Napoli In Bocca

Napoli In Bocca is located in the suburb of Haberfield. In my humble opinion, Haberfield epitomises all things Italian in Sydney. Yes, I know most of everyone thinks of Leichhardt as the Italian suburb but for me it is Haberfield. It has a sense of being in a community and an Italian one at that!

When I do come here, I can't help myself and go crazy with the biscottis, the gelato, pasta, cheese, smallgoods etc. Tonight we celebrate a special dinner for AF, who did amazingly well in the recent HSC exams. His choice was Italian and I picked this restaurant. I have been here twice before and enjoyed both meals.

I stepped in to the restaurant and I felt like I was in a nice family oriented Italian restaurant. I felt the warmth, both metaphorical and physical. The wood fired oven greeted me as I passed 2 young Italian men working away on the pizzas.

There were 8 of us tonight so we started off by having some entree. We had the Bruschetta pizza and Stuffed zucchini flowers. Both were delicious but the zucchini flowers were not as popular because the majority of the group didn't like anchovies. So NF and I happily had our lion's share of the zucchini flowers.

Then we ordered individual main dishes. Some had pizzas, some had calzone and others had pasta. I ordered the Linguine Vongole and found my dish absolutely delightful. It was a simple but classic dish and the linguine was perfectly al dente. By the way, all servings were generous!

Temasek Restaurant

Okay, you may be wondering why would I be blogging about Temasek only now? This restaurant has been operating for years and yet this is my first time posting about a meal there. Admittedly I have been there many times over the years but I didn't have a blog then and you really can't be taking photos at a business lunch.

So today is my chance. A dinner with some friends whom I haven't seen for more than 2 years. Yes, you read it right, 2 years!! This time the group decided to meet for dinner at Temasek, which is located in Parramatta.

We arrived at 6.30 pm and the restaurant was already quite full. I cannot believe how popular this place is, even after all these years!

I suggested we go for a banquet menu and we decided on the $31 per head menu. So here are the dishes. Apologies for the quality of the photos. For some unknown reason my camera wasn't behaving that night and the images are not as clear as I would have liked.

Entrees were Spring rolls and Curry puffs - not the best I have had and I was a little disappointed with the lack of flavour. There is definitely room for improvement.

Spring rolls and curry puffs

Mains were Beef rendang, Satay chicken, Singapore chilli prawns, Assam seafood, French beans stir fried with belacan and Ngoh Hiang. Ngoh Hiang is also known as loh bak and is a Hokkien dish that can be described as five spice pork rolls, rolled in bean curd skin and deep fried.

Beef rendang

Satay chicken 

Assam seafood

Garfish Kirribilli

What a Saturday! :-( it was wet, grey and rather chilly for the tail end of summer. But we still trekked to Milsons Point for our lunch date at Garfish.

Garfish has 3 restaurants in Sydney; Manly, Crows Nest and Kirribilli. For this special lunch, I chose the Kirribilli venue. It is located very near to the Milsons Point station, and there were some nice little boutiques to browse in.

The lunch was to celebrate MO's 40th and I really wanted it to be a nice, relaxing and enjoyable meal. I didn't realise that seafood is MO's favourite type of meal so I was lucky with my restaurant selection.

We decided to go all out,  i.e. have a 3 course meal. For entree, MO had the salt and pepper squid with chilli, garlic, coriander and lime. I had the seared scallops with sweet corn purée and Granny Smith apple.

Melt CBD (Adelaide)

A couple of days after arriving home from the fantastic trip to Queenstown, I had to fly down to Adelaide for a work assignment.

Not having been to Adelaide for many years, I really had no inkling of what's good or trending food wise in this city.

So on one of the nights there, we walked through the central part of the CBD just to get a feel of the city. We eventually walked into a place called Melt. It is located in the city centre and had a rather cool vibe about it. It was quite full for a Thursday night at around 9.00 pm.

We decided to have tapas instead of pizzas. The tapas menu was written up on the board on a daily basis. Their specialty looks to be more on the pizzas. There was a rather large table which had trays of pizzas being served.

We had the following tapas dishes:

Panfried haloumi with pickled red onion. This dish was rather nice. I really liked how nicely done the haloumi was. It wasn't overly salty and the sweetness of the red onions sat so well with the haloumi.

Wai Restaurant (Queenstown)

It was our final night - this being the first Gorgeous Girls trip to Queenstown. A tinge of melancholy hit me as we met up for our final dinner and I think this feeling was felt amongst the group too. We have all had a fabulous time and suddenly we realised the week was almost over and it was time to have our final dinner together as a group.

But what a way to celebrate!! We took the water taxi into town, all of us dressed up to the nines!! Here we are in one of our very many group photos, but I think this last group photo is where we are all looking very fine, don't you think so?

Wai Restaurant is a fine dining restaurant located at the pier of Queenstown's wharf. I had read about this restaurant months ago in a travel article about Queenstown and when I found out this was one of the restaurants we were going to dine at as part of the GG group, I was excited!

Because there were so many of us, we were give a few choices of 3 course menus.

For entree, I chose the Tuna Mayonnaise. It had squid, tuna, cucumber, soy and tempura crumb. It looked beautiful and tasted thoroughly delicious! I was surprised that something that looked simple could have such lovely flavours. The cucumber slices were presented in a cigar like shape with the tuna mayonnaise rolled in it.

I managed to take a photo of another entree and this was the Confit Duck Leg Terrine. It had duck liver parfait, cherry jelly, smoked macadamia and gingerbread. How interesting to have the gingerbread thrown into this rather classic French dish. My dining neighbour Jane's verdict was 'Nice'!

A Day Of Optional Activities In Queenstown

After a week of dining, shopping, wine tasting, and art appreciation, what would you do on the only day in which there were no GG group activities organised while in Queenstown?

Hmmmm..let me think. Well, this is what I did.

1. Visit the Remarkables Park Farmers Market which is located in Frankton.
It was quite a small market with some unique stalls but the location it was in was what drew my attention. The market was located close to the Remarkables, beautiful panoramic landscape.

While there, the most popular stall for the ladies who did decide to go was the stall selling all things felt. Very popular indeed! I found the stall selling dog cakes and biscuits fascinating. The cakes looked good enough to eat for us humans!

Every stall holder was warm and friendly and they didn't mind me taking photos.

2. Go for the Jet boat ride.
About 9 of us decided to sign up for this jet boat joy ride. Some of us were dressed appropriately and others, like me, were not. I should have put on my waterproof jacket but for some unknown reason, I did not. Boy did I get drenched!?!?!

But it was so much fun!! We saw so much of the landscape from jetting around the lake. The driver stopped occasionally to give us a bit of history of the area, this was something I didn't expect but was happy to hear more about Queenstown.