get out, exoskeleton! (Azuma Regent)
Regent Place
Ground floor
501 George St
Sydney 2000 NSW
Phone: (02) 9267 7775
(we are done professionally.)
K: Azuma regent is the joanie loves chachi of Azuma Chifley, a Sydney institution that neither of us have actually tried. It’s tucked away in a newly created alley off George St, the platform 9 and 3/4s of shopping centres, but it’s definitely a special occasion kind of place.
N: There is a funny shoe store nearby.
K: Plus the mork and mindy of the Azuma world, Ton Ton ramen (a noodle place run by the same folks).
N: We had been here before in a bigger group, but could not resist the lure of the only Japanese potato salad I actually like, so we were back for a return visit.
K: Even if everything else on the menu tasted like dirt, the potato salad would be worth the visit. It comes on a bed of roquette/rocket (N: What’s up with that? Rocket sucks balls, you guys.) which is superfluous (rocket can be ok, ladies, but is perhaps overdone), but aside from that, is essentially perfect. Creamy with slightly mashed potato and kewpie mayo and punctuated by unexpected morsels of baby corn, it needed only the addition of japanese bbq sauce to be truly jizzworthy. Which it totally got. Oh yeah.
N: It seems only right, considering that the restaurant is named after them, that we tried some of the marinated skewers. There is a weirdly huge variety (jellyfish, anyone?), but we ended up with a more conventional selection, involving a smoky duck one, an equally smoky but somewhat fatty pork belly one and a quite awesomely cooked scallop one (not stringy, as scallops can be, but delicious with the lemony salt provided.) Speaking of, the miscellaneous salts that come with the dish are pretty amazing, even though I pretty much could not identify anything about them beyond “lemony” “a bit peppery” and “that one what is a bit orange” (K: my notes say curry). The skewers themselves are not hugely generous (three pieces per small skewer), but what there is was delicious.
K: I opted for a quail egg (not horrible, but pretty much like 3 small boiled eggs on a stick), scallop (most delicious), and salmon belly (also A++). Less excellent were the stuffed zucchini flowers, filled with a kind of prawny mix redolent of seafood extender. I like seafood extender perhaps more than your average bear, but this just tasted like mushy prawn in a flower.
N: I don’t like seafood extender, but I do like edible flowers and tiny zucchini, so this dish was pretty good times for me! I would recommend it if you too are into tiny zucchini, which you definitely SHOULD be, because you can get past the prawns if zucchini is your happy place, I promise.
K: Unfortunately, neither of our happy places involve exoskeletons. From the sushi selection, we ordered a salmon avocado hand roll (the salmon was fresh and nicely textured, but nothing out of the ordinary), and what we thought was a soft shell crab tempura roll. The otherwise competent and inobtrusive waitress took that as soft shell crab tempura full stop. Untempered by the sweet embrace of rice and seaweed, the crab took on a menacing, (N: Nightmarish!) prehistoric appearance. Too much crunch, not enough sweet sweet crabmeat made the experience one we could not complete.
N: Eating exoskeletons: a lose I cannot get past. Sorry, crabs.
K: Thankfully there was salvation in the form of the tuna salad. Lightly seared, piled with micro herbs and fragments of crisped garlic and then lavished with a gingery soy dressing, this was the salad I knew I loved before I met it.
N: Here is my suggestion: pile everything onto a piece of tuna and then put it all in your mouth at once. It is like having your mouth explode with a culinary grenade, in a way that is both disturbing and delicious. Also, the garlic seems extreme at first, but you will grow to love it. YOU WILL GROW TO LOVE IT.
(SEGWAAAAAAAAYYYYYY)
Dessert time! Look, I had no idea what a chiboust was (K: Chiboust, chiboust, oh baby when she moves, she moves.) I assumed it was probably some sort of cream due to the context clues. All I knew was that it was orange and that I wanted one. Apparently it is a sort of creme brulee on top of a tart casing. I’m not sure which bit was actually the “chiboust”, but all of it was delicious! Also, the sorbet had a mysterious object underneath it that neither added nor detracted from the sorbet, ergo, it has a sort of pointless existence. And there was also some hard fruit involved, I don’t know about that.
K: I went with the caramel and pear mousse, a classic combination that while quite good, could have been better (MOAR caramel??). The fruit and sorbet were good, but not really necessary.
Go to Azuma Regent if you like: POTATO SALAD. Grilled things on sticks. French dessert with Japanese mains. Tuna and petite herb salad worth marrying.
Don’t go to Azuma if you don’t like: Ambient techno. The occasional order screw up. Exoskeletons between you and the crab.
Dish that we forgot: Prawn croquettes. Meh.
Will cost you: Quite a bit, but good value for a special occasion. $150 for two, sans wine, but a heck of a lot of food.
