Motto Motto Japanese Kitchen - Indooroopilly — Restaurant in Brisbane City

This is a super cool and casual little Japanese joint at the food court of the Indooroopilly Shopping Centre.

Ordering is done at the front counter, or via an app on the table. You can choose to take your meals out, or eat at the few tables inside the restaurant. Generally it takes only a few minutes for orders to be ready for take-away, or, if dining in, to be brought to your table by a pretty hostess.

The food is excellent and served in generous portions. We ordered the chicken curry and the tofu donburi. Both meals were fresh, tasty and infused with those delicate and aromatic Japanese flavours that we’ve all come to love so much.

The atmosphere at the food court on a busy Thursday night was lively, energetic and fun and it’s great to see shopping centres like this one, roaring back to life after Covid. There are ample clean and well maintained toilets and plenty of parking available with three hours free.

The cost was reasonable given the hyperinflationary crisis that we’re in, but I baulked at paying $10 for a bottle of Asahi, when I can buy it at BWS or LL for less than $3 a bottle.

Motto’s distinctive logo and it's vibrant green, pink, white and black colour scheme, make this an easy place to spot in the crowded food court, and I know exactly where I’ll be heading next time I’m in the Indooroopilly shopping...

The food has been ok but frankly not satisfying. Still, some in my family like it so we have been comming for years. Service similarly hit and miss. Today I tried the lobster curry special at a premium price and that was the final chapter.

The patty was mostly cream sauce with zero lobster, just a sparing amount of prawns. The brown "curry" tasted like a nice gravy for roast beef. Farewell

Update: you will read below Motto (no one uses their real name) asked me to contact them. I did so same day and a week later they hinted the supplier was to blame and asked me to advise the date and time we ate. I replied with the information within an hour and then more silence for another week.

Clearly they do not actually care. No apology and just looking for excuses. Quality control of all their supplies is their responsibility. All they had to do was cut one open and look. If they were serious this could have been...

We picked up takeaway vegetarian curry. The service was lovely, but I won't get vegetarian food from here for a while (which is fine, if I understand correctly, Japanese cuisine is very meat focussed anyway).

My first impressions was odd: the curry was separated into a number of different plastic containers (maybe it's designed to be that way, but I was expecting it and haven't had that from other Japanese restaurants). I found this upsetting because we're trying to reduce our waste, especially on plastics.

Secondly, the meal itself was quite bland. I was quite disappointed and have had much better curries elsewhere. It may have been a bad day or batch. The staff were really friendly, otherwise I would have given this experience 1 star.

There are a lot of popular review for this location, so I'm guessing the meat based dishes are good. Perhaps this vegetarian dish was authentically japanese and it just wasn't...