Horoki Casual Dining/Bar

This place is severely (with emphasis added) recommended to those people that like to try a lot of different dishes and share food between small groups people.

This quirky little restaurant is located on Liverpool Street, and is not that big (only seats 27 people), so groups of 2, 3, or 4 would be perfect. Anymore would be pushing it because you won’t have enough to share between everyone anyway. The dishes are semi tapas-like, but the dishes are slightly larger.

 

There were only 2 other people in the restaurant when we got there, so the atmosphere was excellent. Comfy, cozy, quiet, comfortable.

On to the food.

This daikon salad was yummay (aye!)! The daikon had a potato chip texture (crunch!), and although it certainly didn’t taste like potato chips (in fact, by itself it didn’t taste of anything at all!), the sesame seed and soy dressing perfectly married together the daikon, seaweed, and the sashimi.

Then we had a scotch fillet steak. The specks of green that you can just make out (not the bok choy) are wasabi. There’s also some fried onion there as well. The meat was tender and succulent, and I loved the mushrooms. The mushrooms just go ‘pop’ in your mouth and you get a huge flavour explosion of mushroom.

Another excellent dish. Octopus in garlic butter. Eaten with the bread on the side. The dish was sizzling when it came, and garlic butter sauce went very well with the bread, which was toasted to perfection.

And then we had some stuffed chicken wings. Looks like normal chicken wings, but they have been deboned and stuffed with gyoza, like a dumpling.

A very very interesting combination, and works very well with the soy dip provided on the side. It was like eating a chicken wing and a dumpling together.

And finally dessert.

Green tea ice cream was very good. 2 big scoops of it in a cup with a strawberry on top.

And I loved the panna cotta, except for the fact that there could have been more of it. As you can see, it’s barely half the cup. Still, it tasted very good, especially with the jam.

Pricewise, slightly pricey, but not too bad. The dishes were on average about $14 each, each chicken wing was $3.50, dessert was $4.50 each, and in total came up to about $30 each for the 2 of us. In terms of amount, I could have eaten more though. Perhaps if I had the foresight to order a bowl of rice (which I’m not even sure whether they have or not) I would have been much better off.

Horoki is truly a gem of a find and I cannot believe that I’ve never heard about it before.

6-Minute Egg

This was my breakfast today, consisting of kabana, half a loaf of garlic bread, salad, and a 6-minute egg, with some cracked black pepper sprinkled on top.

What’s a 6-minute egg? It’s an egg with the white part near the shell firm (but not hard), and the closer you get to the yolk, the white gets softer and softer until you get to the soft and runny yolk. Its technique is described here, on the Voltaggio Brothers’ website.

At first, I thought I had failed and had obtained a hard boiled egg, but lo and behold, just like the description, the white was firm on the outside, but softer and softer as you get closer to the middle. The yolk flowed out like a golden river once I cut into it. Its texture was almost silky and it went extremely well with the garlic bread.

This was definitely a success story, unlike my previous attempts with poached eggs, and I will surely make it again.