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Searching for somewhere new to eat after a morning ride up Mount Dandenong, HPG and I decided to head towards Heathmont to see what was on offer. It’s strange that after two years of living in the area, I had never actually hit this strip of shops which is just around the corner, despite having driven and ridden past it many times.

Right down the end of the strip is Barclays Cafe.

It looked quite promising from the outside, with a very solid Sunday mid-morning breakfast crowd and a constant bustle of wait staff around the room. With most of the tables either full or reserved, we were actually lucky to be able to secure a table.

The room is nicely furnished, with a couple of tables out the front and another courtyard out the back, so there are quite a few options of places to eat. Didn’t seem overly squashy either.

Unfortunately, despite the positive start, the food was rather average. HPG reports that the coffee was too hot. My freshly squeezed OJ was indeed freshly squeezed, however the juice itself was quite bland. We the breakfast was quite overcooked, with the bacon not only crispy, but hard and quite black. There were also significant parts of the Turkish bread which was burnt.

It’s a shame really because the space is quite nice and the prices quite reasonable.

So I’d heard a lot about this mythical place – J’s Surf and Turf. $28 for all you can eat Japanese and run by actual Japanese people. Sounds like a good deal hey? Well I finally got to go last night.

A bit of background first. I quite like Japanese food. For anyone who’s seen me eat, this might seem strange because I do tend to eat large amounts of food very quickly, which doesn’t really go down very well at Japanese places, where serves a often quite small and delicately prepared. I should point out that I am not one of those typical SE Asian types who seems to have a fetish for everything Japanese (although I do own a Japanese car), took Japanese as subject in school/uni, went to Japan to teach English and watches hours of anime. Rather, my interest in Japanese food is that I like tasty food – all sorts of interesting flavours.

So with the possibility of being able to try every single flavour on the menu for $28, I couldn’t really pass it up.

Of course, we had to get there first, which proved to be quite a chore. The reason I held out going to J’s for so long is that it’s in Brighton (131 Were Street since I hadn’t mentioned it before), which is a royal pain in the backside for me to get to. Traffic down Nepean Highway was grindingly slow and as usual, the rain made people drive like stupids.

But we did get there eventually and my folks had already started to order. The oysters (which you have to pre-order) were just oysters. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of oysters, but they seemed to be okay. The takoyaki octopus balls were quite tasty, although had a bit more sauce than I liked. The agadeshi tofu seemed to be a bit too dense. The serve of prawn tempura was massive, however the batter itself was kind of heavy and the prawns tasteless. Teriyaki chicken was quite good and not too sweet. The beef salad was quite tasty, although again drowned in sauce. Sashimi again came in a very healthy serve and tasted okay, although was lacking a bit of firmness. The sushi was very cold and the rice was hard. Croquettes were actually quite good.

Sounds very average doesn’t it?

I will forgive it however because the service was excellent. We never had to wait long to get service and the food arrived in a flash. Unlike some other all-you-can-eat places where you order through a waiter, we didn’t sit there waiting for ages, trying to get a waiter’s attention. In fact, a waiter seemed to be hovering nearby all the time and ready to pounce the moment someone even looked at the closed menu.

Dessert was a very simple affair. vanilla ice cream & fruits with jelly snakes & chocolate coins. Very un-Japanese, but somewhat satisfying.

So overall, I’m really not sure how to rate this place. Food was quite average, but it was sufficiently cheap for all you can eat Japanese seafood. Serves were generous and service was generally quite good. Maybe I’m rate it descriptively rather than a score. I’d rate this as a place I’d go with a group of friends because it’s a bit of fun, but not really somewhere I’d go for a special event. If it wasn’t so far away, I would probably go back more often, but given the time and effort to get down there, I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything.