The contents of this blog are matters of opinion formed over one more visits. There has been some artistry applied and metaphors and similes should not necessarily be taken literally. All meals are independently paid for - the author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Chungking’s menu sits on a pedestal outside their Burwood restaurant, and while novices like us will peruse it from the outside, likely making a plan or two for what to order before going in, all bets are off once one is actually inside. The walk from the front door to the dining table often provides us with a chance to see a selection of what’s good and popular at a restaurant, and on this particular walk we saw no less than 6 tables (around half of the diners) eating the same thing.
The specialty of the house was the Charcoal Barramundi. There is a choice between frozen and live barramundi, as well as a choice between other barramundi and other fish, including Murray cod. We had a live barramundi, which meant that the dish started at around $50. There was a choice of soup base, and being spice wimps we chose a mildly spicy garlic base. We thought that this would be the end of it, until our waitress told us that we needed to select three additional items at additional cost. We chose the fried tofu, some glass-style noodles, and baby bok choy each at an additional cost of around $5.
Luckily, this dish was actually quite good. The barramundi came butterflied, a bit fried and crusted on top with salt and pepper flavouring. It was supported by a bed of noodles, tofu, and baby bok choy as specified, keeping it crisp and preventing sogginess as we ate. I would probably do this again, but with a frozen dead barramundi rather than a live and then dead barramundi.
This lamb stew hotpot (I want to say, $32?) was the other dish that we got. Looking around the room as we left we found that other tables of two diners essentially just had the charcoal fish and nothing else. That would’ve been the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do was to order this dish as well. It wasn’t even really special. Might’ve been better with some rice.
This is a review of 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle in Burwood NSW, and certainly not a review of the similarly named 1915 Lanzhou Beef Noodles, around 100 metres up the road.
There always seems to be a line outside 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle, and on our visit last weekend the waiting time happened to be around 15 minutes for a seat. I wonder if the bulk of the waiting time is due to patrons only deciding on what they want once they get into the restaurant, which is a bit silly as they have a very limited and focused menu, easily visible from the outside.
Forever a fan of the classics, I chose the Lanzhou Beef Noodles ($12.80 in small) with the thinner noodle option. I really enjoyed this bowl, and I can see how this simple noodle dish has become a staple not just in Lanzhou, but across China and Chinese diasporas. The clear noodle soup, flavoured with radish, coriander, and a little bit of chilli sauce just felt so clean and wholesome, not weighed down by any soy or fattiness. The lean beef had a light but aromatic flavour to them. The noodles were hand pulled in the store window, but to be honest were not more than a caloric vehicle for the rest of the bowl. I regret only getting a small size, as it seems that the extra $1 for the large gives you a lot more soup, which is truly the star of the show.
My dining partner and also romantic partner, forever the non-classic fool, ordered the Special Dry Beef Noodle ($13.80 in small) with wide noodles. This was probably just fine but didn’t live up to the standards set by their soup noodles. It had a bit of tomato flavour to it and a bit of stewed beef flavour as well. What ultimately brought it down was the fact that the sauce did not quite coat the noodles as a pasta sauce should, even though it kind of ate more as a pasta than a Chinese noodle dish. This meant that at a certain point you were kind of just eating really wide unflavoured pasta.
These pork and cabbage steamed dumplings (4 for $4.80) were alright.
This is not really a restaurant, and this is not really a review. It is more of a description of a vibe and a general sense of feeling that I get when I drink a small $9 flask of bubble tea.
I don’t think there’s really any argument about the quality of these drinks. They are tasty, they are inventive, and they actually have a number of elements not found elsewhere. The Grapefruit Green Tea Slush with Fruit Jelly ($8.50) is a good example of this, where these guys experimenting with new ideas, for example putting the jelly at the bottom of the cup and not throughout it, actually changes the experience. It tastes pretty good, but again I’m reminded that we just spent $8.50 on a bubble tea.
This Black Milk Tea with Panna Cotta ($9) was also actually very good. Again a daring move from the mochi mochi team putting panna cotta at the bottom of the drink. Very tasty, and I think better than the option from Xing Fu Tang which incorporates panna cotta as a separate element. The price element comes out again though, even more in this case. One of the other things about these teas is that you’re actually not getting a large 700-800mL cup like you would normally. These are quite compact, slim, hip-flask like situations, so I think ultimately you’re paying around 3x the price for what you would pay for a standard milk tea a couple of years ago.
Whilst bubble tea has always been a discretionary spend Machi Machi certainly takes the idea of it as a luxury good to the next level. I don’t think your average public selective school student or university student really has access to buying and drinking these all the time, but there’s always the international student market.
UPDATE JANUARY 2023
We found ourselves back at Machi Machi, this time in Hurstville, about 14 months on for a $9.50 Grapefruit Mango Cream Smoothie with Kanten Jelly. It actually did taste very good, but looked nothing like the picture, and again I’m left wondering to myself – who is the target market for this product? Because it sure isn’t us.
Pegfeeds adherents know that this blog originally started as an idea to catalogue all different types of Asian groceries and snacks so that I could remember what I liked and what I didn’t like. That never really took off, and to this day I still keep buying the same snacks having forgotten that I don’t actually like them.
That said, I have done one previous frozen dumpling review from the yet-unparalleled Big John. Are these frozen dumplings from Orange Supermarket from Wentworth Point NSW going to cut the mustard? Find out more literally in the next sentence.
I boiled these Pork and Chives Dumplings (15 for $12.50) in the usual way. While they were not bad, and definitely better than 90% of the other frozen dumplings on the market, they weren’t quite as good as Big John’s. There was a good quantity of chive, with a good filling to wrapper ratio, but at the end of the day I didn’t feel like the texture of the meat was as good. It kind of faded away into nothing, where I prefer a bit more of a coarser grind to the pork to give it a bit of bite.
