Chin Chin

What’s this? A restaurant review? What has this site become? Some wanky foodie themed poo poo page? Well, obviously not, this site will continue to be that random no-theme-post-whatever-comes-to-mind out of focus blog with no core theme apart from yours truly. Any way back to the topic at hand, Chin Chin, an Asian/Thai fusion restaurant on Flinders Lane in the CBD, we had so much fun that I thought I have to post this, also I did the Asian thing and took pictures of everything. We got there just before 6pm on a Friday evening, and were told that it was a one hour wait, but they took our number and would get back to us when our table was ready. So while there is no booking, at least if you get in reasonably early you can get a table guaranteed reasonably quickly. We got in there just after 7pm and sat down, we’d read about the “Feed me” option earlier and pretty much had our hearts set on that. The waiter came over and explained that it was probably too much food for two of us, and that they could give us four or five dishes for the same price and we wouldn’t feel too full. But being the Asians that we are, we just went for the full thing, which is seven dishes picked by the staff, so basically it’s not a degustation as that would consist of several small dishes, there were seven good size dishes. What they failed to tell us at the beginning was that if there were four of us we would have gotten the same amount of food, so basically we ate food enough for four. On to the dishes, the kingfish sashimi was the first dish out and was very yummy, we knocked that one off very quickly. The school prawn and the pork belly wrap were next, I liked the wrap very much, kind of like a cross between Peking Duck and Vietnamese rice paper roll. I’m not a big fan of school prawn so can’t really comment on it, it was edible, but you know. The caramelised fish and pork belly and pad siew were next. The fish was a bit too salty for my taste but perhaps might have worked with some rice, the pork was good as pork belly usually is. The pad siew I thought was a bit too salty, the noodles were really soft and smooth, but I thought the beef was a little overcooked.

Crispy skin duck was next, and to be honest I thought it was a bit dry, it needed some sauce, the final dish of the night was supposed to be the soft shell crab curry (served with rice), but at this point we were way too full to handle a curry and decided to switch to a papaya salad for something a bit lighter. The salad was good (I especially love my plating!), would have been better as an earlier dish, but at that point it was either that or dessert, but we decided to go the whole hog (to a degree) and get the seventh dish. Then we finished off with a dessert of palm sugar iced cream with lime syrup, there was actually another iced cream in there but I can’t remember what it was, there was also honeycomb, so it was pretty bloody sweet, except for the lime syrup which was bitter and once mixed with the sweet iced cream would balance the flavours. I thought the iced cream was too sweet and didn’t really like the fact that waiting for the iced cream to melt to get the flavour balanced as we were left with a melted pool of iced cream. Sheesh, after all that bloody food we were totally bloated, and I was just about ready to burst. This was truly a contest, me versus all the food, and Em versus the waiter. He was quite wanky, coming over and explaining each dish with all the superlatives and adjectives usually associated with Masterchef, and seemed to become particularly smug the longer we went, getting visibly more distressed (probably) until we finally managed to finish the meal and were ready to leave. So if you’re keeping score, we won 2-0 :D.

I do apologise for the orientation of the pictures, but WordPress seems to be cracking it with the iphone 5 pictures.

Kingfish Sashimi

School Prawn

Pork Wrap

Caramelisd Fish and Pork Belly

Pad Siew

Roast Duck

Papaya Salad

Palm Sugar Iced Cream