Sunday 4 January 2009

ST's farewell @ garlic tepanyaki, neutral bay

It seems like one-by-one, my friends are heading back to HK whether it's for work or to be with family (I actually wonder what it'd be like to work in HK - but I'd say it be much tougher than working here in Sydney. Not that I'm really considering it at the moment).  Anyway, last week, we had a farewell for our friend ST at a place called Garlic Tepanyaki in Neutral Bay. It's in the mall where Coles is - it's only a very small restaurant and you might actually miss it if you don't look carefully. 

The restaurant fits just over 30 people - our group took up about half the restaurant. At first I thought this place was Japanese but whilst waiting outside and reading the news clipping that was on the window, their chef is Chinese and also from Hong Kong. He understood everything that we said and he seemed awfully amused.

We had the $30 set menu which I thought was enough for the girls. I wouldn't be surprised if the guys were a little hungry afterwards. Here's the first course - scallops (looks very pretty cooked in butter and garlic but was a tad overcooked and chewy).
I sat on the side so didn't get to see much of the actual cooking.
King Prawns - served in the same sauce as the scallops. The missing prawn heads were used for the game of 'catching prawn heads with your chopsticks as they were catapaulted towards you'. Admittedly, I wasn't very good at catching them. I had at least 3 prawn heads at my feet.
I actually managed to take photos of all the courses but being lazy about posting them up (well some don't look particularly interesting). I did like this one though - it was the teriyaki chicken which tasted fab!
After the initial catching of raw eggs in bowls (which I missed and almost went into my can of coke), there were more egg games. We had the machine gun fired at a select handful (thankfully I was sitting on the side), the catching of egg in your mouth (I managed with this one first go) and finally, the egg fried rice in a bowl which is flipped mid air and you need to catch in a stack of bowls (yay I managed this one too! Others weren't so lucky and had egg fried rice in their laps).
J seems to be doing ok with this one.
 Cheesy got asked to put the stack of bowls on top of his head. Thankfully the egg fried rice bowl landed in the stack of bowls and not on his head.
Photo with ST (everyone down my end of the table).
Group snap.

Tepanyaki is definitely a fun way to eat food (although I'm not so sure about the food that gets wasted and whether you actually feel that satisfied afterwards - it's a lot of effort to get to your food esp. when you have a cheeky chef that wants to try a handful of new tricks). Fortunately the chef seemed to get the gist of it and picked on the guys mainly, leaving us girls relatively unscathed. Phew!

ST - have a safe trip home. All the best and hopefully we'll be seeing you back soon!

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