Doko Home- where your tastebuds go to die

Location: Waratah Place, Melbourne CBD(off little Bourke street, sorry i didn't get the building number, but believe me, you don't want to go there after this review)
Phone: I didn't get it, but apparently the phone is disconnected?
Time: Dinner Time
Cuisine Type: Chinese Hot Pot
Price: Little pots of soup starts at $5 each, dishes of stuff start from $3 onwards
What got dished out:

This place, served hot pot. Well what looked like hot pot.
We had 4 of these pots going. One with satay soup, one with tomato and ox tongue(?) soup, and one herbal chinese soup.. okay I lie, there was 2 of those going.

We ordered 2 dishes of the beef.
one dish of those stringy japanese white looking mushrooms. I don't know what the correct name is, I guess if I went to my friend's blog now, i could get, but I can't be bothered.

We didn't order anything more than that. Considering there were 5 people in total, and no we weren't on a diet. *sigh*

My thoughts:
Where do I start? Clearly you guys have noticed my hiatus from the food blogging game for some time because i got slack and not like anyone noticed my disappearance in the first place! See you need to leave comments.. *aherm* but Doko Home really NEEDED a review because it was just so... EPICICALLY bad that it would make great blog fodder and a great read.
but back to the review...

I don't get who Doko or what Doko is, but apparently according to a friend that was there, Doko is from some anime/drama show. I've never come across it but my guess is that it must be bad.
Because this place delivered nothing but bad stuff, okay it went from bad to worse.

Doko Home used to be the home of Crystal Jade, until they upped and moved to the corner of Little Bourke and Russell and got extremely fancy and popular. Actually they were popular before they got big and fancy because the food was really good and quirky. It's such a shame the popular and good food wasn't passed onto Doko Home.

Unfortunately I was fashionably late, the first thing I was confronted with was a restaurant filled with.... no, not people, just empty-ness.
There was us, (a table of 5) and in the corner on the other side, a table of annoying Fobs. What irked me was that we were situated. I don't know why in an empty restaurant, we were seated right next to the door. The doorway is always the coldest spot in the restaurant and generally the last place you sit, unless of course you rocked up to a FULL restaurant and that's the only place left for you to sit down unless you want to wait forever and a day. Being that I was late, I couldn't really ask or whinge about it.

My friends had already ordered these pots with soup and 2 dishes to cook our food in. I don't know why they ever bothered considering that the plan was to leave anyway and eat elsewhere. But suffice to say, we went through the exercise of dipping food into soup pots and ate it unwillingly.

How were the soups you ask? It was bland, more than bland, it was reallllly watered down. Everything was so tasteless, that we had to add stuff to it. Okay, the only one that I preferred out of the four was the satay soup which really was just peanut sauce. The other 3 just didn't do it for me.
But the satay soup wasn't even spicy so we added some spice to it. (oh Man where do i start with this place).

We asked for chilli sauce or even fresh chilli's. They give us Chilli oil, the stuff you put in your Pho. I couldn't be bothered complaining, so we put it in our soup anyway which made it a little bit spicier and somewhat sweeter thanks to the chilli oil. It didn't make it any better but it added something to the soups so that we could TASTE something.

Forget about the chilli sauce, the thing that irked me the most, that made me want to run away as far as possible was the fact that the cutlery that gave us was all greasy. Ok, when I say cutlery I mean chopsticks. When I asked for new ones, the waitress' response was "I'm sorry, these are the only ones we have, these are our new set" I wanted to die right there.. okay exaggeration, i didn't want to die at this restaurant, i couldn't think of anything worse. But I was dumbstruck, I had no comeback to this.
Seriously a place that isn't even busy (mind you this was a Saturday night when trade should be mega busy), the one thing they should have gotten right was cleanliness. which bugged me because if they couldn't even wash a bunch of chopsticks and keep it from getting so ridiculously greased up, what chance did we have with the quality of the meats and how fresh these things were.
At that moment, I just prayed that i didn't die of food poisoning.

We ended leaving, having split $10 per person. In truth that was the most wasteful $10 ever spent in my whole entire existence.
I know my tastebuds won't be forgiving me for a long time. My friend made an offhand comment that at least the waitress looked pretty and when I made the comment that they weren't, his response was "gzzz, you have high standards". In truth, they weren't ugly, they weren't pretty. They were exactly like the food that was dished out, BLAND (and fobby). and besides, you don't go out to eat to stare at the waiters/ress. if you are then that's just fucked up. I mean this isn't hooters. gzzbus!

I mean if this place was riding on the fact that they've got some nice looking girls working for them, they definately failed at that. If they were riding on the fact that the food was good, there are a dozen other places that are better, namely Little lamb on Russell street and I already think that Little Lamb is crap, actually after eating at Doko, it's just made Little Lamb a whole lot more appertizing. I remember my first experience at Little Lamb and the entire week afterwards I was complaining at exactly how bad the soup was, the raw food that we had to cook was all frozen and bad and they charged us extra for different dipping sauce etc. Now, after this experience, I may have to appreciate Little lamb and this is why i hate Doko Home. Truly Little Lamb is absolutely shithouse but Doko House made it better and that's just wrong.
I'm not a big fan of Hot pots, unless it's made in the home. Perhaps being food poisoned a few times has something to do with it.

It's no surprise that Doko Home was empty even on a Saturday night, where every other restaurant in the area is pretty much a FULL HOUSE. Perhaps not having an operating phone like has something to do with it, many people like to reserve tables, if the phone line is disconnected, we'd assume as diners the place has gone down the gurgler.

Doko Home could try to defend itself and say "we're in an alleyway", it's hard for us to be busy. But like I mentioned earlier, it used to be the home to Crystal Jade and they were booming business. Location isn't the problem, the food was the problem... they were the problem..
arghz.. it was an hour of my time gone down the drain.

Would I recommend this to anyone? Unless you want to break up with someone or as a cruel joke. then No, stay clear away from this place. This place redefined the meaning of shithouse. And that says a lot.


P.S I'll try to blog more often... =]