Laksa Me

16 Liverpool St; 03 9639 9885

Laksa Me opened to great acclaim just over a year ago. It's an excellent city lunchtime option. While you can spend more, a lot of their lunch options, including the laksas, are $10 or under. One menu item definitely worth digging around to find some extra change for is their Thai chilli calamari ($14) - strips are 'flame tossed' and served with chillies, roasted peanut, red capsicum, Thai chilli paste and soybean oil, accompanied by rice. It reads as well as it looks and tastes.

The lunch menu offers three laksas - a lemak with fish cake and dumplings, prawns and tofu; the 'skinny' laksa with mushroom, spinach, tofu and eggplant; and the signature My Mum's Laksa, with pho noodles, pork, chicken and prawns. I had the latter on my last visit and I think managed to score their one off-day in the kitchen! That presented a dilemma: ordering the same meal again seemed too narrow, but I was still keen to finally sample such a well-rated dish.

Compromise won the day, by going for a different type of broth dish. The duck broth wonton noodles comes as a steaming bowl of pork and prawn wontons in duck broth with choi sum (chinese cabbage), egg noodles and a side bowl of pickled green chillies.Although broth is water-based, when it's been well done - that is, started with quality ingredients and given time to cook properly - it gives the impression of being more of a soup, thick and rich with flavour. This duck broth had that quality and was not overly salty. The wontons looked like little comets, with 'ruffled' edges and long 'tails'. They were quite hefty and hard to miss (it's always nice to find an extra wonton at the bottom of the bowl!). As the chillies were served on the side the dish itself wasn't too hot, unlike other plates at the table, which came with sweat-inducing chilli levels. That reaction was probably exacerbated by our proximity to a powerful bar heater - concrete floors and plate glass windows do not a warm restaurant make, but no one wants to eat in a sauna.

One of the big talking points about Laksa Me when it opened was that it didn't have a wine list - owner Allen Woo insisted that beer was a better match for the type of food being served. And fair enough too, but from the presence of a wine list on our table it looks like enough diners didn't agree!

If a craving for any combination of chilli, soup or dumplings hits you while you're in the city, Laksa Me is handily placed, slightly south and east of centre, and offers high quality, well-priced 'modern Asian cuisine', filled with fresh ingredients rather than MSG.

www.laksame.com

Shanghai Village

112-4 Little Bourke St, CBD; (03) 9663 1878

The glory of yum cha is the chance to say to the waiter: 'I'll have that, and that, and that, and that...' and so on, giving one a feeling of decadence that lasts until the bill comes, when it is replaced by a feeling of satisfaction for wangling so much for so little. That satisfaction can veer close to smugness if, at Shanghai Village, you've also availed yourself of enough cups of free green tea from the communal urn at the front of the restaurant.

This restaurant suits the lackadaisical approach. The waitstaff are pretty casual - both in dress and attention to service. But that's OK because you know the food will be speedy and filling. While the dining area is hardly gawdy, the colours employed - on the bright pink feature wall or the disturbingly bright orange chopsticks - are certainly not casual.


The first dish to reach us was a chinese pancake.
It fared well with the addition of soy sauce. Looking a bit like a hollow omelet, and consisting of a very straightforward, fried batter, it served as a great raging-hunger-queller before we got into the meatier dishes.

There is no yum cha without pork buns, but this restaurant's offering are not the large sweet-doughed-savoury-filled variety. They're 'mini pork buns' and are more of a dumpling to be honest. The filling is quite respectable, but it's a shame not to have that unique casing, akin to a chewier, more floury meringue texture, to go with it.

Three spring rolls are suitably crisp, but their accompanying sauce - perhaps plum - is quite bland, and without a killer filling it leaves the dish as a bit rudimentary.
More exciting are the steamed beef dumplings. There's just so much meat and dough goodness on the plate! They are utterly impossible to eat with chopsticks: the dough slipping around and the globe of meat inside inevitably escaping to be eaten solo.

Overall the meal was entirely satisfying, particularly as we'd brought voracious appetites to the table. I left with a fairly voracious thirst however, which I doubt was entirely due to my liberal splashings of soy sauce, but rather to some heavy-handed salting in the kitchen.

Wild Yak

350 High St, Northcote; 03 9486 2733

Time to try a new cuisine: Tibetan. Wild Yak in Northcote is a laminex-tabled, plastic-chaired, faded-postered kind of restaurant, run by an effusive native who works the floor with enthusiasm. The food is extremely well-priced, the restaurant is BYO, the atmosphere is simple. It's fundamental international suburban dining.

But what to eat? A bit of research reveals that Tibetan cuisine is based around barley, the flour from which is used to make noodles and dumplings (are we the only country in the world without a national dumpling?). Yak, goat and mutton meat also feature. Wild Yak is no doubt true to the spices and cooking style of Tibetan cuisine, but serves no eponymous meat. Choice instead runs to beef, chicken and, bizarrely, calamari. The menu is broken down in the traditional way of Asian restaurants: entree, soup, then repeated dishes featuring the different meats or a vegie or tofu option.

Momo, the Tibetan steamed dumpling, features first up. It's available as a main (at $9.50 I'd rate it as one of High St's best bargains) but we choose the beef variety as entree (fried and vegetable are also available).My, they were good. The dough was so pliant, but held its shape, even if the lightly-spiced but beautifully cooked meat fell out while one was utilising the dipping sauces. The ying is a soy-style sauce, while the yang was a notably piquant mixture, masquerading behind the appearance of satay.

I had some difficulty choosing a main and enlisted the help of our host. He steered me from the sha gogpa (lean beef with rich garlic sauce) to the sha nyamo-kyurmo (tender beef cooked with lemon, honey, tomatoes and herbs). His recommendation was spot-on. Here we had something that little bit different and very striking. The sauce was rich, perhaps a little runnier than tomato soup, and the balance of tomato with the sweet and sour of honey and lemon was exact. The meat had been treated gently and was indeed 'tender'. The beans and red capsicum were fresh and crisp and I was thoroughly pleased.

Just as well, since I'd been pipped in my first choice by my dining partner, that dish being thukpa: a Tibetan soup with noodles (egg, not barley in this case), beef, chicken, vegetables and 'fungus' (luckily she's a scientist, so is adept at assessing fungal risk and decided to give this one the go-ahead!) in a rich soup.The broth was hearty and not too salty. The dish featured an excellent distribution of meat, veg and noodles to liquid. Maybe a little excessive on the fungus side of things (though not in a health-inspector-concerning way) but that earthy, warming flavour and effect was a big winner.

Two mains, a starter, rice and corkage was $35. I'll be back - those dumplings are calling.

Pierogi, Polish Festival

Would you spend an hour in a queue for these tasty morsels?

In the normal run of things I wouldn't, but in homage to the way Melbourne embraces her cultural events, I was happy to get my dose of 30+C sun hanging about at the Polish Festival at Fed Square in the line for the only stall dishing up the pierogi (Polish dumplings).

And they did live up to expectation. The dough was quite thick, but very giving, and slightly salty. This was a good seasoning match to the meat filling, made a little bit peppery by shredded cabbage. On top are some caramelised onions contrasting all the mushy stuff with some crunch. Especially given the Albion Polish Association must have sold several thousand of these on the day, they were a quality, fresh product.

There was also plenty of this fine Polish pilsener, Okocim, to be had!