New Kum Den, Melbourne

No new dishes the last/this week because I was/am knocked out totally by laryngitis since last Tues that gave me chills, fever, joint aches, cough, lost of voice and something I've never had before--sticky eyelids. I've been waking up everyday since last Sunday with swollen, sensitive eyes glued by some icky discharge and I hate that feeling. The doc said it's related to my flu because the ears, eyes and nose are connected. If it's bad, it can go to the brains too. So don't be stubborn like me. Run to the docs before your eyelids get glued.

I haven't even started on CNY baking. I know all of you have already baked and packed your bottles of pineapple tarts, prawn crackers, cashew nut cookies and all those yummy snacks. I haven't even shopped! I am feeling slightly better today so I think I'll start baking tomorrow. I have a couple of new recipes to share so stay put. In the meantime, here's a post on a meal I had in Melbourne last month.

This was the graduation celebration dinner we had with three other sets of parents (and a grandma) and the graduates' friends at a restaurant in Chinatown called New Kum Den. There were 2 dozens of us so we had 2 tables. The mood was very happy and hopeful. I think for parents it was a relief to wash their hands off a financial burden and for the graduates it was a relief to not have all-nighters and deadlines. I was missing the rest of my family, especially Hub, who couldn't get away from work. It felt odd to be there without him because we celebrate all our kids' 'events' together. Anyway, the food:


Chicken with a salted egg yolk batter, pretty good.


Stewed pork was okay I think.


Garlic kai lan, never fails.


Silky beancurd  with crabmeat and prawns, good.


Sweet and hot clams with Chinese crullers for the sauce. The thing about clams is that they're mostly shells. I've come to the conclusion that clams are best eaten at home, a plate to a person. Otherwise it's just too unsatisfying.


Mixed veg with scallops. 


Roasted duck. The duck was chopped too big and didn't taste good or bad. No matter how many times it was spun around on the lazy susan, it remained more than half uneaten. It left me wondering whether it was the chef's fault or the duck's.


The fish slices had the usual bland bi-carb of soda texture and taste. But then again, maybe all Chinese restaurants in Melbourne use too much bicarb of soda. Bicarb of soda makes food tender, preserves it, masks staleness, swells meat up so they look thicker but for all that, the taste and flavor of the meat'll be gone.


The free dessert. There were 12 of us at each table. This amount is good for one person. Whadde.


A big "thank you"  again to Amanda's parents who generously footed the bill even though it was agreed that we'd split it. 

Halva To Dim Sum

Here's some of the food we ate in Melbourne:

1) Breakfast at Chimmy's (342-344 Bridge Rd, Richmond)

You don't have to wear an LBD and your mom's pearl necklace to eat brekkie at Chimmy's. The food was very good too.


Madrid omelette with cubes of potatoes and chorizos was yummy, AUD15.80/USD  /RM.


Fruit bread, can't remember price, was heavy and sweet and good with a hot cup of coffee.

2) Dinner at Wennie and Josh's



This was dinner cooked by Josh, fiance of Yi's ex-roomie Wennie, who's going to be Josh's wife in two months. Thanks, Josh & Wennie, the delicious dinner and your company made it one of my most enjoyable and relaxed evenings in Melbourne. Both of you make sure a beautiful couple and I'm looking forward to your wedding photos (gorgeous gown, Wennie) and your visit soon.

3) Seafood lunch at Hooked (172 Chapel St)



Hooked was given a good review by Gourmet as a place for healthy seafood, so I ordered the fish pan-fried instead of battered and deep-fried. Unfortunately, the fish was not impressive, tasting a notch better than dory which I dislike. The rest of the stuff on the plate was good, especially the salad and the pesto. Which is an insult, considering that seafood is the mainstay of the restaurant.  At AUD18.90, not cheap, not too expensive.

4) Yum cha/Dim sum at Crystal Jade (not related to the xaiolongbao and la mien Crystal Jade chain of restaurants), at the corner of Little Bourke St and Russell St,  right at the entrance to Chinatown.

Looks are deceiving. The ha gow was authentic in that it had strips of bamboo shoots but the prawns were minced and not springy to the bite, and worse, didn't have any prawn flavor. The cheong fun was too soft while the beef filling was bland and flavorless and that's how it was with all the other dim sum. The meat just tasted uniformly tender and tasteless. Btw, do you, like me, HAVE to have mustard sauce with ha gow (prawn dumplings)? 


