| The
Australia Log--Entry #15
10/08/04:
Having a Feed in Melbourne
As we were only a block from Chinatown, we ate a lot
of Chinese food. The worst of it was still better than anything we’ve
found in Boulder. The best was better than any Chinese food I’ve ever
had, period. A quick gallery of our Chinatown experiences:
The Orchids Garden. Good chicken, friendly staff,
so-so beef.
The Post-Mao House. Good name and excellent spicy
chicken!
The Bamboo House, right across from our hotel. This
gets my vote as the best Chinese restaurant. We dined there twice, and
the food was splendid both times – the Cantonese beef was one of the
best beef dishes I’ve had in recent memory, Chinese or otherwise.
Slightly more expensive than the Orchids Garden or PM House, but quite
reasonable, and the service was excellent.
The Flower Drum. This is the restaurant I had to buy
shoes to eat at. It was an intriguing experience: while the restaurant
is on an alley, as soon as you go in you are ushered through the fancy
waiting area into an elevator and spirited away to a huge, lavishly
decorated dining room. I would say that the food was on par with that of
the Bamboo House, but you ended up paying a little more for amenities
and extra services – the waiters producing a silver toothpick dispenser
for your table at the end of the meal, that sort of thing.
Beyond Chinatown, we indulged in an assortment of
cheap meals. I had a delicious kangaroo pie at the Aussie Pie Stop; I
noticed halfway through that the pie had a kangaroo baked into the
crust.
Note the other options on the menu, including
crocodile and emu!
Ellen found a good place for very cheap sushi. While
we chose not to partake in true fast food, we did see a few odd things.
The local KFC was offering “New Orleans Chicken” – I wonder if we’ll get
this back in the states? And while McDonalds and KFC were exactly the
same, Burger King went by the name of “Hungry Jacks.” Hey, look, it’s
Spock with a beard!
A few other things about dining in Melbourne:
-
A meal is often called “a feed”. The Iron Talons
wanted to know if we felt like getting together for a feed, and KFC
had a “two-piece feed” on the menu.
-
We dined at four separate Chinese restaurants
with various levels of cost, and they all had one thing in common:
no fortune cookies! I don’t know if this is purely an American thing
or if it’s just not an Australian custom (or equally likely, not
something you find in Chinatown itself), but it was interesting.
While we didn’t get fortune cookies, we did get hot towels. The Bamboo
House brought us hot towels before our food. The Orchids Garden brought
them after the meal. Not to be outdone, the Flower Drum brought them
before and after the meal. So you’re clean, but you have no future. We
tried adding “… in bed” to the end of the receipt, but it just wasn’t
the same.
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