Turns out the predictions were true. We eat out ALOT here. I can list a bunch of excuses/reasons (cost, kitchen, busy), but in the end a big part is the temptation of discovering all there is to eat here. This blogging thing is new to me and I am definitley not in the habit of photographing everything I eat (thank goodness) but I did remember a few times lately, each for their own weird and wonderful reasons.

Beertopia

First there was beertopia, pretty much as it sounds, a festival which was all about beer. So what did I do? Bought 4 giant cans of cider. Classic move.

It tasted pretty much how you’d guess from the picture, like fizzy strawberries.

The location of Beertopia was awesome, in Central, down on the waterfront, by the ferris wheel. And even better, they had Raclette. Day made.

Random noodles

I don’t even know the name of this restaurant. We saw it once saved it on Google then returned to try it. We ordered a bunch of random things.

The famous dish seemed to be these giant noodle things with a bunch of spice and flavour to them. The guys thought they were good but not amazing, I would go back just to eat those again.

The egg and black fungus dish, sauteed veggies and pork dumplings were also all delish.

Ramen

Ramen noodles are definitely something I had heard of and I probably have eaten them before but I am no expert. However, our real estate agent emphatically recommended a noodle place near my work that she travels especially to from a few suburbs over. Considering noodles are everywhere I thought these had to be worth checking out.

The restaurant is not your normal sit down at a table, rather you are shown to a booth, they are kind enough to put you at neighbouring booths if you go with a friend though. When you get to the booth you are given a form to fill in to make your order. There is only one option, Ramen.

But you can choose how spicy, how intensely flavoured, how well cooked the noodles are, how much red sauce, whether you want to add meat, boiled egg, mushrooms etc. Your booth has walls on either side to separate you from your neighbour and you are facing a drawn down blind with just space at the bottom for a bowl of noodles. There is a tap inside your booth to pour yourself water and a buzzer. A quick press on the buzzer and a faceless hand appears under the blind to take your piece of paper.

A few minutes later and a piping hot bowl of ramen is passed to you under the blind then it is pulled down all the way so you are the full privacy of your booth. As weird as this may seem it started from Japanese school girls who used to eat ramen with their hands covering their mouth as it's a bit of a slurpy mess, so someone thought hey why not give people their own private booths then they can slurp to their heart's content.

All that aside, the ramen was SO GOOD, the broth was really flavoursome, noodles were delicious and I somehow even found the booth concept kind of charming. I will be back for more slurpy goodness.