Izakaya

Last week when I wrote about Chonging Hotpot, there were several comments suggesting me to try a restaurant called "Izakaya" at Pesanggrahan road. I've already passed this restaurant several times but not interested to try it because the place was so deserted and the name "Izakaya" supposed to mean "Japanese drinking place which also serve food", but instead of serving Japanese food, they offered Chinese food & dimsum. However, those comments made me reconsider and eventually decided to give it a try.

So last Monday, SC & I drove to Izikaya. We arrived there at around 8PM, but we were their only customers at that time. I asked for "ma la tang", which they have, but we can't order it in the same pot with the chicken broth, so we had to order malatang & chicken broth in 2 different stoves, and select about 5-6 inggredient to put in the pot. (btw the price of malatang is almost twice the price of chicken broth, and they didn't even state their prices on the menu). Overall the meal was not bad, but not that special either. The "malatang" was so hot and spicy with lots of dried chillies and sechuan peppers in it, but aside from the spicyness I couldn't taste anything else. I supposed malatang should have more taste than just hot and all of those dishes cost us about 175K (I don't think that was cheap).

Several days later, I put my comment about Izakaya here, and said that I preferred having hotpot at Haytian than Izakaya even though Haytian didn't served malatang. That remark prompted a flurry of comments vilifying Haytian (i.e. they put tons of MSG in their soups, the soups contain lard that will makes you 'eneg') and praising Izakaya. I began to wonder whether these are honest comments? So I checked the IP addresses of those commenters and sure enough, they turned out to came from the same IP address and they are using different names to comment in this blog. I don't like that kind of people, it's so malicious. So I erased their comments and promised not to return to that place again. Jakarta has plenty of decent and better hotpot restaurants than this one.