Spice Temple Melbourne

March 17, 2013

Spice Temple Melbourne
Crown Complex , Whiteman st, Southbank
03 8679 1888

It’s P.Diddy’s Lunar Birthday and being a lover of Chinese food I decided to take him and P. Mummy to Spice Temple.  Walking into the mysterious dark decors of Spice Temple, My Asian Parentals are suitably impressed but slightly disturbed by the picture of the girl standing with her arms crossed outside the dining room doorway.

We started off with the Bang Bang Chicken $19.  The chicken was perfectly poached and the chilli was fragrant and numbing.

Next we have the scallops with handmade wheat noodles $23.  This dish is YUMGASMIC.  The scallops were so fresh and perfectly cooked.  The noodles were nicely chewy and my only complaint that it’s super small.  I was a bit sad though- the bowls wasn’t changed between the very saucy chicken and this, so I had to make an effort to separate the flavours.  Actually, the bowls wasn’t changed for the whole duration of the meal, so I had to use rice to soak up all the saucy sauce from the first course so as to not mix flavours.

Whole fried and steamed Snapper with chilli and Sichuan pepper $39 was our next course.  P.Diddy loved this dish.  He loved sucking on the bones and couldn’t believe it when I told him a Western guy opened this restaurant.  He also raved about how “value for money” it was to be given two fish when we were expecting one.  It was easy pleasing this man but I do agree that the fish was fantastic.

Our last savoury dish was supposed to be the pièce de résistance and required to order 24 hours in advance- Whole Eight Treasure Duck for $75.  My Asian Parentals laughed when they saw this and scoffed “You call this Eight Treasure Duck?  Maybe for Westerners but us Chinese don’t eat it like this!”

First of all, when the description said “whole” we expect the duck to have a head (well, at least a neck!) and a resemblence of a tail end.  Definitely not rolled up like this.  Maybe they thought it’s great for presentation but we were slightly disappointed.

Next, the stuffing.  The stuffing should consists of glutinous rice and dried shrimp at the very least, which I did not detect any traces of it.  From memory there should also be lotus seed, chestnuts (which they do have) and a salted egg which it glaringly lacked.

That being said the flavours wasn’t too bad and the meat was tender.  It just felt nothing like the Eight Treasure Duck my Asian Parentals loved.

Looking at the dessert menu my Asian Parentals were also disappointed that the dessert offerings were not “Asian” enough.  Not that it mattered when the dessert arrived.  Whilst I secretly still thought that my caramel chocolate and peanut parfait $18 that I shared with hubby was the best, P.Mummy was loving her ruby red grapefruit granita with aperol and crushed hazelnuts $14.  The black sesame pannacotta $14 also sits prettily in front of P.Diddy but we were honestly too busy polishing off the parfait to care.

Overall it was a very good dining experience.  There are some mini disappointments here and there but we happily overlook those when most dishes were fantastic. 8/10

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