Well, I will have to go back.
Last week, my Partner in Dine and I went to Oh Monk, in Tarragindi. I had heard about Oh Monk before it opened, from a friend with excellent taste in food, and so was very excited to go. There were meant to be quite a few gluten free options.
There were. I was not disappointed.
The layout of the place was simple, the people were friendly, and it looked like it was already a regular spot for at least a couple of people. It is not a big place, and because of this, I think I found it comfortably cosy. Cosy can be good, it means you will want to come back. While you may not be racing back, you will be going back. It will hit you at 4 in the afternoon when you are writing about it, and you are looking at the menu to remember what it was you were eating. You will stop and think, I should go back and have something else off the menu.
To be honest, I was expecting something much fancier, at least decor wise, and was pleasantly surprised to find it wasn’t. It felt very much like here you are, come and eat.
So we did.
We took a seat, and perused the menu for at least 2 minutes. I saw gluten free chicken karaage, and immediately needed it. I then looked at the menu for a bit longer. Pad Thai, with beef, was my next choice, and this was accompanied by a second dish ‘Monk’s Duck Jang Mien Noodles’. We washed these down with some Cold Pressed Cloudy Apple Juice.
Which is where I will start the adventure. I am not sure if Cold Pressed is a brand or the description of how they got it, but I am guessing it’s a brand. As far as cloudy apple juice goes, I am a fan. Unfortunately, unless it is coffee, I am not likely to wax lyrical about a beverage. That being said, after I write about Oh Monk, I will tell you about 2 pretty disgusting soft drinks I had. I loved them both.
There are a few places out there now that do gluten free chicken karaage now, shout out to Bird’s Nest in Toowong, but Oh Monk did pretty well with theirs. The pieces were just above bite sized, which means you can get a decent amount of sauce on if you are that way inclined. I am not always drawn to this option, I am more drawn to the crunch. The problem with gluten free coatings is you can’t always get the same crunch as you can with a gluten flour. It was still very tasty though, and well worth getting. After we finished the chicken karaage, the Jang Mien and the Pad Thai were brought out.
‘Monk’s Duck ‘Jang Mien’ Noodles’ is indeed a very tasty dish. Admittedly I am biased, as duck is one of my favourite meats, but even so it was still pretty tasty. The sauce mixed nicely with all of the ingredients and especially the noodles. The noodles, in this case, were thin sweet potato noodles. I have had potato noodles before in a simple dish of noodles and soy, and was pretty happy to have them again. Before any of you say, I can go out and get my own, not that happy. If I was going to go out of my way to get noodles I can eat, they would be rice noodles.
You know, the kind you find in dishes like Pad Thai.
Which just so happens to be the next dish. Will you look at that! I love Pad Thai, it is my comfort food, which I think I have mentioned before. I especially love pad thai with lime and peanuts. This one came with both. The noodles weren’t incredibly gluggy, and didn’t clump together like something out of a pastafarian's intense dreams. They also weren’t too chewy, which I have had from some cheap, heat and eat pad thai (you get what you pay for, and if it is about $4 it is probably going to be bad, and it was).There is a certain flavour about the sauce of pad thai which hits every spot of my tongue, and makes me enjoy the whole experience immensely. We had beef with this one, and it was cooked pretty well. Like stir fry beef should be. The menu says there were garlic chives in this one, there was a hint of it, but not enough for me to mention it. Except just then.
Overall, I had a pretty good time at Oh Monk. They have great food, and take the gluten allergy thing pretty seriously, so another place for the coeliacs to go eat. Always a plus. There are a couple of vegan and vegetarian options, but we didn’t try those.
Next time.
I need to go back to eat more of the dishes.
But first…
As I mentioned before, I had 2 drinks that were wonderfully bad. I believe I used the word disgusting, but it occurs to me I have had far worse. Both of these are of the Lester Fixin’s range of soda’s, or soft drinks if calling it soda annoys you. The first was Bacon Soda with Chocolate, and the second was Ranch Soda. The reason I am not writing two separate entries for these is because I found something mildly worse. Ha ha ha ha, I can hear what you are thinking, and yes I did indeed combine the 2. Now imagine if you will, a drink that tastes something like the afterthought of maple bacon combined with the tiniest hint of burnt grill, pretending to have a chocolate flavour in there. Mix that with a drink that, to me, tastes like someone answered the question nobody asked, what is carbonated salad dressing like anyway. What you wind up with is not, as I had envisioned, a drink that tastes like a fizzy bacon salad. You instead wind up with a fight of flavours in your mouth, and no one is the winner. Your taste buds get knocked out pretty early, leaving you with the aftertaste of a bad idea made entirely of unnatural things.
I loved it.
Of course I did. Eat well my friends.
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