it does sort of say a thing or two about us. I’m the silly, frivolous one; the one with a penchant for Marc Jacobs, Trelise Cooper, cartoons, and dessert as the main course. B is pretty good at the Minister of Silly Walks, at laughing til he’s crying when watching Family Guy, and he once hugged a road. Which leads me to the whole thing about him being a grounding force. He is the one who organises our trips, who drives me everywhere, who calls the oven people when my oven breaks down (my oven broke down. I haven’t been baking for two weeks. Starting to feel jittery). If we eat gai lan, he likes the leaves and I like the stem, so it all kind of works out well.

So thank you, B, for my big box of chocolates, and thank you for being you

There’s a sushi restaurant in Chatswood that we’ve been trying to check out for ages now. It was recommended to us by a friend as a good place to go. So far, every attempt to visit it has been thwarted by various unexpected events. This most recent time, it was closed. On a Wednesday night! There was a little note posted on the door, but we weren’t close enough to read it, so circumstances remain a mystery.

Instead, we found ourselves trawling Artarmon for a place to eat and ended up at a Japanese restaurant called Wakana. It’s a simple, homely little restaurant where you can grill your own meat, or choose from the a la carte menu. We picked the latter option, and ordered Wagyu beef tataki, teriyaki salmon and tonkatsu pork.

Almost immediately after ordering, frosted bowls of complimentary salad arrived at our table. A promising way to start. The salad consisted of iceberg leaves, with some seaweed and a yellow garlicky dressing. Very refreshing. Next was the beef tataki garnished with sliced shallots, a mountain of raw onion, and drizzled with the same yellow dressing. This dressing also appeared on the shredded cabbage next to the tonkatsu pork.

Now I actually quite liked this dressing, but it started to get a bit much after awhile. (It brought back memories of eating at Interlude in Melbourne : one of the earlier dishes in the degustation we had, was baby squid with an overdose of garlic sauce, garlic chips and garlic flowers). After all that sauce, the sliced onion was looking a bit lethal. “Don’t you dare eat any of that onion .. or it’s the couch for you tonight!,” I warned B. He contemplated me for a moment, then picked up a heaped serving of the onion with his chopsticks and shoved it into his mouth, chewing defiantly. I tried to give him the evil eye, but it started to water from the onion fumes.

I concentrated on the salmon instead, which was cooked through but still moist. The sauce was a little too sweet for my liking, but otherwise it was all I wanted from a dish listed as teriyaki salmon. The pork was nice and crunchy on the outside, and moist and meaty on the inside. Curiously, both the pork and salmon dishes also featured a small serve of elbow macaroni. Not sure how it all fits in, but I ate it anyway.

Wakana is not about to usurp any restaurant in my personal list of Japanese favourites, but it serves fairly decent, straightforward food which you might happily drop in for, if you happened to be in the neighbourhood.

Wakana – Yakiniku Restaurant
Broughton Road
Artarmon 2064.