Chin Chin
Chin Chin
125 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Australia
03 8663 2000
“Right guys double chin is filling up everyone start running now” “2 tables of 3 left HURRY” “Comeon boys still tables left hurry upppppp one competitors ringing their friends now gogogo!”
I kid you not. These were the sms I sent to my man and Chowie when Chowie wanted to visit Chin Chin on a Thursday night. Not to mention I checked out the competitsh on Tuesday to see how many tables were left at 6pm. It was stressful as hell but thankfully we did made it without having to wait 2 hours.
Chin Chin is infamously unbookable. You just gotta get here really early or be really lucky to get a table here. Its extensive menu is Asian influenced shared dishes. Cocktails are wicked. The vibe is cool.
We started off with a serve of school prawns. Served with a side of fairly hot chilli (now this is an Asian talking) and raw vegies, the prawns are crispy and moorish.
Pork roll ups was next. The pork was not as tender as I expected but I love the hot wraps that comes with it. I couldn’t help but imagine if these were served with crispy duck skin.. mmmmm
I ordered the oyster omelette and that was definitely my favourite. Fresh plump oysters with fragrant eggs with crispy side bits. Simply awesome.
Son-in-law eggs are probably a must have. Perfectly cooked and decorated with Thai Basil and chilli, it has a slightly sweet flavour and gooey on the inside.
Crying Tiger- certainly not for the faint hearted. Really, even hubby who love to add chilli on his chilli thought this was really hot. The beef was pretty good and the crispy gai lan leaves was awesome. What we all didn’t like was the crispy noodles that was just hard.
Pork belly and barramundi with green apple salad was always my favourite dish. Well, the pork belly side anyway. The pork belly was sticky, gooey and yum. I secretly thought that it tasted like peanut butter and palm sugar, in an awesome way. The barramundi side… well, not so awesome. I thought the whole thing is just way too sour. I wonder if I can just ask for the pork belly without the barramundi salad 
Massaman Curry wasn’t that good. The flavours just tasted very flat and there were barely any beef in the curry. We didn’t really finish it.
Overall, it seemed that the small dishes were better than the large ones. There are still a lot of dishes I wanted to try and I will definitely come back- once I get over the stress of trying to get a table. 7.5/10
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I’ve been here once and I fail to understand the hype!! Maybe it was my bad luck? I think I should give it another try hehe
Seemed like that in Mamasita too… The large dishes were less impressive…
No dessert? I do love the pork belly and barramundi as well. And I thought the son in law egg is pretty good too.
I actually don’t like their dessert… Tried their purple rice pudding with sprinkles of deep fried shallots before and I thought WTF?! I think I like Cookie’s dessert more :p
Hi Pig Out, this review has resulted in me calling up my girlies and making a date at Sea Bay, very yum Asian food & very reasonable too (Sydney, you have to try it if you visit!)…there goes the diet! I’m visiting Melbourne this weekend for InDesign tho so definitely will pay a visit. I was wondering if I could maybe get some help? I’m working on a dating app atm, and a part of the app will have bloggers recommending 5-10 places in their city to check out for a first date, I was wondering if you might recommend maybe a few places you love? I will put links up to your blog on the app and so far we have 2,000 signed up to download the app (I’m pretty surprised but so excited!) you can pop on here – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG93enNmdHRPOTVuUWVqOFJMUElibnc6MQ or email me on lauren@heylets.com xxx