Right, Thursday night we went out for a nice Japanese dinner at Dhan in Mt Eden Village… Lovely place, great service… But the food… I’ve always known Japanese food to be clean and refreshing, but it seems their chef has doscovered cheese & fat. There was a lot of both.

Weird meal too:

• Wontons full of cheese (yum, but only a couple, or your head will start to feel clogged).
• Grilled eggplant covered with melted cheese (delicious, very oily).
• Japanese dumplings (delicious).
• Beef stewed in beer with quail eggs (very sweet, quail eggs are weird).
• Crumbed & grilled things on a stick:
  • Lotus root (very boring).
  • Prawns (yummo).
  • Eggplant (boring).
  • Fish.
• Teryaki chicken, which is as you’d expect – yum.

Maybe we just ordered the wrong set of dishes, but it really had a general feeling of being extremely greasy and felt like it was clogging up my arteries.

Like I said, though, the service was great, very friendly and attentive, without being annoying and intrusive, and the decor was wonderful, with each table given privacy by hanging screens.

Then, on Friday, we went out for Hot’s birthday dinner, accompanied by Dale, James, Dan (wearing his special occasion GIANT SHOES™), Dylan +1, Cola & Callum. Expected to make an appearance were: Karl & Louise.

We arrived at Bodrum to be shown to our excellent (and huge) round corner table, surrounded by cushions, and raised above the rest of the tables, took a few bottles of wine (cheap shiraz; cheap bubbles; very good bubbles) & corkage was free (as it should be, the dirty money grubbing bastards that expect a couple of dollars from each person at the table, even if they haven’t been drinking, are lucky they haven’t been introduced to my shovel).

Set menu, so not much thinking, other than the drinks list that no one took too much notice of, just a couple of beers here and there and a mix or two.

Starters came out:

• Big bowls full of numerous delicious dips.
• Plates covered with hot pita.
• Plates piled with cubed potatoes under a delicious sauce.

We all tucked in to that for a remarkably long time… There really was a lot to go around.

A LONG time later, and without really any attention from the waitress, we finally managed to get our mains out, which consisted:

• Bowls of rice.
• Truly excellent felafels drowned in delicious sauce.
• Big bowls full of sauced beef.
• Slightly smaller bowls full of equally saucy chicken.
• Some sort of horrible salad (had capsicum in, you see).
• Oh, we also got bowls of penne pasta and sauce, which felt a bit out of place to me, and no one really seemed to pay too much attention to it, besides nicking all the feta off the top.

The waitresses seemed more interested in groping their boyfriends than providing anything like good service, so that’s what they did — when they weren’t standing next to the counter looking extremely bored – after all, if they weren’t seeing to our needs, they weren’t doing anything, so they weren’t doing anything. – even failed to bring me a decanter of water when I asked.

So, to um it all up, which you probably would have prefered anyway:

• Food: good (and plentiful (really)).
• Decor: nice.
• Service: shite.

We didn’t stay for coffee (which was included in our set menu).

If you combined the service from Dhan with the food from Bodrum, you’d be on to a winner. Though it would be odd having friendly Japanese people running a Middle-Eastern-Type-Place™.