I had a rather brilliant weekend with the MCA zine fair on Sunday and catching up with a good friend on Saturday. The zine fair was a lot of fun and I picked up a number of zines and walked away feeling rather inspired. I’ll blog about in a while once I finish downloading some of the images. Gigantic thank you to Pirochan for printing and table space and the continued “where’s your zine?” nagging. Issue 1 and 2 sold out on the day as well as a healthy number of issue 3 as well!
Going back through some old photo I just remembered that I haven’t talked about Nippon Club. I first heard of it from Helen’s blog and the idea of visiting this hidden gem on Macquarie Street piqued my interest. It surprised me to realise that I had walked past this little underground restaurant without realising that it served food. There was only a sign with “International Nippon Australia New Zealand Club Limited” posted outside and until you wander down the stairs it would be easy to dismiss it as a private club exclusive to Japanese expats.
We signed ourselves in after being greeted by two surprised elderly Japanese gentlemen enjoying their Sapporo beer on a Tuesday evening. The atmosphere felt a little like your typical RSL with pokies hidden away in a corner, furniture popular in the 80’s (those wicker chair, that beige colour scheme that was in when Dynasty was on TV).
Apparently their usualy chef was off and they have a new chef starting that week. Unless we were willing to wait until 7:30pm, the only option was the lunch menu until then. With sapporo on tap and a decent sake menu we decided to wait and ordered from the dinner menu. The sashimi and sushi selection was decent, but the value came from the bento box sets. We ordered salmon skin sushi, chirashi sushi special (second photo) brimming with more sashimi than rice, beef tataki, finishing off with the most the most radio active looking green tea ice cream I had ever seen.
It was a surprising experience from start to finish, unlike the typical Japenese restaurant, but thoroughly authentic, affordable and highly recommended.
mirgraphy 
Yikes. Yes, it looks like ice-cream made for the hulk. What was it served with? Red bean?
Yup red bean, though we stared at it for a good 5 minute wondering whether the colouring came from tea grown near a uranium plant.