Aoba - a lucky night

Its saturday night that we decided to try something new (Japanese) and we chose Aoba. This place has a good rating in urbanspoon. The restaurant is really small, it can only fit 14 people inside and 4 people outside. There was no table for 5 people so we sat separately. There are many restaurants next to Aoba, so if you don't get a table you can easily go to next door. 

You can really feel the Japanese atmosphere as soon as you step in, walls, tables and chairs are all wooden style. 

What should you order? Definitely the Aoba box, you can choose the main from teriyaki chicken or fish and comes with vegetable croquette, seaweed salad, rice and miso soup for $13. This is some kind of a bargain for me,  the croquette tastes really nice and crispy. The chicken is tender and served with delicious homemade teriyaki sauce. 

Aoba Box with teriyaki chicken - $13

The next thing i would recommend is the dinner set, it comes with rice, miso soup, 2 spring rolls, 2 gyoza, 3 agedashi tofu, sashimi and main to choose from all the main menu. You could pretty much taste everything from the menu. I like the homemade gyoza, it has tasty filling and flavour, soft unlike other gyoza that usually has tough burnt skin. You also get one scoop of ice cream!

Aoba Dinner Set - $22

For the ice cream, i chose the brown sugar as recommended by the staff. It tastes really nice, and whats better its homemade and i don't think you find this flavour anywhere else in melbourne. However, the salmon in the sashimi platter was not really fresh, we could tell from the appearance. 

One of my friends ordered the Katsu Curry Rice with pork cutlet for $13.50. The curry sauce is good but the pork itself its not too tender, my friend thought they got a wrong cut for it. We also ordered the Teriyaki Wasabi Chicken for $13.50, but it does not taste really different from teriyaki chicken. We thought they should put more wasabi to make it stronger. 

Unfortunately i forgot to take pictures of the last two dishes. 

Overall : 7/10 , I would come back to try their lunch menus, looks cheap and delicious! There were only 2 staffs when we're there, one's cooking and one's serving. So be patient because you might have to wait for at least 15 minutes for the food. Good thing is the staffs are really friendly and smile a lot even though it was really busy.