Hot Dog stand outside Ministry of Education

There has been a hot dog stand outside the Ministry of Education on the corner of Gorrie St and Thurston St for most of the past decade. While it is always good to see enterprising young men try and make their way in the world, the LiS crew will only ever judge you on the quality and cost effectiveness of your food, and never on the purity of your heart and honest intentions.
These guys have one item on the menu, at a single price ($4), and that item is the Hot Dog. In years past they used to have a burger which was tasty enough but seemed to give everyone acid reflux, and it is no longer on the menu.
The above is a hot dog, a sausage in a bun with sauce and mustard, with grated cheese. Not the sort of thing one has to study Julia Child to learn how to do. If they have relish you can get relish but they don't seem to have it that often.

There really isn't much to say about it - its a damn hot dog. It is what it is. If I had season tickets at Yankee Stadium I would have the requisite cultural software installed to determine where in the grand spectrum of hot dog quality this sits. Unfortunately I have neither tickets nor the inclination (nor for that matter the stomach lining) to become a hot dog connoisseur.

I am however fully qualified to comment on this meals place in the price performance curve. At $4 this is simply not a good deal. Scrounge around in your coin jar for $1.50 more and you can get a substantial feed at a place like the Handicraft centre. Most people with Pacific Island appetites will need two hot dogs to make a decent lunch - well for the $8 that will cost you can get yourself a bi bim bap at Shabu Shabu, an option that is both healthier, heftier, and tastier.

In Summary

Hot Dog Stand

Outside the Ministry Education, Corner of Gorrie St and Thurston St (http://osm.org/go/vrytA9Pi@-)

Opening Hours:

Mon - Friday: 12:00pm - 2:30pm

Spend:

$4 per hot dog

Rating:

Thumbs-down

Jody's @ MHCC

Closed ... as predicted by Kania Tiko. On the bright side, the location is just too good to go to waste ... so there'll eventually be another eatery here for us to scrutinise.

The MHCC complex has added a fast food place on the ground floor (on the Renwick Rd side) which the LiS team is duty bound to find out more about.
The interior looks like a typical fast food chain, obviously they've looked at the Macca's of the world and tried to copy what works. I can say that the ordering process is efficient and well thought out, however one doesn't always understand what the attendant is saying - the dude rattles off the options at a rate of knots in a language believed to be English.
There are a selection of toasted sandwiches, this is the pick of the bunch - egg with Jody's fire sauce (which seems to be some sort of Tamarind and chilli mix), but after eating one can't help but think that one could do a better job at home. Scramble some eggs, toast some bread, put on some tamarind chutney and tabasco, and you have a quick tasty breakfast. Kudos to Jody's for giving me the idea, but it's unlikely I'll be going back there for this one.

This the menu, it has far too many things on it.
This is a chicken burger - the smallest one that they offer as you can see from the $0.50 piece provided for scale. Its also one of the most boring burgers that we've ever eaten, not actually bad, just completely uninteresting.
This is their grilled fish with coleslaw. An utterly revolting meal - nothing short of a vile, disgusting abomination - in fact worth purchasing just to marvel with ones own senses at how bad cooking can get.
This the CSI pizza, and CSI does not refer to the forensic team that should be investigating the crime against food that the Grilled Fish is. CSI apparently means "Community Sourced Ingredients" which in this case are pumpkin, baigan, and tomato. This actually isn't a bad pizza, which is a good thing as their other pizza options are pretty horrible. This is the only thing I ate that I'd actually go back for.

A note about the price - this place is expensive! All the food above cost $28, and the two grown men eating it were not satiated at all and ended up taking the escalator to eat some noodles at Joji's.

I really have no idea what this place is trying to do, maybe it wants to be Indo-Fijian McDonald's, which might be a worthy goal if they could pull off more than one dish. Perhaps if they cut the menu in half and concentrate on a few winners (fried chicken, Indo-Fijian style pizza, funky roti parcels with some sort of original twist) they could make this work.

Judging by the empty tables we don't expect Jody's to be long for this world. It will not be missed.

In Summary

Jody's

Bottom Floor, MHCC, Renwick Rd Side

Opening Hours:

0900 - 2100 - 7 days a week

Spend:

$15 per person

Rating:

Thumbs-down

The Daily Catch

Closed ... just like their predecessors. Kania Tiko believes there is a curse on the building: every business operating from this location seems to go under.

After being distinctly unimpressed with The Daily Catch in the first instance, many people suggested that they've pulled up their socks, are back in the game, and didn't deserve the panning they got in the first review.

So here we are again.

The concept remains the same: you pick the fish and they fry it up on the spot with a parcel of chips. The fish options range from $5 to $10. Mussels and other extras sometimes show up as well.


The serves are generous: 3 or 4 pieces of fish and slightly more chips than one person wants to eat. The fish in batter is good. The chips are soggy. A lemon wedge was included with each serve, but no tomato sauce: you can buy that separately. There were no chillies included in the serve or on offer at the counter.

Each meal was dropped into a white paper bag (no cardboard tray) that was soon damp, translucent from the oil, and broke open. Given that every other serious fish and chip shop in town has a takeaway box (which works well), there's no reason to disadvantage your customers with poor packaging.

Coke and Pepsi fridges in the shop offer the usual range of canned acid to wash down the oily remnants of your lunch.

