Flower drum

Location:17 Market Ln, Melbourne Vic

Phone: 9662 3655

Time: Dinner

Price: Expensive

Cuisine:Cantonese cuisine

What got dished out:

Our first dish from their banquet menu was an assortment of dumplings. These dumplings were pretty much standard dumplings one would acquire at your standard yum cha place. It wasn't the best, nor was it all that bad. I don't know what I was expecting, okay I lied, when I saw dumplings, i thought "oh wow, it's going to be awesome", it wasn't that, it was "oh, this is so shark fin house style, except less rude and more pretentious"

 S.A King George Whiting (entree) came out and it was fish that definately deserved a second helping. For someone who doesn't like fish, I did like the fish, the batter was light, it was tasty (okay maybe a little less salt) but still very tasty

As part of the 4 course "tasting" banquet, FlowerDrum had "peking" duck as part of their menu, and oddily enough it was part of their "main course", seriously speaking, I'm not quite sure how peking duck can be considered as a main unless of course they're going to feed me an entire duck itself.(which they didn't). I can't say that the duck was the best thing ever, because it wasn't. It wasn't a total disappointment like my Quanjude experience, but I must add, at the time, I hadn't gone to QuanJude yet, and at the time, I thought my experience at flower drum was somewhat ordinary and a total disappointment, seriously I expected a lot more from a classy, top end restaurant, especially when it came to peking duck. In all honesty, for half the price (which would have fed a table of 4 people) i could have gotten much better peking duck elsewhere. Actually, i didn't just think this experience was THAT ordinary, i thought it was VERY ordinary, and to some degree, annoyed. (and then i went to quanjude for peking duck, and realised that flowerdrum had someone who beat them to making very ordinary duck)

The "Grain Fed Eye Fillet with Black Pepper sauce" had a mixed response from our table. Everybody was impressed because you got a choice of " how you wanted your meat cooked, medium/nuked etc etc)  Frankly it wasn't a winner because nobody was all that impressed with it, including myself. You know when your gut feeling says "stay away" and you don't listen, it's at this point you want to kick yourself in the nuts (if you had some that is), well it was for that very moment.
Don't get me wrong, the meat was nice and succulent and very tender but what was the biggest let down of them all had to be the sauce. Even if I was a fan of the sauce, it would have been nothing but a disappoitment, it was like an array of wtf-ness bouncing off my tongue, it just didn't taste right and no matter how much coke or chinese tea i consumed, i couldn't really get rid of the peppery or lack thereof taste out of my mouth.
On the menu it also stated "seasonal vegetables" and as you can see in my photo, apparently the only seasonal vegetable showing happened to be some bok choy. Seriously WTF!??! no broccoli? no beans? no carrots? someone can't be telling me that the only thing in season is bok choy, (probably the cheapest crap on the market at the time)... don't worry, i found this hilarious, of the crappy kind.

We had a choice of desserts, and of course I decided on the mango crepe thing (sorry can't remember the exact name of the dessert), and to it's credit, it was very tasty. However, I've had something similar (at a yum cha place) where they did something similar and they added whipped cream inside the crepe and mango (it was far more delish). I guess, if I hadn't been spoilt and eaten something like that, the dessert served on the day would have been given the two thumbs up.
So in many ways, if you're not like me, and you happen to NOT like whipped cream in anything, this is for you.






 

My thoughts:

I've been to Flower drum on several occasions before, all of which had been several years ago. Some of the things don't change, for example the impeccable service and the high price tag for every single dish.

The service which everybody always comments on is to some degree creepy, borderline stealth/ninja like. What the heck am I talking about? This is perhaps the only place I know where the waiters are already pouring tea into your cups just as it's half full. The moment you move to stand up to go to the toilet, someone's already there to push your chair out, and fold your napkin.

Which basically means it can be unnerving knowing that someones staring at you to watch your every move.

The one thing I won't complain is that the staff can actually speak English, not broken English, or Foblish (you know when an asian puts a twang to english and at times, you're not sure if they're speaking english or their own language but it sounds like something that you think you understand, and you nod your head politely because you don't want to embarass them or yourself).

Don't get me wrong, other Asian restaurants should look at Flowerdrum and use it as an example, especially to those who have a lot of Western customers, you need to have FLUENT and comprehendable staff  and are FRIENDLY. But I guess, when restaurants only want to pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys working.

My biggest disappointment had to be the steak, mainly due to the fact that many years ago, I had cantonese steak at Flower Drum, and I have to say, it has to be the best cantonese steak I've had in Melbourne (that one experience made me order cantonese steak at every chinese restaurant i knew). Needless to say, I was disappointed with every cantonese steak I ordered after that which meant that I would put Flower Drum in a revered status of "awesomeness", but like most things, it's only a distant memory, and when you go back and be as crushed as you were with this experience you start to question "perhaps it wasn't as awesome as it was"

Another thing that puts me off Flower Drum is the high cut price charged for the food, sure, some of it's tasty, some of it's OMG, but for what you pay for at Flower Drum, you could probably eat out at a simple chinese restaurant for the same amount of money spent for an entire week (probably including lunch and dinner).

So I guess the people who are going to frequent such an establishment would be people who have bucket loads of money (literally they shit out money when they go to the toilet), those who want to be served properly at when at a chinese restaurant (i mean how often are we subjected to bad service?) or want an experience of a different kind.

Speaking of toilets, the biggest let down for flowerdrum has to be the toilets, I'm quite sure what the male toilets were like, but the female toilets were a tad WTF? especially for a place that's a hatted restaurant, (these days a lot of restaurants ensure that the toilets are nice, clean and uncluttered), Flowerdrum's experience is a total mess. The female toilet seems to be the dumping ground of the restaurant's unwanted tables and chairs, it's like going to a different world altogether, you've got a beautiful restaurant front, lovely staff, and then you got the toilet. It's almost like going to one of those Chinese restaurants in the 'burbs and having to go down some dark alleyway to go to an outside toilet that reeks of dead meat. Thankfully the toilet at Flowerdrum isn't as bad as that, but i guess if they had that option, it would go that way. Don't get me wrong, the toilet wasn't dirty or unhygenic, it was just unsightly with all the furniture being dumped there.

Overall, the food wasn't spectacular, and for $99 I paid, I felt ripped off. I expected more, I expected my socks to be spinning off my feet or something like that, it didn't.

Would I go back to FlowerDrum? Well, lets put it this way, not unless someone else was happy to foot the bill because my bank account says NO to FlowerDrum.