Sleepless Travels Reloaded

Ray left me behind and went to Canberra to work a few weeks ago (11th January) :@.

Anyway, the day before we went out to Sato neé Shibata. It’s located on Melbourne St in North Adelaide, a rather yuppy area. Or as yuppy as Adelaide gets, anyway. It’s quite a cute restaurant, very small and cosy. The interior looks very traditional; half of the seating area is on a raised platform with low tables. The prices are not too bad for Japanese food.

They changed their name to Sato after the head chef retired. The second-in-command is still there though, and the taste hasn’t changed. When we go there the new head chef greeted us personally, he seems to be quite a friendly guy. I guess you have to be like that in this line of business.

Here’s the blurb on the back of their takeaway menu:

In Japanese, SATO means Hometown; the place where you always feel welcome, the place where you can relax in comfortable surroundings and be at peace.
Also, SATO is the nickname of the Head chef at SATO Japanese Restaurant.
However SATO does NOT stand for South Australian Taxation Office, so please relax and enjoy the FINE food, kind staff and peaceful atmosphere of SATO Japanese Restaurant

Thank you very much

I thought that was quite a cute message to put in at the end, nevermind that I highly doubt a South Australian Taxation Office actually exists…(we are taxed on a federal level by the *Australian* Taxation Office. I mean, thank goodness we are. Just imagine having 8 different taxation regimes! -Tax accountant’s nightmare-)

The menu is the same, but the actual physical menu has changed. It’s oversized, and very fidly to handle >.<

We ordered the Wafu salad ($9) Sukiyaki Banquet (comes with appetizers (zensai), tea, rice, miso soup and dessert - $28), a serving of sake chazuki (salmon porridge ~$9).

The Wafu salad was a salad with mainly iceberg lettuce, with slices of fish sashimi and a prawn. It was dressed with a plum sauce.

Zensai 1: I always find that this dish is too small. I mean, all together it's not a tiny dish, but look at it! It just feels weird eating *one* broccoli thingo. Or *half* a mussel. It's not really to my taste, although I have to say it's not bad. So I'm quite ambivalent towards the dish; I don't care about the size as much because I don't really like it XD.

Zensai 2 (gyoza and yakitori): The yakitori was REALLY tasty. The gyoza I'm ambivalent towards because again, it's not something I like to eat (if I want to eat dumplings, I eat CHINESE ones, not weird copied Japanized ones >.>).

The sukiyaki was cooked in the kitchen before being brought to the table. However, if we had ordered more than one serving, then they’d have brought out the gas burner and we’d be able to cook it ourselves. I didn’t really mind either way because I’m lazy XD. Anyway, the beef was REALLY tasty. But then the dish cooled down and it didn’t taste the same ;_;

I’ve never really tried Japanese hotpot dishes, but it’s something I really should get into, despite the summer heat >.<
The sukiyaki stock was really sweet and flavourful. There was also udon in the pot, so it was a bit weird eating it with rice XD.
Anyway, it was pretty good.

Ray ordered the sake chazuki. This is meant to be his birthday/going away dinner, so I was paying for it, and he goes and orders the cheapest thing on the menu. Go figure.

Anyway, chazuki is a rice porridge made with tea. So it ends up looking a bit like teochew porridge. The watery liquid tasted more like stock than tea to me. Actually, I couldn't taste any tea o.o

Chazuki is traditionally served in the late hours of the night, after a party winds down. So when it's served, you know it's time to go away....XD

"Sake" is Japanese for salmon, so there was a bit of grilled salmon on top. It's a bit plain, but simple and refreshing in a way.

The dessert was vanilla icecream with a 2 slices of kiwi fruit and a nicely carved bit of apple and azuki (sweetened red beans). The red beans go quite nicely with icecream.

It was unfortunate we had to gulp the dessert down so quick - we were hurrying to get to the movie theatre on time. In any event we didn't make it >.<. So we needn’t have hurried in the end. We ended up driving to some other theatre and having to wait about an hour for the movie (Chicken Little…hehheh so cute) to start.