My hope for food is restored

My hope for food in Sydney improving has been restored, finally.

With the World Cup in full swing and games at god awful times down here, we've been forced to stay up till the wee hours of the morning to catch as much of the US games as possible before crashing.  Friday/Saturday's game was at a reasonable midnight here so a bunch of us went over to Start City Casino to catch the game in the sports bar.  We stopped off for a few drinks at Darling Harbour and then grabbed some food at Ken's Tapas bar in the casino.  The food was, all in all good.  Portions were a little meager, but the food had some decent flavour to it.  Now, this could be because I was able to clean up at the tables in a scant 45 minutes, but I'd consider checking out a few other restaurants there.

I also ventured around Chinatown a little bit yesterday.  I think Chinatowns around the world are probably one of the safest (if you're adventurous) bets for a good meal.  Sure, you'll find a bunch of new and odd items on the menu (if they even post the menu in english) but if you take a gamble you probably won't be disappointed.  And the prices are so much more reasonable than other lunch spots, especially around Sydney.  I stopped off at a local food court and found Gumshara.  It's a small ramen noodle shop that had no one waiting in line.  Usually this would be a turn off, but after reading the signs, I took a gamble.

And boy did it pay off.  Apparently, the chef is "classically" trained in Japan to make ramen.  He takes 120 kilos of pork bones (260 pounds) and water to make his stock.  Nothing else.  The marrow and collagen in the bones give it a very intense flavour as well as turning it into a thick broth.  If he sold that alone, I'd probably take a few litres home to keep in the freezer.  One of the items on the menu was a pork spare rib ramen.  Now, I didn't ask why but on the menu it says only two are available each day.  I figured by 2pm they'd be gone, but thankfully there was still one left.

Other than crisping up the skin on the spare rib, I'm not sure how they cooked it.  But frankly, it didn't matter.  The only thing left in the bowl at the end was the bone.  I'd be hard pressed to try anything else in that food court after having that for lunch.

I've also started to venture deeper into my neighborhood to see what's around.  I've been taking different routes to the gym each night to see what's around.  And in just this past week I've found 3 or 4 worthy restaurants/wine bars that I've added to the list to try.  The neighborhood has a very strong cafe culture on weekends, but there are also quite a few small restaurants with only 20-30 seats.  Hopefully I'll be able to get to a few of them these next few weeks and hopefully the food quality continues to go up.