Da Noi (South Yarra) 12/2018

Hard to believe that it is 12 years since we last ate here and it has remained fundamentally unchanged. At that time we had a five course Sardinian style meal with no menu. See https://1001dinners.blogspot.com/search?q=Da+Noi

That's what you get today. Indeed there is so much variation that dishes might even vary from table to table. The narrow two story terrace, home of Da Noi, remains the same 

with a bit of odd decor.

The food used to be excellent and it still is. It had two AGFG hats at that time and only has one now but it's as good as it ever was with most of the ingredients sourced from their own farm.  

The just baked olive bread is too good - we have to be careful not to fill up on it! Wines are a bit expensive 

and almost all Italian.

Every dish was extremely good and left me wishing for more from the oysters.

Well only one, the mini salad, 

the seafood salad,

to the remarkable pasta, 

a feature of every meal. 

My apologies for the horrible photo's. I did not notice the camera was on the wrong setting.

The main course was Saddleback pork cutlet 

which was quite spicy so Sandra could not eat it. The happily and quickly replaced it with a serve of suckling pig 

which was superb.
The meal ended with a pleasant not too sweet dessert. 

It's a happy, noisy place. The wait staff were helpful, friendly and efficient. The food was very good and I'd recommend it anytime. 

Score 16.5/20

Origin Nepal (Canberra) 09/2018

In Canberra rather late I wandered around Northbourne Ave and precinct looking for a good place to eat. 
There were stacks of restaurants but the all seemed very mundane so I chose something a bit different. 
Origin Nepal is very much a place serving traditional Nepalese food. There's a brief menu on a black board outside the door.

The restaurant occupies along room 

which, at 9.00 pm, had only four customers left although it could seat about 50 at it's white clothed paper covered tables.

Decor is very simple.
I chose a classic lamb curry with an accompanying soupy dahl and some fresh and cooked vegetables and rice.

 Not too hot it was a substantial meal.
The lamb, in a herb sauce, was tender and tasted good

The vegetables interesting,

The dahl mild and inoffensive

and the fresh vegetables gave relief from the heat of the dish.

For dessert I had mango and ginger kulfi with jaman.

Among the worst desserts I have ever eaten. Mild mango taste, almost no ginger flavour and the kulfi hard and full of icicles.
It detracted badly from what was otherwise a pleasant meal.
Score:13.25 /20

Santa Lucia (Milan) 08/2018

 A local resident suggested that this restaurant, near La Scala, the renowned Milan opera house and an art area had the best spaghetti vongole in Milan. Vongole are small, edible bivalve molluscs. Sounded good.
As with almost every restaurant here they offer both inside and outside dining areas
The walls of the venue are covered with photo's of people, presumably artists, who have eaten here
An aggressive salesman, posing as a waiter, tried to get us to indulge in a variety of anti pasta 

but they looked particularly unappealing.
We did have some deep fried crumbed mozzarella which was thoroughly enjoyable.

We headed straight for the spaghetti vongole for main course. 

The pasta was al dente in the Italian manner, bathed in olive oil and covered with a sprinkling of small clams, vongole, we called them limpets when we found them on the sea shore in Melbourne. Unfortunately the vongole were tasteless and did nothing for the dish. Bread was crusty, 

and plenty of it too. Our waiter tried to get us to have a chocolate cake 'Temptation' 

but we resisted in favour of an classical Italian dessert. 

Bad choice.

Score: 13.5/20

Joe's Cafe (Yehud Israel) 07/2018

This is another franchise which we ate at several times in the Canyon Mall. 
The mall is particularly pleasant with very good quality shops. It has an open clean feeling, not too crowded and not too noisy although there are always children running about. Joe's is very popular and we sometimes had a short wait to get a table. They seem to have an endless number of young, attractive wait staff with cute aprons

.

It's light and airy 

and quite decorative.

Food is typical Israeli café style with dips,

pizzas omlettes, salads

and cakes

Score: 13.5/20

Chooka Asian Kitchen (Yehud Israel) 07/2018

We felt like a Chinese meal and our host suggested this franchise. It's an open air place with one table inside. There's an open suchi bar at one end of the room,

where suchi are made to order,

and a counter with eight wok style pans of food - sweet sour chicken, 

chicken with vegetables, 

beef with vegetables a vegetable dish of peppers, 

potatoes!, white rice, fried rice and noodles.

They offer a meal deal, one protein serve and two others, a soup or spring roll 

and a non alcoholic drink for about A$20.
The place was hot, no air conditioning, and noisy. The guy who served was very obliging but there's not much more that we could say about the place. The only distinctly Asian thing about the place is the name, or at least the sub title. Perhaps the sushi was OK but we didn't have that. 
The photo's of the food do not look particularly attractive and it didn't look or taste any better on the plate.
At least, as the three letters top right tell us, 

it's kosher. MSG doesn't get a mention, they've probably never heard of it.

This would have been the worst meal I have eaten since I did National Service in the army 60 years ago.

Score: Anything would be too much.

Halevantini (Tel Aviv) 07/2018

In the heart of Tel Aviv small cafe/restaurants abound. Every few yards there are chairs and tables on the sidewalk 

with endless diners enjoying meals.
This looked nice and clean with spacious tables. 
in an open medium size room.

Conveniently menus are in both in Hebrew

and English

All meals come with a collection of salads and dips and a choice of rice or chips.

These included, from the bottom clockwise, Tehina, Humus, Eggplant, toasted pita, spicy tomato and Israeli salad.

A moment later a pickled vegetable dish arrived. 
Felafel are always available.

I suppose there are others but I don't know of them, where you can get a shashlik stick of Foie gras d'oie plus half a dozen side dishes for less than A$40.
 Foie gras is a luxury food item. It is the liver of a duck or goose, especially fattened by force feeding large amounts of corn through a funnel pushed down the birds throat, a process called gavage. It is controversial with animal rights advocates claiming that it is cruel and it is banned in Australia. At the same time in France it is protected as part of the cultural and gastronomic heritage of the country. It has a very long history, dating back to Egyptian times. More recently, in the 17th century, Foie gras production was developed by Jews in Alsace. France continues to be by far the biggest producer in the world. 
Here, in Israel, one finds it on the menu at many small Turkish, Arabic and Israeli restaurants. On the menu here we were delighted to have it.

Cooked for only about 20 seconds on very high heat it was superb. The rich, buttery delicate taste is as much a sensation, a feeling, as it is a flavour. A mouthful of luxury.
Sweatbreads are usually from the pancreas, other glands also qualify, and are rarely served in Australia except as a small accompaniment to a main dish. Here they were available as a shashlik.

This was not a dish to write home about. The sweatbreads were overcooked and lacked any delicacy and the chips were oily and unappealing. A skewer of barely cooked, grilled vegetables didn't do much to help.

Beef shashlik was tasty but tough. 

I asked for it to be blue and the waiter turned up with two beef shashliks with no idea which was which so they took it back and made another, and it was blue!They also have vegetarian dishes, for example this bowl of rice with lentils. 

This near tasteless dish was rice covered with a cucumber salad.

Things like this make me glad I'm a carnivore. 
We finished our meal with Malabi, a sort of Middle Eastern version of cream brulée.

This is supposed to have a special taste from the milk that is used but this one was more like a sweet custard.

There was nothing special about this restaurant except for the Foie gras but that was out of this world.

Score: 13/20