A Weekend in Lisbon Part 3 - See Food Eat Food

April 01, 2018 by Si-Qi Ho in Travel, Lisbon

Cervejaria Ramiro is the restaurant that appears in every 'must-eat' list for Lisbon. Every cooking show on Netflix about Lisboa, every travel vlog on youtube - will feature this restaurant and its amazing seafood. So expect queues! We arrived around 6pm on Saturday, during holiday off-season, and queued for around 40-50 minutes - which was actually shorter than I expected!

Apologies for the half-eaten giant tiger prawn - we ate them faster than we could take a picture of them!

The seafood was incredible. I know that any future stop in Lisbon will HAVE to include a meal here. Everything above including an order of bread and beer was a little over 100 euros, with the above Scarlet prawns being the most expensive item but also my absolute favourite from the bunch - I'd be happy with anything from the menu but these gorgeous red prawns were unlike anything I'd ever tried before, made the meal much more unique!

Seafood rice was another dish I'd see dotted around the food blogs that I was determined to try. The one above was from Peixaria do Rossio, I mean, it's very difficult to mess up a hearty rice-stew dish with so much fresh seafood. This one was lovely but any future trip to Portugal I think I want to try others and compare notes!

The Time Out Market is a very busy and touristy spot but it's a really fantastic way to sample some amazing Portuguese food. I really love this market and would love to see other cities adopt this idea - it's just a fantastic way for us hopeless foreigners to try great authentic food!

The longest queue was for the grilled Octopus but my favourite dish was the Prego sandwich with Sweet Potatoe chips - if I remember correctly it was a Wagyu beef from Chile.

We tried quite a few of the Bacalhhau salted cod pastries - the make fantastic little snacks, similar to fishcakes, deep fried mashed potato dumplings with the salted cod through them. The one above was one of the 'fancier' ones catered for tourists really at their 4 euros per pastry price but unlike the others we tried they were filled with a real nice, real strong cheese. The shop dedicated to only these pastries were in the heart of the tourist area.

The pastries below where from Pasteis de Belem.

So we did eat a couple little savoury pastries at Pasteis de Belem but really the main and only reason why you would head out to this place are to eat these amazing Pastel de Nata - egg custard tarts! One of my favourites things I've ever eaten, I'm hunting around to see if I can find anything remotely close to these locally!

We went early for breakfast to avoid the queues but the tip is to head inside for table service as the queue is typically shorter there plus you are able to order the tarts to take out from there rather than wait in the huge take away queue.

Eat them portuguese style, which is to sprinkle them with cinnamon and icing sugar!

Blogmas Day 09: Uobei Sushi and Coco Curry

December 09, 2016 by Si-Qi Ho in Japan Trip, Blogmas

Conveyor Belt sushi is one of the many wonderful Japanese things that us Westerners have fully embraced. Uobei Sushi is a different type of conveyor belt experience, where you get to order your sushi on a screen in front of you and then minutes later, WHOOOOSH! your sushi comes speeding out to you on a conveyor belt 'train' - it is stupidly fun!

As you can see the menu is overwhelming HUGE, so we chose the seasonal specials and then tried to pick the sushi that we don't get here back home. Here is a big picture dump of sushi!

There was maybe one real stinker in there, a couple I'll probably never order again, but overall, it was pretty yummy! It's not meant to be top quality sushi but it's still miles above what you can get here!

If the silly conveyor belt doesn't tickle your fancy then the prices will! All of the above dishes cost about 1800 JPY but when we got to the counter to pay, there was some promotion on where I got to pick a random prize out of a box and it turned out to be another 100 JPY off my bill, so in other words, all that sushi cost about £15!

(There are several branches)

Coco Curry

The next few pictures will be the ugliest pictures of food that I'll post on this blog but it's a thing, Coco curry is a thing - any curry/junk-food/japanese-food-lovers have to try Coco curry. It's good, it's filling, it's proper junk food and you know they open 24 hr! I remember walking past the Coco curry next to the famous Piss Alley in Shinjuku - an alleyway filled with mini pubs often crowded with those having a fun alcoholic night - this was around 7 in the morning when Piss alley was quiet and sleeping but the Coco curry was full! I remember thinking 'who on earth would have curry at 7 in the morning', before connecting the curry shop to all the boozey people who have probably spent the night at Piss Alley!

The variations of curry you can have are endless, to curry flavour, spice level, topping, rice amount, veg etc.

Hah! Yes the corn salad was for so-called health and that gloopy blob on the curry is a soft boiled egg - it's a thing, that's simply a thing over here, pick whatever curry you want but please do try it with an egg!

Again there are MANY branches!

Blogmas Day 05: Makishi Market

December 05, 2016 by Si-Qi Ho in Japan Trip, Blogmas

After a busy weekend, our last stop in Okinawa was the Makishi Public Market.

So I'll admit my failures on this one - the above picture is the only picture I took of the Market. This market is a really touristy place and actually I don't know how I even managed this shot because not long after this image the Market became far far busier! And well I do have some images of the food we ate on the 2nd floor, which was seafood that we picked fresh from the market on the 1st floor. However, these pictures may just contribute to the fail of a day we had.

Now all the food was good, the seafood was fresh but I had read up on the market and had hoped to try other types of fish and shellfish, and I was achingly reminded of the things I really wanted to try when the family next to us was greeted by a huge sashimi boat with fresh lobster arranged on it and some sort of giant shellfish - it was really big! Then not long after devouring the fresh sashimi, the cook took the lobster head into the kitchen only to come back out with a large bowl of steaming lobster-seafood congee!

So the market is an OVERWHELMING place. I'm sure the main market is a great place to buy souvenirs, although a lot of the shops did sell the same stuff, if you have the time and are money-savy, I'm sure you could find some great deals. We were far too tired for that sort of thing so all my sister and I really did was wander and take note of the popular things that kept popping up.

The fish market was a cramped space with tanks full of fresh seafood, unique seafood that you will never have seen before, all gathered together with many fishmongers trying there best to attract you to it. It was quite rowdy indeed but no rowdier than any other market place.

The main problem that we faced was that, a little back story here, my sister and I are Chinese, however we were born and raised in Scotland, and it turns out, I'm guessing because of the many Chinese tourists combined with the strong Chinese influence on Okinawa, almost all of the fishmongers spoke mandarin but my sister and I don't speak a lick of it! So they kept throwing mandarin at us and eventually one fishmonger got the point and turned to English mode and before you know it, he was recommending what looked like the most 'foreigner-friendly' fish and he kept suggesting grilled or steamed.

It was of course not his fault, we were simply too overwhelmed by it all and should I get the chance to go back, I would definitely make an effort to talk more and find out a bit more about the different Okinawan fish. Also, I will DEFINITELY ask for something sashimi, I'm sure there would be nothing better than sashimi at a fish market! I'd also recommend going to the market with at least 3 or 4 people so you can try more variety!

Dessert we grabbed at the market called Sata andagi サーターアンダーギー, I grabbed the brown sugar flavour and again, this tasted WAY better than it looks. Sata andagi is a deep fried dough, a little denser than doughnuts but not in a gummy, sickening way and the brown sugar flavour tasted like caramel. Probably the best thing of the market that day.