I tend to not judge a book by its cover, and with a high rating that other patrons had given it on Google Reviews, I thought to myself "what could go wrong?".
Looking from the outside, it looks like a little takeaway stall, especially as it is positioned next to a number of fast food and franchise restaurants.
The venue was clean and well laid out, there was enough room for a good number of customers, you could easily get one-use or reusable utensils/cutlery and one the walls of the building, it hangs out photo for most of the menu items that are available from the restaurant. This visit, I was craving some Japanese, and the other local restaurants that were visited that evening required reservations.
When it comes to the food, this was where my disappointment began. I wasn't feeling overly hungry for dinner, but my partner was keen on eating something filling and rich of flavour. I ended up ordering a Japanese style chicken salad and the partner got ramen.
The salad was a simple dish, so it couldn't be faulted...right? Well, the chicken appears to have been recooked multiple times. Though the skin of the chicken was somewhat crunchy, the meat inside was very dry as there was no juice from the meat as you bite into it. In typical Japanese salad fashion, sauce was what was drizzled over the top of the entire dish and you mix it in with the salad. A Japanese salad would typically have some sauce on it, but if you lifted all the ingredients up from the bowl, at the base is a deep pool of the sauce that was supposed to provide the flavour to the greens. Unfortunately then made everything in the dish taste extra salty. Some may wonder why anyone would want to order a salad at a restaurant like this. Yes, it was silly of me to order this dish, but I didn't expect it to be difficult to eat. Basically I ended up eating everything at the top and anything that was drenched in the sauce was left behind.
Moving onto the partner's Tonkotsu ramen, we have been to a number of ramen restaurants south and north of the river, where we have tried ramen from dedicated ramen restaurants, and others from Asian fusion venues similar to Teri Teri. The ramen that was served did not meet our expectation and wasn't even comparable to other Asian fusion restaurants as well. Usually the first thing you would try is the soup of the ramen. Scooping a spoonful of the ramen's soup and placing it in my mouth, I thought it might have a tasty a fatty pork based broth because it was a pork Tonkotsu, but all I could taste was salt. This salty soup flavour was then absorbed into the noodles and other toppings, therefore eating what we could bear and left the remaining, namely the soup.
In summary, would I be recommending my friends to dine here in future for Japanese? Honestly...no. I would suggest they drive 10 minutes west to Myaree or east to Waterford for an alternative to the Japanese dishes that were offered at this restaurant. I cannot speak for the other menu items as I have yet to try it.
I hope this provides future patrons an idea of what the restaurant offers. As mentioned earlier, it is a pleasant venue, especially as it is north of Mount Pleasant...but the food we had this evening was not. Price wise, I we have had better elsewhere for less.
Enjoy.
Colin Tran