A Meal in Brief: Spring Trees New Sichuan Cuisine (早春二月), Newmarket

We came here because my parents suggested it for being cheap and tasty. After doing some web searches, I discovered the Sichuan restaurant is part of a chain which started in Beijing in 2008. The original store had a couple of trees growing through the roof of the main dining room, hence the name of the restaurant.

Entrance to Spring Trees restaurant.

The menu was huge, both in terms of the size of the pages and the number of items available. It was full of colour pictures, some taking up a whole page.

Large full colour menu with lots of pages.

The setting was new and modern. There was a dining room on the right, a series of booths on the left of the corridor, and private rooms down the back, which you can have a nosy at on the way to the bathroom. Along the way, you'll also see some food storage areas that are less tidy too. The restaurant was pretty much full, so I would recommend you make a booking.

Dining room area.

The service was fine, the usual busy Chinese restaurant experience. Our teapots were filled when empty, and we were able to order extra rice. Staff switched happily to English when we struggled with Mandarin. When we went to pay and asked for takeaway boxes, we were given a choice between free polystyrene ones, or plastic ones with a fee. (I recommend the plastic ones, not only because they are more environmentally friendly, but also because you don't want to run the risk of spilling red chilli oil everywhere.)

What we ate included:

• Nanjing-style salted duck 金陵盐水鸭 ($12) - as the name suggests, this was salty. It was also chilled, with relatively dry flesh, like tasty preserved meat.
• Mapo tofu 麻婆豆腐 ($8) - this Sichuan dish with bean curd and pork mince was really well done, and the portion size was huge for the price.

Nanjing-style salted duck and mapo tofu.

• Mixed beef and honeycomb with chilli sauce 夫妻肺片 ($10) - there didn't seem to be any honeycomb tripe here; not sure if they didn't have any or if my parents asked for just beef without me hearing. This cold dish had nice flavours, as with everything else we ate.

Beef with chilli sauce.

• Griddle cooked lotus root 干锅莲片 ($12) - there was a generous serving of lotus root pieces with little pork slices, set atop a platter with a tea light underneath. Just a little bit spicy, we enjoyed the crisp and slightly sticky nature of this dish.

Griddle cooked lotus root.

• Fried pork with cabbage 手撕包菜小炒肉 ($10) - this was less cabbage than it looks in the photo, because there was a lot of meat underneath. In hindsight, we should have ordered another dish with greens. Despite being cooked with chilli oil like many other Sichuan dishes, this was not very hot and did taste different from everything else.

Fried pork with cabbage.

• Delicious dasheen roll 香芋吐丝卷 ($5) - literally "taro toast roll", these cigars were dipped into crispy sesame at each end, and filled with a sweet taro paste. The toast part itself was not particularly crunchy, probably due to their reheating method, but can't really complain for that amount of money.

Taro toast rolls.

• White rice ($1 per bowl) - if all the dishes above seemed ridiculously cheap, the rice made up for it by being rather steep. Each bowl was tiny, maybe only three soup spoons worth. I guess they have to make their money somehow.

Overall, Spring Trees is a great choice for flavourful Sichuan food, with low prices and decent surroundings. It will be a relatively oily meal which you will want to supplement with plenty of white rice, but the dishes are skilfully cooked and well worth trying. Call ahead as this place is popular.

Restaurant Details

Spring Trees (早春二月)
100 Carlton Gore Road, Newmarket, Auckland
(09) 302 0465

According to their business card, they also have a satellite branch at Unit 13, 16 Gooch Place, Meadowland, Auckland, (09) 533 5008.

Review: Sun World Chinese Restaurant (新世界海鲜酒家)

According to the Cuisine Magazine, Sun World was one of the first places in Auckland to offer yum cha. It is certainly still very popular, with queues going out the door during the busy weekend yum cha rush. As a Chinese seafood restaurant, it also has an excellent a la carte menu, and plenty of live seafood for you to look at while you wait, from lobsters to paua (abalone) to geoduck to clams.

