Takeru: For the Indecisive Eaters Around Here

As I blogged about earlier, I have a penchant for being an indecisive customer when it comes to choosing food at a restaurant. Luckily, I was introduced by Kevin to a Japanese restaurant that caters to the indecisive eater's needs!

This is Takeru, that allows you to order some half sized dishes so you can mix and match!

I forgot to take a photo of the back of the menu, but it features a cute cartoon of a customer being indecisive about whether he wants to eat noodles or rice, but gets both because Takeru offers half dishes. Definitely caught my attention!

First thing is to order drinks.

Iced green tea latte and lychee calpis.

The green tea latte was topped with a scoop of green tea icecream and comes nice and cold. The lychee calpis tastes like lychee flavoured runny yoghurt. That probably isn't an appetising description, but it's not as bad as it sounds.

The mains came fairly quickly, or maybe it was just the enjoyment of good company and hilarious conversation that made the waiting time seem short. Personally I liked the tuna rice better than salmon. Both full sized meals came with a HUGE dollop of wasabi that went shooting straight to my nose. The tuna rice came in a circular black bowl while the salmon came in a rectangle reminiscent of a bento box. Very cute plating.

Tuna sashimi with rice and mayo (maguro mentai mayo don)

Salmon sashimi with rice and mayo (kaisen don)

The super spicy-that-I-can't-handle-it gekikara ramen was also a full sized meal, and while it was delicious and fragrant, I was unable to eat any more than a sip. A big serving of ramen though with fresh vegetables and half a boiled egg.

Lots and lots of ramen in the gekikara ramen.

From the half size menu was the pork in pork broth ramen (kumamoto tonkotsu ramen), something I've been craving for a few weeks now. The broth was really delicious, but I was very disappointed that the half size only comes with one measly slice of pork. The ramen was, well, ramem. There were a lot of vegetables in the bowl as well which I didn't enjoy as much because they were too crisp, whereas the full size bowl would be big enough to cover with hot soup and cook. On the side was a pot of fried onions, mmm.

With fried onions on top.

The came the dish we most looked forward to - squid ink spaghetti (ika sumi spaghetti). It was the one thing most intriguing on the menu and as soon as it came out, it was met with a few cringes and skeptical raised eyebrows.

It looks real gross!

It had a "sea" flavour, but after awhile it was mostly overpowered by the cheese, garlic and olive oil. It tasted more like fettuccine aglio olio, which coincidently is one of my favourite pastas. Tossed with the pasta was some diced tomatoes, which you can't see because of the black-as-night sauce. It was a shame this dish came out last because by the time we got to it, we were pretty full and this isn't the prettiest dish to look at when on an almost full stomach. Nevertheless, it was finished, mostly by me since I just had a half dish lol.

For some reason the receipt had charged us an "extra" of $2.50 I have no idea what this was, the only thing extra I could think of was that we asked for extra plates. But how can they charge us for plates?! I didn't notice this until after we had paid and left, so everyone please check your bills before you pay! since Kevin wanted extra ramen.

The rest of the day was followed by a 3 hour session of extremely loud and obnoxious karaoke, complete with table top bad dancing and melted macarons. We're so cool...


Address:
Takeru Japanese Casual Dining
339/345 Sussex St
Sydney (near Tetsuya's and Chinatown)