Crystal Jade's dim sum (dainty Chinese mouthfuls, mostly steamed, eaten for breakfast and lunch over copious cups of tea) looked delicious but tasted otherwise--the meat, whether pork or prawns or beef, were overdosed with bicarb of soda, making them tender and swollen (yes, tender and swollen) but tasteless. In fact, I was disappointed with the Chinese food in Melbourne this trip because the meat and seafood were flavorless and had the same texture, tender and soft, so that if you were blindfolded, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between chicken, pork and beef and all fish would taste the same. The sad thing is, I think most young people who grew up eating meat marinaded with bicarb of soda think that's how meat tastes in Chinese restaurants. Using bicarb of soda in meat may be a world-wide practice with Chinese food now, and that's truly bad.

I am convinced now that Hong Kong's dim sum is  still the best in the world, whether it's at traditional dim sum restaurants or the newer classier ones. In Hong Kong, if the food is not up to par, the rent and picky customers would kill the restaurant within a month. In such Darwinian circumstances, it's no wonder HK is the food heaven (IMHO) of the world.

5) Halva, Prahran Market


This halva 'cake' was about 20 cm/8" tall and full of nutty flavors.

Halva is a yummy confectionary found in the Middle East, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, India, Greece and many other countries. In China, dragon's beard is a kind of halva floss. I'm not sure what halva this was--I'm guessing it was Turkish, based on the rose petals-covered Turkish delight next to it. I loved it and would choose it over baklava anytime.

MoVida Next Door

MoVida is at 1 Hosier Lane, near the Federation Square. MoVida Next Door is next door to it.



I had a short list of restaurants I wanted to eat in in Melbourne, among them Cutler & Co, which is rated by Gourmet Traveller as the best Australian restaurant for 2011 and yes, it is in Melbourne, not Sydney. However, being a country bumpkin from Borneo, I didn't make any reservations and I didn't know that most restaurants in Melbourne are closed on Mondays. I was told that Cutler & Co would have a long waiting list and I had to choose between eating and shopping (not so great since the Oz dollar was too strong. My daughter had warned me that Oz is more expensive to shop and eat than Europe, and I didn't believe her until I got there). Lucky for us, MoVida was open the last Monday I was there so we were clever and got there at 5 pm just when they were opening.

The sign said MoVida Next Door, and when we were seated, we asked and were told that the original MoVida (the one listed as Melbourne's top Spanish restaurant and one of its top ten restaurants) was next door.  I was very tempted to move next door (so I can brag to you that I ate at one of Melbourne's top restaurants) but the promise of the same food at lower prices convinced me to stay. Also, the cooks, and especially the head chef, were running between the two restaurants and I was comforted by that.

A couple of nights before that, we had gone to another Spanish restaurant and had a so-so paella which left me craving for paella. Unfortunately, MoVida only served a limited variety of tapas and raciones (slightly larger plates of tapas), and the tapas were not the ones we liked, those canapes-like tapas we ate in Barcelona. I don't think there's any Barcelona-type tapas restaurant in Melbourne, which is strange especially since there are not one but two MoVida tapas restaurants.


MoVida has an open kitchen and it was fun to see them cook. MoVida's bread rolls (in the bucket, on the house) were the hardest I have ever eaten, so hard that they can knock a dog dead. The bread hurt my mouth and tongue and I had to tear it off between my teeth like a cannibal.


Potato tortilla, AUD 4, was good but then I've never had a bad tortilla.


Empanadillas, AUD3 or 4, was quite good but very small, about the size of a little curry puff.

Fish of the day with Serrano ham, AUD18/USD19/RM58, was very disappointing because the fish had a not-so-fresh flavor--fishy with a hint of refrigeration. I expected nothing but the best since the waiter had said that this MoVida specializes in seafood. We struggled to finish even such a minute portion. The portion was so small it made us giggle at the pretentiousness of it. Come on. That's a ridiculous portion for that price.

Lomo (char-grilled pork loin with preserved peppers & salsa verde), AUD15/USD16/RM48, was the best dish we had. The pork was tender and tasty, the preserved peppers tangy and crisp and the salsa refreshing. Simple but very well done.


