Chiba Japanese — Restaurant in Melbourne

🌶 Spicy Tuna Roll 🍤 Tempura Prawn Roll 🍣 Ebi Prawn Nigiri 🥟 Pork Gyoza 🍗 Chicken Teriyaki Yakitori 🐟 Whitebait Tempura 🍠 Vegetable Tempura

Chiba is a Japanese restaurant located in Hall St, Moonee Ponds. Always busy, this has been a go to for locals for years for dine in or takeaway. They offer an A La Carte service as well as 3 different Set Menus ranging from $38-48 per person. What they are most known for though is their signature Sushi Boats. 🛶

Judging from their Instagram page and first impressions on arrival, I thought this looked quite fancy! Sadly as soon as you are seated you realise it is definitely casual and dated, with disposable chopsticks, damaged menus and dirty glasses. The music in the venue is so faint, there is no vibe. It seemed confused as to wether they were trying to be luxe or casual, small changes could makes a big difference here.

The Sushi was fresh and you can watch the chefs prepare them at the counter. The Sushi Rolls were nice however for some reason completely fell apart as soon as leaving the plate, barely reaching our mouths. The Gyoza here are massive with great flavour but more like a dumpling. 🥟

The Tempura Vegetable batter was only barely crisp however the Tempura Whiting was perfect. The Teriyaki Chicken was moist but the sauce was overbearingly sweet.

After ordering a decent selection of food we were surprised our dishes were paced and everything was brought out almost at once. Considering we were seated at a small table for two, we were having to reorganise and replate dishes leaving us uncomfortable and rushed. We had a 2 hour seating and we were out the door in 40 minutes. ⏰

All in all the food seemed fresh, nothing was bad just very simple. The wait staff were lovely however the actual service needs tuning. Good for a quick, casual meal if it’s...

The nice presentation of the restaurant and the menu price brought an impression that this would be a good Japanese restaurant. We ordered sushi and seafood ramen. Both are quite oridinary, nothing special. That makes the food over price. We expected a better quality. But that was still OK. The staffs are lazy , I waved and called them 4 times before they approached me to get order after lefting me and my family there alone with the menu for 20 minutes. And then during the meal, my husband had to go and get extra bowl and water by himseld coz the staffs are hopeless, they stood just around the kitchen, and stare without seeing us. It was on Monday, it wasn'tthat busy and there were 4 staffs around, looking and doing nothing. However they noticed very quickly when my son started his favourite chip from KFC. My son is only 6 years old and he doesn't like Japanese food ( sushi and the like) , he only likes Western food so we had to get him KFC. The staffs arrived and said we can't bring food from outside. I had to tell her that it was 8.30pm and if my son couldn't eat now then he had to wait until we finish our meal to eat, and that was not nice to a small boy , and the restaurant should change policy and be more flexible. The staff said she would go and ask , she returned and said my son could eat but this must be the only time, next tine we can't do it again. At this point, I know we would never come back to this restaurant because my son won't eat Japanese food. Anyway bad...

My first ever proper Japanese dining experience and I absolutely loved it!!!

I had gyoza for the first time ever and loved them! So much better that standard run-of-the-mill dumplings.

We also had tempura vegetables for starter and they were simply wonderful!! I'd had "tempura" things before at other places and didn't find anything remarkable about it and it just seemed like any ordinary batter to me. I think this tempura however, is a proper example of how tempura is supposed to be. It was delicious, soft and fluffy batter and the vegetables were fresh and tasty too!

My fiancee ordered the tofu steak which I tried a bit of and I thought it was absolutely delicious!! I'd previously believed that I didn't like tofu at all (maybe I had an unpleasant experience with it when I was younger) but this was just delicious!!

I ordered beef noodles and I really enjoyed it. I found it really tasty and was rapt that the beef wasn't overcooked and tough as I often find it to be with most Asian cuisine. This was a really yummy dish and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Highly...