Kids checking out the lobsters by the front door.

The restaurant's Chinese name 新世界 actually translates to "new world", but the word "new" in Cantonese is pronounced "sun", and presumably they didn't want to call themselves "New World" to avoid confusion with the supermarket chain. It has apparently been in Newmarket since 2000, and every time I go I wonder what used to be there before that, because the Roman gladiators on the side glass doors don't seem entirely in theme.

Roman gladiators on the side doors.

Yum Cha

The restaurant's website says that they have been offering yum cha since 2007 (fellow blogger Her Worldly Pleasures has documented some dishes from this time). Perhaps that is true for their Newmarket location, but friends remember having yum cha at Sun World when it was still in town, and yum cha has been available in Auckland for at least 25 years, if memories serve correctly.

At Sun World, as with most restaurants of this type in Auckland, yum cha is still offered in the traditional way, with someone pushing trolleys or carrying trays around, although you can, of course, also order a dish rather than waiting for it to appear.

Trolleys with a variety of dishes, from dumplings to spare ribs.

We found the options at Sun World to be varied and plentiful, so it was easy to select different dishes without waiting a long time for what you want. All the usual delicacies were available, including the various steamed dumplings, congee, ricesheet rolls, pork spare ribs, turnip/taro cake, and BBQ pork buns. For dessert, there was also plenty to choose from, such as egg tarts, jin deui (fried sesame balls), various buns and bak tong gou (steamed "white sugar cake").

Yum cha favourites including siu mai, pork spare ribs, chicken feet, and chicken tail buns.

The food was fresh and tasty, and even when we picked the special (more expensive) dishes like deep fried crab or vegetables in oyster sauce, the bill came to a surprisingly small number. Sun World definitely offers one of the best yum cha experiences in Auckland!

Steamed things, fried things, baked pastries - all are available and delicious.

The only reason we don't eat here as often as we would like is that the place is almost too popular. The crush of people and the long queues can be off-putting. Sometimes the waiters are so rushed that they forget to bring your tea, or you find that you have to wait for some time before you get all your crockery. But hey, it is all part of the fun, and did I mention that the food is good?

Dinner

Dinner at Sun World is less frantic than the lunchtime yum cha sessions, so you will have better service and a more relaxing atmosphere to go with the excellent cooking.

Free range chicken with garlic ginger paste.

As with all Chinese restaurants that are not cheapie eateries, you should go with a group and order a variety of dishes so that you can share a balanced meal. (It sounds ridiculous saying this, but one knowledgeable person should do the ordering. I have seen customers unfamiliar with the cuisine attempt to get each person to pick something they like, and it always ends in disaster, even if there are no duplicate dishes, e.g. no one orders vegetables. In case of doubt, ask the waiter for advice.)

Stuffed tofu.

The menu is large, but everything we tried was of a high standard, both well-presented as well as having great authentic flavours.

Steamed fish and roast meat.

Sun World is a popular institution in Auckland with good reason!

Restaurant Details

Sun World Chinese Restaurant (新世界海鲜酒家)
2A York Street, Newmarket, Auckland
(09) 520 3218

Opening hours:
Mondays to Fridays 11am - 2:30pm, 5:30 - 10pm
Saturdays to Sundays 10:30am - 2:30pm, 5:30 - 10pm

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Review: Selera Malaysian Cafe

A popular food for Chinese New Year is the turnip cake (蘿蔔糕/萝卜糕), known in Malaysia and Singapore as "carrot cake".  Just as egg rolls can mean different things to different people, this delicacy is quite different from Western carrot cake, in that it is savoury (well, okay, so are fish cakes), and its primary ingredient is actually neither carrot nor turnip, but the daikon radish.

