Melbourne

Qantas business class seats on the Airbus A330 features their "cocoon" style bed, when you flatten the bed, your head is cocooned in the cowl of the seat. It was pretty comfortable. Selected Yakitori for dinner to go with the Australian Chadonnay I was drinking. My, they were the largest yakitori skewers I have laid my eyes on ! The skewers were approximately 8in long? Large chunks of chicken alternated with shitake mushrooms on the skewers. Perhaps its the Aussie way of showing their manhood to the Japanese customers...


The Chardonnay was just acceptable, so I did not bother to check the label or vintage. It tasted a bit too light for my taste, which is prefers the richer, oaked and malelactic fermented Chardonnays.







Lunch was at Livebait, a seafood restaurant by the sea at Docklands, near Telstra Dome stadium. Docklands is also just a short distance to the famous Crown casino. Above is a pic of the docklands, without the restaurant.





I ordered some Tasmanian oysters au naturel for starters and we shared an assortment of starters: scallops, zucchini with zucchini flower rolls, soufle and octopus salad.


For main, I picked the Pan Roasted Kingfish （ひらまさ）or Hiramasa on a bed of squid ink （イカ墨 or ikasumi）risotto. The pan roasted Kingfish was firm and quite well roasted, and just a tad dry. The Kingfish is well known in Japan for sashimi, due to its firm flesh.


The risotto was disappointing, as they did not use the right arborio rice, but instead had used Japonica rice. Bummer.

Dinner was at St. Kilda's, at a restaurant called Donovan's. Again I had oysters au naturel for starters and main was an entree sized Linguine with Western Australian scampi. There was only 1 scampi in shell, and the rest of the prawns were the common banana prawns. Dinner was accompanied by WA's Cullen Estate Cabernet Merlot 2005.

After dinner back to the hotel and had 3 bottles of Hoegarden beer with a colleague. It was just after 4am to bed.