The ternera (veal girello poached with white anchovies & mojo picon), UD12.50/USD13.3/RM40, was light and delicate but a little bit bland.


The bill came to about AUD53/USD56.50/RM170 (not cheap but not that expensive either for such a highly rated restaurant but it is a tapas restaurant after all, not a fine-dining restaurant. The original MoVida too has similar setting and menu) and we weren't too full so we left to grab a pho. Just as the waiter had said, MoVida was next door (if you eat at MoVida Next Door like we did, you use the washroom at MoVida) so I took a photo of its menu, just in case you are going there. For such a famous restaurant, the menu is surprisingly limited.



MoVida's menu is limited.


Walk down Hosier Lane and you can see walls of graffiti, something that Melbourne artists are proud of:

Squires Loft, Melbourne

Docklands was a port area and now the waterfront serves as a pretty backdrop for trendy restaurants.

Docklands in the south of Melbourne has been revived into a residential and commercial area with many trendy restaurants along the waterfront. Squires Loft, a steak restaurant, is one of them. I had expected Squires Loft to be a chain restaurant like TGIF and didn't expect much of the steak dinner, hosted by J's parents, who were also in town to attend their son's graduation ceremony. J and my daughter were in the same course the last 5 years and it was very nice of them to include us, together with their relatives, in their son's celebration dinner.


I had the 300g scotch fillet  medium rare and it came rare instead. I didn't want to return it since nobody did theirs...kiasu. While the flavor of the steak was very good, the steak had quite a few streaks of gristle. I think the steaks were about AUD33 to AUD45, more if the steak is Angus beef.


Yi's medium rare rib eye was done just nice.



J's mom had the wagyu burger which looked so good I wished I had ordered the same thing.


J's dad had the grilled prawns kebab.


A very rich and delicious hot chocolate fudge cake with ice cream.


Yi and I shared a sticky date pudding with butterscotch sauce. This was so good, it stands out as one of the best desserts I had on the trip. It was served warm, wasn't too sweet, the flavor was superb and the texture was perfect: fine, soft and moist. I wish I had the recipe.


Other than my steak being too rare and there was a bit too much gristle (or whatever they are called), we enjoyed the dinner and the company. Thanks, J, for the dinner and best wishes to you!

Squires Loft, 818 Bourke St, Docklands, Melbourne is open for lunch and dinner Mondays to Saturdays.

Journal Canteen, Melbourne

Journal Canteen (JC) has been given good reviews in food magazines such as Delicious and Australian Gourmet Traveller, which is how I found out about the restaurant. Journal Cafe on the ground level (JC is on the first floor) is for coffee and cake and the restaurants are not the same. JC is the one that's mentioned in reviews because the head cook/chef is Rosa Mitchell, whose rustic cookbook 'my cousin rosa' is for sale on the kitchen counter. The recipes for the dishes served in JC are all in the book. Rosa herself seated us, by the high table looking out at Flinders Lane, but we moved to a more comfortable table, sharing it with 4 other people. The restaurant was packed.



JC's menu is limited; the menu for the day is scribbled on the black board. The restaurant was formerly a classroom and efforts have been made to give that casual feel. It's not fine dining (although the prices are clearly not canteen prices) and you are reminded of that when the waiter comes and wipes the crumbs left by the previous diners off the table onto the floor with his bare hands. That's just to show how homey and causal they are around there, I suppose. Have a Chinese waiter do that in a Chinese restaurant and he'll be regarded as disrespectful and sloppy.




Yi was on diet and didn't want meat so she ordered a veg main, baked zucchini. The prices weren't clear. We saw 18/24 scribbled next to the mains and didn't ask, because really, how much can baked zucchini cost in a casual retaurant, even if it's highly recommended? Well, AUD24/USD25/RM77 is how much, for 4 strips of baked zucchini on orzo. 


I had the falsomagro, Sicilian beef roll stuffed with cheese and egg, also AUD24/RM77. 

Both the baked zucchini and falso magro were very good (although we both prefer the zucchini; the falsomagro was a little bit dry and boring) and came with a complimentary salad of bread and plain lettuce. There was only one dessert, a choc tart (coffee is complimentary), and we decided that there were just too many (better) choices in other places. The damage was AUD48/USD51/RM154, which I thought was expensive, given the meagre portions.  Sure, the food was good (not excellent) but Melbourne is not short of good Italian restaurants so I think JC is overhyped and overpriced for a 'canteen'.