紅蘿蔔 hóng ​luó​ bo = "red radish" = carrot

白蘿蔔 bái ​luó ​bo = "white radish" = daikon radish

蘿蔔糕 luó bo​ gāo = "radish cake" = turnip cake, a.k.a. carrot cake

I am used to eating turnip cake simply sliced and fried, maybe dipped into chilli and soy sauce.  But I enjoy it in other ways too, like in the Malaysian version at Selera, an eatery in Newmarket we have been frequenting on and off for years. There, it is fried with egg, soy sauce, mung bean sprouts, and spring onions in a delightfully spicy mixture.

Soft cubes of fried turnip cake, egg and vegetables in a salty, spicy sauce.

"Carrot cake" is not the only item on the menu worth eating at Selera though.  Their mee goreng is beautifully hot and juicy, if a little sweet, and the giant bowls of laksa served here are not just tasty, but great value for money.

Vegetable laksa and mee goreng.

You will find your usual hawker favourites here, from char kway teow, to nasi lemak, to Hokkien mee, to Hainanese chicken rice. Those with a smaller appetite can nibble on snack items such as satay chicken, lobak roll and roti canai.

The eatery feels more pleasant now that the footpath outside has been upgraded, and the redesigned menu which came out last month is easier on the eye too. Our only complaint would be that the chopsticks left in a holder on the table are prone to feeling sticky.  This can be off-putting, but rest assured that Selera has an "A" food grade rating, and nothing untoward has happened to us yet.  We're not letting this minor detail get between us and good food anyway.

Panda Recommends

Mains: Mee Goreng ($13.00), Carrot Cake ($13.00), Curry Laksa Noodle ($14.00).  We have yet to try everything, so there are no doubt other great choices.
Avoid the Selera tofu ($7.00) or the Spring Rolls ($5.50), unless you like generic sweet and sour sauce.

Vegie Pandas
Oh, this is a tough one.  Malaysians love to use shrimps in their cooking, and you will find it in the lemak sayur (vegies in coconut milk, $19.00) as well as sambal anything.  Mix Vegetables with Garlic ($19.00) would be safe, but boring.  The Vegetable Laksa Noodle ($14) is great, but I haven't checked the ingredients.

Menu - page 1

Menu - page 2

Restaurant Details

Selera Malaysian Cafe
487 Khyber Pass Road, Newmarket, Auckland
(09) 520 7977

Opening hours:
Mondays to Sundays 11:30am - 10pm

Selera is on the corner of Khyber Pass Road and Osbourne Street.

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Review: Faro (화로), Newmarket

The best, and perhaps only, modern Korean BBQ restaurant we knew of was Faro in town, and I'd been meaning to write about it for a while.  We were therefore excited to hear that a new branch opened just over a week ago in Newmarket, where HP8 on Nuffield Street used to be.  Not only that, there were new items on the menu, including sesame leaf rolls!

We headed off immediately to try this new venue out.  It seemed to be less dark than the Faro in town, and tables were partitioned off to give a sense of privacy.  There was also an area to the right that could accommodate larger groups.  Otherwise, it was much the same, with a grill ring in the middle of the table for you to BBQ your food, a button on the side of the table for summoning your waiter (common to Korean restaurants) and a pipe which you can adjust to hang above your grill, for extracting the smoke from your cooking.

Extraction pipes hung above each booth.

Floor seating for a larger group.

After perusing the menu for some time, we decided to go for a selection of entrees, as well as getting some meat and veg for the grill.  We also opted to try a rice dish with radish greens called shiregi (시래기영양밥), and were mildly surprised when the outgoing waitress suggested that it would taste "healthy" and that she wouldn't recommend it.  The vegetarian had had enough of bibimbap (비빔밥) though (mixture of vegetables, optionally with egg and/or meat, on rice, served with a fermented chilli sauce, which seems to be the safest vegetarian option), so we ordered the shiregi rice despite the warning.

Our entrees came first, the stir-fried peanuts labelled kong (땅콩무침) to begin with, then the sesame ssam with rice (깻잎밥).  And here I have to digress...

Sesame ssam: rice and black sesame seeds wrapped with a pickled perilla leaf.

