Kayu

Grill Salmon Sushi

Our dinner at Kayu proved to be a very nice ending to the birthday of our friend S (Happy Birthday again :-) ). It took us some time to find a parking lot because there were two wedding parties going on in Srijaya building. There was valet service but we are too stingy to pay for valet :D . Kayu is at the 5^th floor of Srijaya building. Accidentally, we went to a different floor at first (bad sense of orientation combined with bad indication), the floor where one of the two weddings was going on. For a moment, we were tempted to crash the wedding party but then decided not to because we were too hungry already!

Kayu is a very nice and cozy restaurant. The interior consists of a lot of wooden elements which create a quiet and warm atmosphere. Kayu really has soul. It is hard to explain what ‘having soul’ means for a place but if it was a person, he would be honest, true to himself and not trying to be someone else or faking something. We haven’t found a list of criteria yet which determine if a place has soul or not, but usually you can feel it when you are there. 

The Golden Saffron

Chicken Tandoor Mix

Coming from a European country where most people eat bread every day, I (Julia) have some kind of a bread addiction. Sometimes it can get really bad and I crave bread so much that the sweet bread and toast bread which you can find in Surabaya are not enough to satisfy me. Then, strangely enough, I have to eat Indian Nan bread to fix my bread cravings :D . So, when this was happening last week, Carlo and I went to The Golden Saffron to enjoy some Indian food and bread. The Golden Saffron is located in Lenmarc Mall and one of the very few Indian restaurants in Surabaya (Sitara is another one). We haven’t been to India yet, so we cannot judge the authenticity of the food. But I used to eat a lot of Indian food when I was living in Singapore, so we have a rough idea about it.

You already get a feeling of India when you enter the restaurant. There is a small elephant shrine that welcomes you as you enter. The interior design is pretentious, with a lot of kitsch and a lot of purple colour and a screen showing Indian TV, so you feel a bit like being in Bollywood. Tables are big and comfortable but our table was not clean. There were stains on the table cloth! This little fact changed our expectations from neutral to negative and we were curious how the food would be.

Tong Tong Japanese Resto

Carlo used to go to this place very often but had not been there for a long time. So we went there on a quiet weekday evening and had a nice date. It was the calm before the storm because after dinner we went on a crazy supermarket shopping marathon to find some European ingredients for me to cook at home (update: the food I cooked was not good -.- ).

Tong Tong is one of the most authentic Japanese restaurants in Surabaya. When we got there, a group of Japanese businessmen were having dinner. So we figured that if even Japanese people eat at this place, it must be authentic! It was also very interesting to watch those businessmen, the way they were communicating was, well, very Japanese.