Grahame's LJ - Pretty awesome night.

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May. 19th, 2009

12:26 am - Pretty awesome night.

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Shook the iPhone and [info]kattiko and I ended up going to Ha-Lu in Mt Hawthorn. It's a Izakaya-style place, where you order lots of dishes to share. Lots of vegetarian options on the menu, a really nice feel to the place, and delicious food :-)

Then wandered down and saw Star Trek, which was freaking awesome.

I'm thinking that a regular shake-the-iphone outing is a good idea; urbanspoon seems like a good way to stumble across good restaurants I'd probably never find otherwise.

Edit: hmm, poking around urbanspoon a bit shakes my faith a little. The list of Perth's "best" restaurants comprises far too many pubs, so I suspect their ranking algorithm relies heavily on the number of votes received. The reviews are skewed by conflicting expectations; there are people (like me) that are happy if the food is nice and the staff friendly, and others who think that having an order of a beer forgotten ruins their evening. Overall it seems to suffer from the same problems as tripadvisor. The systems need a way of measuring user expectations and calibrating the rating accordingly (or just showing reviews by people with similar objectives), but obviously that's a very hard problem.

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[User Picture]
From:[info]wintal
Date:May 19th, 2009 05:08 am (UTC)
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I went to Ha-Lu ages ago soon after they opened. I really like the concept - as far as I know there's nothing else like that in Perth. When we went, it was almost empty which sucked a bit ambience wise and the service was a bit strange. We were a bit confused on how the dining experience was supposed to work and they didn't seem to know either ;)

I loved the food though, and they have sake :)


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[User Picture]
From:[info]grahame
Date:May 19th, 2009 10:51 am (UTC)
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It's definitely improved since then - the service was really good, the guy explained the idea to us (which we already had some idea of, we'd been to a place in that vein in Japan), and then we ordered and the plates just kept coming at appropriate moments. It was about half-full when we arrived and almost completely full by the time we left, so I guess it's fairly popular now.

Yep, great food, didn't have any sake though, just an oolong tea :-)
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