While I was looking up the Korean for this dish, I discovered that kkaenip ssam (깻잎쌈) is actually a wrap with a perilla leaf, not sesame, the common mistranslation.  I confirmed this with a Korean friend:

Perilla is correct. Because both perilla and sesame seeds are used in the Korean cuisine in similar (but distinct) manners, one word, '깨', refers to both.

참깨 ('true' 깨) refers to sesame, usually more expensive, used as garnish or to get sesame oil (참기름, or 'true' oil)

들깨 ('field' or 'wild' 깨) refers to perilla, used for flavouring soups, or making oil (들기름), which is used as marinade or dressing for vegetables. 

Because the word '깻잎' simply means the 'leaf of 깨', not many Korean people would know which one it refers to. But the correct answer is perilla :)

Yay.  So we seem to have eaten a green version of what is growing in my garden.  It was a bit soft and fibrous, quite unlike the crisp and juicy feeling you would expect with a lettuce leaf, though perhaps not so different from a stuffed vine leaf in Greek or Turkish cuisine.

A couple of dishes from the Dinner Special page came out shortly after this (though they still looked like entrees to me): stuffed chillis called gochu jeon (고추전) and chicken on fried tofu, or dubu dak (두부닭).

Dubu dak and gochu jeon.

Then came the food for the grill, along with the usual Korean side dishes.  Each person was given two varieties: the pickled onion and a daikon salad.  We also had four larger bowls to share between the table, which contained kimchi, a green salad, a white jelly made of mung bean starch, and a sliced soy egg.  When we polished them off, they were later replaced by battered courgette slices and a mung bean salad.

Marinated boneless beef rib fillets, fresh cut top blade, marinated chicken with hot hot hot sauce, and side dishes.

I guess the thing about cooking your own dinner is that you've only got yourself to blame if it's burnt or otherwise suboptimal.  When the bars on the grill got black and sticky, a waiter would come rushing up to replace it for you, so vegetarians don't even need to worry about contaminated cookware.  Our marinated meats were good, but we could have done with some salt for the plain one.  Thinking back afterwards, they must have just forgotten to give us the sauces they'd advertised on the cover of their menu, which were supposed to be:

Galbi-Jang: best with marinated beef
Roast Salt: best with fresh beef & pork
Ssam-Jang: best with vegitable wrap

Marinated beef rib fillets on the grill.

You can also grill vegetables, though they were quite dry and tended to burn easily.  The tomato, in particular, wanted to disintegrate and stick to the grill.  Again, these could really have done with some sauce.

Grilling vegetables.

Finally, we received the shiregi rice, which was the $17 bowl of grains that the waitress had tried to dissuade us from. Yes, it did taste healthy, but it was also delicious.  I would have liked it more if it had had more radish greens, and where was the chilli paste mentioned in the menu?  It was also served with a decidedly unvegetarian soup: we found a prawn, some little clams and dried shrimps in the doen jang soup (된장찌개), which had tofu and vegetables in the soybean base as well.

Shiregi rice with doen jang soup and soy sauce.

We were so full after all this that we unfortunately had no room for desserts.  We were happy pandas after a fun and pleasant meal.  Although some of the food was bland, partly due to the missing sauces, this was no doubt due to the fact that the restaurant had opened less than two weeks ago, and we look forward to coming back when these mistakes will have been sorted out.

Panda Recommends

Mains: something off the grill menu ($11 - $13).  This is a Korean BBQ restaurant after all.  Don't forget (as we did) to ask for your sauces.

Vegie Pandas
Unlike the menu from Faro in town, the vegetarian options are not clearly marked here.  There are a number of beautiful entrees which you could order, as well as a plate of vegetables to grill, or go for the default option of vegetarian bibimbap (비빔밥).

Menu - page 1

Menu - page 2

Menu - page 3

Restaurant Details

Faro
49 Nuffield Street, Newmarket
(09) 529 4040

Opening hours:
Mondays to Sundays 11:30am - 3pm, 5:30pm - 10:30pm

The Newmarket branch of Faro is not far from Hansan, where HP8 used to be.

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