Harajuku Gyoza - Brisbane

The gyoza at this restaurant are large and delicious! They also have great happy hour offers Monday to Friday from 3-6 pm, as well as weekend specialties on Saturday and Sunday. This is a lovely place to visit when shopping on Queen Street Mall.

The interior sets a wonderful mood that feels just like a real restaurant in Japan! The prices for food were a bit high, but the gyoza was delicious with a flavorful and rich filling.

This restaurant may be a bit challenging to locate, as it is not directly on the square. However, it offers excellent authentic Japanese cuisine. They have a great selection of Japanese beers and the service is very attentive.

Really warming place and staff! Must try watermelon sours, the duck gyoza and the open pork belly gyoza

Stepping inside shows a very functional if somewhat characterless interior. The timber cladding is very nice, the colourful plates on the wall are nice quirky, the tables and chairs nondescript. A major downside of the hard surfaces all around is that they make the place...very acoustically challenging for anyone who is tired or has poor hearing. This is aggravated by the weird music at the venue that is probably very hip in Japan, but proves tiring very quickly. The venue is modelled after the Japanese drinking holes called izakaya, hence the limited range of food and drinks. This is not a restaurant in a Western sense, and people should not expect it to be. For an izakaya, it has actually a wider range of offerings. Gyozas are unsurprisingly the main menu item, and their range of flavouring is excellent. I was a bit suspicious about the takoyaki gyoza, but it proved a very delectable hybrid. The lemongrass-flavoured pork gyoza had oodles of lovely lemongrass flavour: everything has what is shown as, not ingredients are skimped on. The main problem is that preparation is uneven. I like my gyoza fried/grilled, with a bit of browned shell for extra taste, but this is difficult to do consistently. One bite proved thoroughly charred, and this literally left a bitter taste in my mouth for the rest of the night. We were very happy with the chicken karaage, though. It was as tasty and succulent as any we had in Japan. The watermelon cocktail was a great success by my table-mates, and I was happy that they stock Sapporo beer, my preferred Japanese drop.