Grated Expectations

CHEESE FEAST!

I’ve found my dream restaurant.

Cider and cheese flight.

The ciders L-R: a pretty normal cider from UK, Kelly Brothers pear cider that tasted weird and vanilla-y, delicious Barossa Valley squashed apple cider, and a very dry very French Cidre Brut from Normandie.

The cheese L-R: Cabots cheddar from USA, Mountain Man brie(?), Meredith Farm chevre, Langres from France. I REALLY liked the last one, it was nice and stinky and creamy. The others were nice, but I preferred the cheeses from Scott’s board. He liked my chevre better than his goat cheese though!

Unfortunately I don’t know the names of any of Scott’s cheeses. But his board came with a quite firm bit of goats cheese, a delicious mushroom-y brie, an amazing cheddar with lots of those crunchy bits (the best!!!), some quince paste, and some salami. The breads and lavosh were also very nice.

Had a bit of cheese-sweats going on after this nutritious dinner. ;D

They also have some hot foods on their menu, in addition to many different cheese boards. I will have to go back again to try some more sometime, I trust that it’s all amazing.

A new restaurant opened very close to our apartment. I had been craving dumplings ever since moving back to Melbourne, so we went to check it out the other week. We were the only people in the whole restaurant, which was a little weird. I walk by there all the time and they never have any customers! Doubutful they will survive, tbh.

Salt and pepper calamari. Quite good. Tempura batter was thin and crispy, and not too oily. Calamari was tender.

Panfried chicken and prawn dumplings. Also good. Wrapper wasn’t too thick. Nice and juicy dumplings.

Spring onion pancake. We weren’t too impressed with this. Why did they deepfry it?? It wasn’t very nice.

Fried overload. Kinda our fault, we didn’t order well.

Prices were higher than I expected but they gave us $10 off, so that was nice.

I finally got to try a Scotch Egg!

Actually the original plan was to meet Scott for lunch at the Masterchef event he saw on his walk to work. But it was SOOO busy and we couldn’t even figure out where the line started. Instead we just snooped around a bit and tried to get in the background of shots. I watched Gary, George and Matt taste some of the foods (although they didn’t actually eat much!), and we saw some of the competitors. There was quite a few of them on each team so I don’t think we really saw any big spoilers. There were people ERRYWHERE.

Then we walked a street over and ordered a couple scotch eggs from Good Egg where it was much less hectic.

We got one of each: a falafel scotch egg with harissa and tahini dressing, and a pork and fennel scotch egg with roast tomato relish. They were both great. Crispy crunchy coating on the outside with a perfect soft boiled egg in the middle. Scott really liked the falafel one, but I preferred the pork. The sweet tomato relish complimented the salty traditional scotch egg nicely.

They were only $5.50 each and quite filling, definitely one of the better value food options in Melbourne! Plus our server was very friendly. All in all a great experience.