From what I can tell, Mikirin is the new restaurant from the two sisters who have the Spicy Lips Asian-fusion restaurant at George Street cinemas. I’ve been intrigued by the name, but have never tried it. Their website is under construction so that’s all the infotel I could find out, which is fine: it means I just have to explain what I experienced.
I had dropped by the post office at World Square and decided to treat myself for lunch. So. Many. Options. I haven’t wandered up the particular corridor much that leads from the middle of World Square to the corner of Pitt and Liverpool Streets. The food alley next to it is more busy; I’ve often ended up downstairs for a matcha ice cream or to see what’s new among the ever-rotating restaurants and cafes there. But find Mikirin next to the bull sculpture!
This little strip seems to be buzzy with new restaurants, including this one. I wasn’t sure what to make up the slogan ‘Journey through Cuisine’, but the menu, as you can see, is interesting. It feels to me like Northern Chinese as a base, but expanding and incorporating other kinds of cuisine, from Korean to Thai, with some Southeast Asian cuisines thrown into the mix.
Appropriately then, I had a Vietnamese coffee as my beverage, which had a chocolate biscuit straw. It was delicious, and pricey ($7?), and probably not the right drink to go with a spicy bowl of noodles. What had really caught my eye though was the hot and sour soup with wonton. I love hot and sour soup. Growing up in a Cantonese Chinese-Canadian family, the few times we went to Szechuan or Northern Chinese style restaurants were an exotic treat for us, and I love the particular mix of spices in this broth: vinegary sour and a spice that’s not too peppery or hot, but can have a nice kick.
So, their hot and sour noodles with wonton ($13.80) was served with the style of wonton and noodles not from Canton, so slippery, delicate, rice wrappers, and slippery rice noodles (as opposed to the common wrappers and noodles made from wheat flour that are more Cantonese, and look more yellow). It made the eating pretty difficult, and with ample spice and scallions, when I was trying to scoop the noodles into my wooden ladle, and then sip it down, the chunks of spices would get caught in my throat, and I coughed, alarming the person next to me.
But it was really, really tasty, I have to say. And delicious enough that I’d be curious to go back and try more dishes. It was also fun sitting in the back corner, and watch the world at World Square go by.