Avigayil Damm

During our visit to Oslo, we stayed at the Holmenkollen Park Rica Hotel. Since we took a mini-cruise package which included the mini-cruise, hotel accommodation and breakfast plus one additional meal, we chose to have our dinner at the hotel. The restaurant that was appointed to serve the additional meal was De Fem Stuer, one of their in house restaurant which seems to specialize in fine dining. We were excited to see what kind of culinary adventure awaits us.

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During the first week of March, my hubby and I made a sudden one week trip to Denmark. With a short notice, I was invited to attend a training which I could luckily accept thanks to the two year multiple entry visa that I got last October 2009. Otherwise it would have taken me 3 weeks to apply for a visa, rendering me unable to attend the training. With an even shorter notice, my hubby was asked to be one of the facilitators in the training.

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Sometimes my hubby and I opt for a very simple dish which requires no particular skills, extraordinary ingredients or complicated efforts. This time, we chose to have it healthy as well so we decided to cook pan-fried salmon with some steamed vegetables and boiled small potatoes.

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Today we went out to Gourmet Garage again in Kemang, as we needed to do some shopping anyway. We tried out some new dishes at their restaurant. My hubby chose the salmon fried rice and I picked the chicken mushroom pasta. Actually, I am not quite sure what the name of my dish was, but basically it had chicken and mushroom with pasta in creamy sauce. If you want to try it out, just look out for the menu description (obviously).

The salmon fried rice was served with some salad and also chilli in soy sauce. My hubby, being a bule with sensitive stomach, he skipped the chilli in soy sauce of course. But I enjoyed it very much although I could only take some two spoons to try out the dish. It tasted like a typical Chinese fried rice actually, which gives this slight smell of burnt rice (in a good way) but does not taste burnt at all. The salmon was a nice touch – it was the first fried rice ever with salmon that I tasted. In fact, it’s the first time I found this type of dish in any restaurant.

As for my dish, it was very tasty as well, but unfortunately since it was served with cream sauce, it was quite heavy. Hence I could not finish the whole dish, but they were kind enough to pack away the rest into a doggy bag. And this time, it was not for Sam, but for my lunch the next day.

Since yesterday, my office has been swarmed by visitors from the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response, who are in Jakarta to review the response during the Yogyakarta earthquake emergency operation. The focal person for this exercise is a colleague from our Yogyakarta office, so she came to Jakarta yesterday and will be here until tomorrow. Since today was Friday, my colleague and I took her out for dinner at Setiabudi Building. Originally we wanted to have Dim Sum, but unfortunately the one restaurant that has it on the menu ran out of a certain dumpling that both my colleague and I liked. So we ended up at a sushi restaurant which was also good, called Sushi Groove.

I have been here a few times before, once with my friend (who is also my hubby’s colleague), which was the first time I tried sushi at this restaurant. Another time was with him again and a group of his colleagues, including mine, having lunch before his departure to North Sulawesi. So when we came to this restaurant, we already knew to expect good food.

Surely enough, the restaurant didn’t disappoint us at all. We ordered edamame (Japanese soy bean), chuka wakame (seaweed in sesame oil, or so it seems), salmon flame roll (inverted crunchy roll topped with fresh salmon), Tokyo meltdown roll (tori and gobo root baked with special teriyaki sauce), and salmon sashimi. Everything was P.E.R.F.E.C.T. Originally we ordered only one plate of salmon sashimi, but when we finished all our orders, we felt like having something more, but did not have much space in the tummy for sushi rolls. So we ordered another salmon sashimi to satisfy the ‘curiosity’ of the tongue. We had ocha tea with our meals, and ordered green tea ice cream for dessert, which was excellent. Loved it until the last drop.

If I had to squeeze out one down side of it, I would criticize the limited space, and the table set up which sometimes makes it difficult to seat down more than two people. They only have long tables with seats on both sides, which means if you come with more than one friend, you may just end up sitting in one same row if no other seats are available. That was what almost happened to us, but we were lucky that one person from the seat across was willing to swap seats so one of us could sit facing the other two.

Other than that small hiccup, I would definitely come back here again, and also recommend it to other people. I think these two happy satisfied faces (posing behind the chuka wakame and edamame would agree with me). However, I would also recommend calling first to reserve seats if you’re coming during lunch and dinner time with a group of friends. If it’s only going to be two people, then it would probably be easier to find seats. Here is the address and phone number of the one we visited: