Full Circle, Sydney

100 Willoughby Road,
Crow's Nest 2065 Map

http://www.fullcirclevege.com.au/

Full Circle is a vegetarian Thai restaurant in the northern Sydney suburb of Crow's Nest. Upon arrival, confronted with a large glass frontage, it took us several seconds to work out how to get in until we noticed a small red circle with the instructions to “press to open door”. This we did and the centre panel of glass slid aside to allow us to enter the restaurant.

The restaurant itself is well decorated and has neat “white-clothed” tables down each side, which sets it apart from a lot of the other Asian restaurants in the area.

Having taken our seat we were presented with the menus and asked if we wanted a Chinese tea (which we did).

The menu is extensive and it took a while before being able to decide on what to have. There were a lot of dishes with mock meats made from gluten which I can take or leave, and mostly have out of curiosity.

We chose a mixed entree selection to start, not knowing what we would get. It turned out to be a plate of different mock meats! They were, we were told, mock barbeque pork, roast pork, mock intestines(!), beancurd skin and mock jellyfish. The jellyfish, in case you are wondering (and I suspect you are) was a salad of various vegetable with some very slimy noodles. Of the other dishes on the plate, the mock roast port was really tasty as was the beancurd skin. The barbeque “pork” was okay and the “intestines” had very little flavour to be honest.

It took a while to decide what to have for main course and, in the end, we chose King Oyster Mushrooms, Pine Nut & Vegetables in Birds Nest, Tom Yam Curry Tofu and Braised Sweet & Sour Eggplant.

The curry wasn't too spicy and had a lovely citrus overtone to it. It had a nice selection of vegetables including baby corn, broccoli and carrots and the tofu soaked up the curry sauce really nicely.

The bird's nest was filled with a selection of vegetable, tofu and mushroom in a tasty sauce.

The best of the dishes was the sweet and sour eggplant. The eggplant was battered and deep fried and just melted in your mouth. The sauce was gorgeous and although we were getting full, we just had to keep going back for more.

For dessert I had deep-fried ice cream, which was wrapped in a coconut flavoured coating, with caramel sauce and accompanied by some fresh fruit.

All the dishes were well presented and everything was nice and tasty. The service was very friendly and polite, and all of the dishes were delivered in good time, so there were no extended waits between courses.

We'll be visiting there again to sample more of the menu and maybe to get another taste of that superb sweet and sour eggplant.

Update (July 2009)
I walked past Full Circle today, only to find that it has closed and that the premises will shortly be opening as a seafood restaurant. This is a real shame as we had some good meals in there, and we'll both miss the sweet and sour eggplant.