Having said that, they’re not bad, right. The flavour was OK, and they certainly slide into the premium tier of frozen grocery store dumplings. They just don’t beat the reigning champ.
麒麟 手工韭菜猪肉水饺 – UPC 0793420734661
UPDATE. I had more of their frozen dumplings/wontons and didn’t feel like it really warranted a separate post, especially as this one’s already been published. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have an entire meal at Chi Lin and this will become a restaurant review instead of a review of only frozen dumpers.
The Chi Lin Pork and Vegetable Wontons were actually quite good. They were better, in my opinion, than the Pork and Chives Dumplings.
I preferred the thinner wrappers of these wontons, as well as the filling, which had a more complex umami flavour. These wontons even came with soup flavouring for a bit of a hot and sour soup, which was tasty even if not elevated. At $11.50 for 12 from Orange Supermarket in Wentworth Point, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy these again.
Chi Lin Pork and Vegetable Wontons – 0793420734630
I watched Lucas Sin’s cha chaan teng video for VICE at least three times over the last few months of lockdown here in Sydney, and have had a hankering for some Hong Kong Cafe style food ever since. Luckily the Instagram algorithm saw it fit to serve me photos of Hong Kong Bing Sutt’s delicious looking beef noodle soup over the same period of time, and while I was unable to order takeaway via the app (as I am illiterate) I took myself and my Cantonese-speaking girlfriend over there the first chance I could.
Hong Kong Bing Sutt’s milk tea ($5.30) is extremely rich and dark, likely owing to the traditional method of brewing Hong Kong milk tea which undergoes multiple prolonged steeps through a silk stocking filter to ensure deep extraction. While this is only imagined (the brewing of the tea was not witnessed by me), the rich and smooth flavour of the tea was directly confirmed. While the hot version served at the restaurant comes unsweetened with some sugar on the side, HKBS also sells bottled versions of its chilled pre-sweetened milk tea for $7 a bottle, which are also pretty good, if pricey.
The Mixed Beef Noodle ($15.80) was what drew me in initially, and was actually pretty great in reality. It comes default with thin egg noodles, stewed beef brisket, beef tripe, beef tendon, and beef tendon balls, though many of these elements can be customised to taste. The beef brisket was represented by both fatty and less fatty pieces, all of which were rich tasting and cooked to an extreme degree of tenderness. There was no skimping on any of the other components, including the deep soy marinated tendon and tripe, and even shared between the two of us we felt like we each had enough. The soup was flavoured with chu hou paste, which is a traditional sauce for Cantonese style beef brisket, and nice and warming. The noodles were not extraordinary, rather acting as a mere vehicle for the rest of the very good bowl.
I wasn’t such a huge fan of the BBQ Pork and Over Easy Eggs with Rice ($16.80), but my partner loved it. I felt that the big slabs of char siu were actually not as flavoured as I am used to, which was fine, but didn’t help to carry the bulk of the rice underneath as well as I would have liked. The over easy egg was very well done, extremely soft and runny in the centre. It was only at the bottom of the rice that we found some soy sauce. I think ultimately this was a dish that would have been more suited to being served in a claypot with a bit of thick soy sauce on top, and the bowl format just didn’t work as well.
This rice noodle roll was fine, but too vegetarian for me. The rice noodles themselves were soft and not too oily, coated in a sauce of sesame seeds, hoisin, and probably peanut butter. The sauce wasn’t overpowering, but I just like my chang fen with a bit of prawn or meat in it.
The scrambled eggs and beef satay sandwich was pretty yum. This, the rice noodle roll, and the hot signature milk tea came to a combo total of $13.80, which is pretty decent. The satay beef was good, as was the very light and soft scrambled eggs. The bread was mostly de-crusted, although some edges still had a bit of unfortunate crust.
SECOND VISIT
These are the chicken wings in house made Swiss sauce ($8.80). I’ve recently been trying to lower my carb intake, so sadly many of the items on the menu at HKBS were mildly off limits to me on my second visit. The Swiss sauce in this dish is similar to the Swiss made stamp on my Chinese-made “Rolex” “Submariner”. More of an abstract vibe than a statement of origin, Swiss sauces are a purely Chinese based invention, a mixture of sugar, dark soy sauce, and shaoxing cooking wine. Classically boiled and shocked in an ice bath, these wings exhibited a good tender texture with a firm skin, however I must admit that after a couple of wings the strong shaoxing cooking wine flavour put me off having any more.
The beef brisket with special curry sauce and rice ($14.80) was a really good value, large meal of a classic Hong Kong style curry, big chunks of beef brisket, and potato served alongside a ball of rice. I appreciated that the curry and rice were served separately, minimising mess and also the desire to eat all of the rice. The beef brisket was tasty, though in my opinion could have been cooked to a higher degree of tenderness. The flavour of the curry was good overall, with the sauce highly compatible with the supplied rice.
The crispy pork belly with red beancurd sauce ($13.80) was really quite nice. The exterior batter is extremely crispy and made with fermented red bean curd (jiang dou fu 酱豆腐), which imparts a slightly salty, slightly sweet, and quite funky taste to the pork, almost similar to marmite pork ribs. The meat encased in the super crispy batter was moist, tender and fatty pork which tasted great on first eating, especially with the red sauce that neither my partner nor I could pinpoint as sweet-and-sour or sweet-chilli. Unfortunately as with many deep fried dishes this dish was a victim of entropy, and as our meal progressed on the loss of heat to the environment dulled its shine.
VERDICT Overall I enjoyed, though I think charging $7 for a small bottle of milk tea is a bit absurd.
