She had a Summer Salad Combo from Sumo Salad – a marinated mushroom and grilled chicken salad with a Nudie juice for $9.95. The marinated mushrooms were delicious, as was the freshly grilled chicken. The dressing was lovely – I tasted garlic and lemon in it – and there were big chunks of fetta throughout, which was good for Jac, who likes fetta – bad for me, who took a huge mouthful without realising and went ptooooohhh!!!!. Yeah, not the most elegant reaction.

I had a craving for bad Chinese (yes, bad Chinese, as opposed to good Chinese, which would be noodle soup or steamed dumplings) – I had a large oriental combination, which consists of four meat or vegetable dishes with noodles and/or fried rice. The four dishes I chose were honey chicken, black bean beef, honey pepper lamb, and chicken and vegetables. The honey chicken was good – battered succulent chunks of boneless chicken smothered in a sticky honey sauce (definitely baaaaad). The black bean beef was sliced thin and very tender. There were lots of vegetables cooked in the black bean sauce with the beef. The honey pepper lamb was spicy (peppery – duh) and very sweet. The lamb was terribly dry and tough and chewy – I did my best to gnaw through a couple of pieces but gave up on the rest. The best part of this dish was the thinly sliced sweet potatoes that were covered in the honey and pepper sauce and were really delicious. Such a shame about that torturously chewy lamb. The chicken and vegetables – such a boring name, eh? – were all cubey and looked like chicken and cashews, but minus the cashews. Yummy, though. Three and a half (half for the slices of sweet potato) good dishes out of four. The fried rice – yes, there really is rice buried under there – was nice. The vegetable chow mein (made with egg noodles) was good – I love stir-fried egg noodles. I just wish they’d use bigger plates so they wouldn’t have to pile everything up like that. The flavours get too mixed up – I’d prefer to have control over which flavours mingle, rather than have them mingled for me before I’ve even started poking around with my fork, and it’s just impossible to eat without bits spilling off the plate onto the tray and making a mess. I like eating the rice with the meat dishes and it was damned hard work getting to the rice for the first few mouthfuls without causing the spectacular collapse of my Tower of Bad Chinese.

Not surprisingly, I was too full to contemplate squeezing in dessert. I left a pile of rejected lamb, but I pretty much ate everything else. But Jac felt like having something sweet, and having eaten a boxful of leaves (hahaha, I don’t mean that in a bad way, but let’s face it, lettuce is leaves, right? :)) she had plenty of room. She got a couple of sweets from the Indian place. This was the *something* halwa – she did tell me the *something* part but I neglected to it write down, and when I asked her later she’d forgotten what it was. Sorry! She said this had a very strong treacley, golden syrupy sort of flavour.

This was the coconut barfi. The silvery bit on the top isn’t part of the dessert – it’s alfoil that they hadn’t peeled off properly. This sweet was coconutty and milky. I think she liked this one more than the halwa.