On the day I visited there were several other things that stood out, none of them particularly worrying by themselves, but adding up to a negative impression.

The display fridge had condensation problems preventing a good viewing of the fish on offer. Understandable when you have a display fridge in a non-air-conditioned environment, but still annoying and unsightly.

The fryer vent hood was not working that day, so they had a desk fan blowing across the top of the fryers ... ensuring each new visitor to the shop got hit with the smell of hot oil as they came through the door.

Whilst I don't approve of aquariums in fish and chip shops (it seems rude to stare at the little fellows while you wait for their bigger cousins to get fried up for lunch) they don't bother me ... but this fish tank featured a couple of tough little fellows swimming in water that was vomit green.

Add to that the blaring serenade of a Christian radio station being piped into a room with bare concrete walls ... and I don't ever want to go back.

No matter what your opinion of The Daily Catch, you can't help but miss the old Cakaudrove Fish.

In Summary

The Daily Catch

11 Bureta St, Samabula

Opening Hours:

Monday - Saturday: Lunch

Spend

$5 - $10 per person

Verdict:

Thumbs-down

The Joli Fryer

The Joli Fryer styles itself thusly: "Tasty Fish & Chix"



Located in a little cluster of shops on Rewa street, this out-of-the-way chippie focuses on the basics. You can pick what fraction of a chicken you want with your chips, or how many pieces of fish to include with your meal, but not much more. If you're after a more gourmet 'pick your fish' experience then this is not the place for you.



The serves are well priced, fairly generous (particularly the chicken) and generally live up to the claim on the box of being tasty. All frying is done to order, so freshness is not a problem.



The shop is clean, with a few homely touches. It is however, quite small. Eating in is not recommended.

Kania Tiko sums up his impression of this place as follows: "It's fish and chips ... what else can you say?"

My own feelings are somewhat stronger. The last time I went there neither of the 2 ladies behind the counter wanted to take my order. They skulked around the back of the shop filling a backlog of orders and ignoring the shop front. After 20 minutes of standing at the counter I left in disgust, without placing an order. I have not been back since.



This (hopefully isolated) experience earns The Joli Fryer a thumbs-down until the weight of public opinion proves otherwise.

In Summary

The Joli Fryer

Rewa Street, Flagstaff

Opening Hours:

?

Spend:

$5 - $9 per person

Verdict:

Thumbs-down

The Daily Catch AKA Cakaudrove Fish & Chips redux

New review of The Daily Catch is now up. Head on over and give us your feedback.

Cakaudrove Fish has opened again, at their original location, but under new management, and with a new name. Whilst the concept seem to have survived, the fish and chip business is but a poor reflection of what it used to be.

Prices have gone up; the fish: soggy and oily; the batter is wanting. The chips are passable, but certainly not special enough to make up for the disappointing fish.

Their fry-on-demand approach keeps them a cut above the vast majority of brown-bag chip shops, but the original Cakaudrove Fish & Chippie has moved on, and so have we.

We'll give the new owners a few months to get their groove on, but until then, they get the thumbs down.

Central Cuisine

Having been told marvellous things about Central Cuisine by the gang at the water cooler, Kania Tiko and I felt moved to verify some of the claims of excellence being thrown about.

Central Cuisine certainly is central, so central there is usually a substantial line trying to reach the counter, comprising lunchers from every office building in a one-block radius (read 'half of down town Suva')

The overhead menu board boasts a range superior to anything we have seen on an overhead board anywhere else in Suva ... which is quite a feat when you realise that every single dish on the board is laid out in one of the many food warmers lining the counter.

Your order is handled efficiently: "Rice or noodles?" ... "Which dish?" ... "A drink?" ... and you are handed your tray and shuttled toward the cashier to hand over money within 30 seconds of having hit the counter.

Being desirous of trying as much of the range as possible, we both ordered combo-deals, which involve a quartered tray, a serving of starch, 2 selections from the menu and a bowl of soup.

Chicken in black-bean, fried red pork, noodles.

Braised beef, chilli chicken, rice, chicken sweet corn soup.

Whilst there is much to be admired in the logistics applied by Central Cuisine in getting everything on their menu into a warmer, this McDonald's style approach to lunchtime fast-food does not translate into a good meal.

The dishes tasted mass-produced: the difference between meat dishes of the same type being nearly impossible to distinguish. We suspect the chilli chicken and the chicken-in-blackbean may have started off in the same wok before being finished with different sauces.

The starch was a little on the cold side, and the noodles were oily and slightly singed.

The soup was enjoyable, but certainly nothing to write home about.

Now if fast service is the stick by which you measure your meals, by all means give Central Cuisine your custom.

The fact that Central Cuisine has recently expanded and taken over the operation of the busy Southern Cross cafeteria in USP and dishes out more of the same (and cheaper) to the student population, does their logistics much credit. However, it also confirms that they have become the McDonald's of Chinese in Suva: homogeneous, and predictable.

Too much has been lost in the mass-produced approach; and that earns Central Cuisine's lunch menu a thumbs down from Lunch in Suva.

Note: Central Cuisine has opened a lunch buffet. We have not had the opportunity to try it yet, so please let us know if you have.

In Summary

Central Cuisine

Suva Central

Opening Hours:

?

Spend:

$5.50 - $8.80 per person

Verdict:

Thumbs-down

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