Journal Canteen, 253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. Closed Sundays.

Asian Gourmet Hut, Melbourne

 Ivy moved to Melbourne about 1 1/2 years ago expecting to work a 9 to 5 job but when the opportunity came for setting up a restaurant with her BIL, who's a trained chef, she grabbed it. Which is what I'd expect her to do, since Ivy loves food enough to blog passionately about it in her blog, Precious Pea. We first contacted through our blogs and when Ivy came to KK a couple of years ago, I met with her briefly. She appeared to me as a very sincere person and I just couldn't leave Melbourne without dropping by Asian Gourmet Hut to see Ivy and her new restaurant.

We arrived at lunch just when the customers were filing in. Ivy's signature dish is bun mein, wheat flour dough torn into small pieces and cooked in a tasty soup of pork slices, dried Chinese mushrooms, black fungus strips and crispy dried anchovies.


Without being biased, Ivy's hand-torn noodles were the smoothest and silkiest I've eaten, much more than that of my favorite bun mien restaurant back home. Heck, I'll say it anyway: Ivy's bun mein noodles are silkier than mine (time to get back into my kitchen and work on my bun mein). The noodles were of the perfect thickness, not too thin or thick, giving a nice bite, and there were lots of pork slices and ingredients, so much that I asked Ivy if I was given extra (answer was "No"; all customers get the same). If I must fault it, bun mien is best with Sabah sweet veg but I guess that's like asking for zeekraal in Malaysia. 


Another winner by Ivy, a delicious beef curry served over noodles.


Ivy's new dessert on the menu is mango pudding: smooth and rich with lots of mango bits although I find Oz mangoes look fabulous but are never as flavorful as Malaysian ones.



If we weren't too full from our breakfast and watching our weight, we would've loved to try more items on the menu. I am happy for Ivy, maybe even a teeny bit envious. She enjoys doing what she does now and I know I would too if I were her. High 5, Ivy!

We stayed until 3 pm when the restaurant closed. Ivy, I'm coming back for more soon!

AGH is at 12 Mitchell St, Doncaster East, in a small cluster of shops and restaurants. Opens  for lunch and dinner 6 days a week except for Wednesdays.

Hutong, Melbourne

We can't get good pho in KK (although that is about to change; more about that soon) and whenever I go overseas, I tuck in a bowl or two. I ate my first bowl of pho in Vancouver, then HK, then Oz but I've never been to Vietnam for the real thing.

On cold days, pho is comfort food. Cheap too, since a large bowl can feed a mother and daughter obsessed with loosing that one kg. There are a couple of good pho restaurants on Swanston St in Melbourne but Yi insisted that the pho in the Vietnamese area of Footscray is the best so one rainy noon, we went to Footscray to check out the market (which is amazing. You can sample all the fruits there, no need to buy) and the pho. Every restaurant in Footscray seems to specialize in pho and we decided on one just because we were tired and because there was a newspaper cutting of a good review of the restaurant. But before the pho, Yi said I should try her fav Vietnamese baguette sandwiches from one of the Vietnamese bakeries.


The baguette was excellent, even crispier and crustier than those I ate in Europe, probably because they were fresh out of the oven or re-heated. I didn't like the filling as much but maybe it was because I expected better.


Pho tastes like pho, whether it's in a downtown restaurant or one in Footscray. I wasn't impressed. If I hadn't eaten pho in Paris, I would'v been happy with this. Truly, the pho in Paris was the best I've ever eaten and the biggest difference was in the soup. I repeat: the most important thing is the soup. It's got to be thick, robust, full of beefy flavor.


Window shopping in the city and hungry? Head for the little lanes, so pleasant and filled with restaurants that reflect multi-cultural Melbourne. We had the spicy Moroccan soup (ok, but after the first sip I wished I ordered the potato leek bacon soup) and ate lunch on low wooden boxes in the fried udon place next door that gave the hawker feel. The udon, which reminded me of American chop suey, was very unauthentic but it wasn't so bad and the box fed the two of us pretty full.


Seasoned pork and beef tongue bulgogi.

