Wagamama TGV 3

Yeah I know, here I am again, and no, I didn't have a change of heart since last time, I came to use up by Frequent Noodler points!

Food

Since I have tried every single thing on the menu, I thought I would go for the most expensive items on the menu to get my money’s worth! This meant the teriyaki salmon ($18.50) - grilled salmon served on a bed of steamed baby bok choi with teriyaki sauce. Garnished with sesame seeds and nori. The salmon was nice and thick and quite good quality. It was cooked right, but I wish the skin is more crispy. The letdown is actually the teriyaki sauce, which was sickly sweet and marred the natural sweetness of the salmon.

We decided against the next most expensive dish of salmon ramen, as we really don’t like the ramen here, and instead, chose to have a dish that we have had some success with in the past, the kare lomen ($17.50) - a spicy soup made from lemongrass, coconut milk, shrimp paste, chillies, fresh ginger and galangal, served with ramen noodles. garnished with grilled king prawns, beansprouts, cucumber, lime and fresh coriander. Maybe my standards have gone up, but I found that the flavour has gone down. You can taste the curry, but I think they have certainly skimmed. For one thing, the prawns seem worse than usual and were not cooked very well. The curry sauce didn’t have any complexity at all, tasting like something from those packet mix.

Rating - 4.5

Atmosphere

The usual stuff, except I’d never been here on a weekend before, and I find the clientele are usually new to Wagamama, and are actually in awe of it. The table of girls next to us were having a catch up, and were so excited and even said this place was like Japanese yum cha! At least they kept us amused, and it’s certainly much more relaxing dining here on a weekend.

Rating - 2

Service

Unfortunately, it looks like Wagamama has decided to employ waiters who can’t even speak English now. Luckily we are such old hands so we knew exactly what was going on, because our server was pretty useless. I noticed that there is actually quite a bit of variance between the competency of their staff. Some were quite good, attentive and efficient, but others are appalling.

Rating - 2

C-factor

Well, I don’t think I’ve ever paid full price for a meal at Wagamama, and I will never fork out full price for this quality of Japanese.

Rating - 0.5

Brownie Points - 9

Info

level 1,
TGV
500 George St
Sydney
NSW 2000
Phone (02) 9264 9155
Website