#33 Vi'em Cafe (345 Victoria St)

Attendees: Beata, Craig, Steph, Annabel

The weather has turned in Melbourne (making our Pom very happy) and the next restaurant on the route has an open coutryard-like area facing onto the street.

We've seen some novel decor but I'd say this one takes the cake. Most striking is the feature wall of fake rock with cascading water that makes you feel like you are in an Indiana Jones film. The lighting casts a green tinge over everything. It is like being in a Vietnamese restaurant theme park.

Even the drinks menu is fun. Unfortunately for Annabel they won't give her the three colour drink so she has to settle for the two colour. Don't ask us what was in it. Coconut milk seems to be the base and little balls of green and red make up the colour. At the bottom are chunks of...something. Maybe cream, maybe lard, maybe something else...

Perhaps the waitress has been staring at the green lights for too long because two minutes after taking our order she returns to take our order. Uh yeah, we just did that.

The spring rolls are quite tasty and and rice paper rolls are good. We substitute pho with a beef soup, which is highly disappointing. It has all the ingredients to make a successful dish (chunks of beef, plump noodles and a colourful broth) but it is tasteless bordering on wrong tasting.

For #27 we have a Vietnamese salad, which is light, tasty and refreshing. Steph being a massive fan of these salads doesn't hold back on giving it a 10 in her ratings. We also have calamari with XO sauce (not bad but not as flavoursome as it could be).

And then kang kong. We order this partly because of the name (I'm have flashes of gorillas on tall buildings) and partly to get our nutrients. This green veggie (it seems to be variation of bok choy) turns out to be stringy and chewy and it doesn't go down like hoped.

But it all doesn't matter because Craig is just happy to eat all the rice he likes under the pretext of 'carbo-loaing' for the Melbourne marathon.


Ratings
Rice paper rolls 6.8/10
Spring rolls 7.4/10
Beef soup 4.1/10
#27 (Vietnamese salad) 9.1/10
Calamari with XO sauce 6.4/10
Kang kong 5.9/10

#32 Beijing Little Restaurant (309 Victoria St)

Attendees: Steph, Beata, Craig

Beijing Little Restaurant appears authentically Chinese. By authentic I mean it has dishes that Westerners wouldn’t usually eat, such as gizzards and intestines. Plus we seem to be the only white people there. The specials are handwritten on bits of paper and stuck on the walls. Although it say restaurant out the front, the table number welcomes us to their ‘hotel’. Identity crisis?

Please let it be gizzards, I say as we count down the menu to 27. And so it is! Stir fry gizzards. They don’t look too bad from the photo. The waiter doesn’t want to give them to us.

“You know what this is?”
“Yes.”
“Insides of the chicken.”
“Yes.”
“You know organs...intestines...”

Yes, yes just gives us our gizzards! He comes back regularly to check on us. He says the stir fry method is one of the best for cooking gizzards so we are lucky. The taste is not too bad, per se, it is more the hard, chewy texture that is off-putting. Steph speculates that perhaps this is one of the joys of eating gizzards and our waiter confirms that this what the Chinese like about them. It is better if you crunch down hard from the beginning, instead of treating it like chewing gum.

We order some pork, celery and water chestnut dumplings. Pan fried. They are too salty for my liking. The vegetable dumplings are better.

The dish of the night is the tofu with szechaun sauce. “This is how all food should be,” says Steph. “Spicy and tangy and with lots of sauce.” Morsels of tofu float in a colourful sauce with specks of chilli and it is delicious.

From the specials we get the beef and cabbage stew. It is the biggest bowl of stew I’ve ever seen. I realise we have over-catered for the three of us. Lucky that we aren’t full from the gizzards. The stew has chunks of beef and cabbage with cellophane noodles (that are virtually impossible to dish out) in deep brown broth. The broth is also on the salty side and has a bit of curry flavour to it (or satay according to Steph).

So we mark down another weird and wonderful Victoria St dining experience. If you’re feeling adventurous, I think there could be some discoveries to be made at Beijing Little Restaurant. Or hotel.

Ratings

Tofu with szechaun sauce 8/10

#27 Gizzard stirfy 6.2/10

Vegetarian dumplings 6.3/10

Pork and celery dumplings 6.5/10

Special (stewed beef with cabbage) 6.8/10