Han Guk Guan is round the corner from my kids' apartment and this is where they eat occasionally, especially on Mondays when the bulgogi is half priced. Well, I think there's a catch in every deal because some of the items were not half priced (the kalbi for instance) and the portions were very small. I've never liked Korean grilled meat seasoned. They always cut the meat too fine and mix them with too much chili flakes, onions and leeks so that you hardly taste the flavor of the meat. I prefer the meat plain. I'm told the japchae and noodles here are good. Han Guk Guan is at 13A Victoria St, near the corner of Victoria St and Exhibition St.

Flower Drum is the most expensive and highest rated Chinese restaurant in Melbourne, maybe even Australia. The restaurant is closed from view with blacked out windows and looks nondescript and unimpressive outside. I heard that the service is superb with a waiter assigned to each table, full attention given the minute you walk through the door.

As we approached Flower Drum, we saw a stretch limo parked outside the restaurant, its driver inside waiting. Right across the road from Flower Drum is Hutong Dumpling Bar, a restaurant for people with less money. Yi swore that Hutong's Shanghainese and northern Chinese food were authentic and affordable so that's where we went instead. You'll have to read about Flower Drum on some other blog.


The chao shou ("crossed arms',  Sichuan won tons) was disappointing. The dough wrappers were too thin and soft, the meat filling too little and mushy and the chili sauce, other than hot, was sugar-sweet. The sauce also lacked Sichuan peppercorns. IMHO (ahem), my chao shou are way better than Hutong's.


The hot and sour soup was okay, but not something I'll go back again for.


Thankfully, the ja jiang mien was good.

We walked out Hutong and saw the limo still parked, the driver smoking outside. We bet it was some rich guy doing his best to impress a date.

p.s. I had my fill of xiao long bao in Shanghai and did not crave them anymore. It was a mistake not to order Hutong's 'little dragon baos'  because that's what everybody ate in the restaurant. Wise to make reservations because this place is very popular. We didn't and waited 40 minutes, walking around the city until they buzzed us.

Hutong Dumpling Bar, 14-16 Market Lane (one of the side lanes in Chinatown), Melbourne.

Brother Baba Budan

Chairs hanging on the ceiling of Brother Baba Budan.

Two things Melbourne is known for: The Federation Square, an ugly building known for its...ugliness. The other is the city's coffee culture and you'll know that because coffee is the first smell that hits you at the Tullamarine Airport, when the doors open to let you out into the city. My daughter, after 7 years in Melbourne, grabs a coffee at least once a day which puts her in the casual coffee drinker category. She has recently switched to chai latte which I am not particularly fond of.

Brother Baba Budan sounded like a Nepalese smoke joint to me but it really is a place for very serious coffee lovers. BBB is small, dark, with seats for about 15. Wooden chairs hang overhead, threatening to fall on you (and one did once, I was told, but nobody was hurt).  You have to sit on a stool and share a table with others, which is why when the first time Yi dragged me there, telling me that the place was designed by one of her tutors, I refused to go in. I am used to sipping coffee in an armchair and I couldn't understand how people can enjoy their coffee sitting on stools with strangers seated one hand span away. Snug, but not comfortable. The second time we went, the place wasn't as packed so we sat down to rest our tired feet. I drink coffee but I'm not a coffee connoisseur but one sip of BBB's coffee and I was completely rested and mellow, all my worries and problems forgotten. My cuppa was thick, rich, full (as against the flat, thin and sharp 'mouthfeel' of Nescafe--know what I mean?), smooth, wonderfully aromatic.  Not bitter. At all. I hate bitter coffee. Years ago when Yi came back and pooh poohed Starbucks coffee, I felt she was being snotty but on this trip to Melbourne, where we drank coffee and chai latte almost every day, I understood what she meant by "Starbucks coffee isn't coffee". And of all the coffee we drank, BBB's was the best. BBB's coffee is rated 3 stars, the highest rating. Being among the best in a serious coffee city like Melbourne means the price of a cup is not cheap, with espresso being cheapest at AUD4, and specialty coffee AUD10 and up. The handsome guy next to me came in, drank a cup, then another and then got another to go. If I didn't have to multiply the Oz dollar by 3.2, I'd have gotten a cup to go too, especially since the weather was chilly out.  I hear the breakfast is good too but man, I can't imagine it being better than the coffee.



BBB is located at 359, Little Bourke St, Melbourne, next door to Chinatown. You must drink a cuppa here if you visit Melbourne.