Killing the craving at Mrs Parma’s, Melbourne CBD

Mrs Parma’s
25 Little Bourke Street
Melbourne CBD

Three issues conspired towards Mr Behemoth and I visiting Mrs Parma’s on a recent Wednesday night:

• We had failed to sate our parma cravings with a pub meal on the weekend, settling for steak and lamb instead;
• We were recently returned from travelling and our supermarket shopping had only provided food for lunches and breakfast, rather than dinner; and
• We’d both finished work at 8pm that Wednesday night and were feeling overworked, underpaid and dog-tired.

A parma would cheer us up. Ultimate comfort food.

We’ve been to Mrs Parma’s quite a few times before for a reliable excellent parma in the city. It’s a bit more expensive than the standard parma, running to around $25 for the chicken and $18 for the eggplant-based parma, but we believe worth it for the consistent quality. There’s nothing worse than a bad parma.

To start us off, we got some interesting beers from the extensive collection of different beers, both on tap and in the bottle. I enjoyed mine, the Hargreaves Hill ESB, finding it fruity and interesting. Mr B had the Gippsland Gold. Oh, and we got pints (it had been a long day at work).

ESB stands for "extra-special beer", apparently.

The parma menu at Mrs Parma’s has a number of variations on the traditional parma. Every time I come I’m keen to order the one entitled “Parmageddon”, which has chilli sauce that apparently takes days to make, but I’m scared that I’ll pay $25 for a dish I can’t eat and wuss out. I find their original parmas the best: you can’t mess with a classic. Behemoth always gets the Mexican variant, which comes with salsa, guacamole, sour cream and jalapeno peppers.

Shaped a *little* bit like Australia, the original parma.

Mr B was edgy to get stuck into it so this pic was taken under time pressure!

As you can see from the shots above, the parma covers the entire plate. But where are the chips and sides? Now, here’s where I agree with one of the best blogs ever reviewing parmas, Parma Daze’s review of Mrs Parma’s. God that blog makes me giggle. The sides come separately at Mrs Parma’s, and they don’t give you your own individual chips and salad. You have to share. Now, that’s fine if it’s just Mr B and I, because frankly we would not be able to finish all this food (below). But in larger groups, there simply aren’t enough chips and salad to go around! And as everyone knows, chips and salad is the accompaniment to parma.

Separate bowls of chips and salad - what a spread

Taste-wise, the parmas here are great. The schnitzel is crumbed and covered with sauce and cheese to perfection; the ham they use is fantastic, none of that processed crap here; and the chips are crunchy, not trapped under the parma and getting soggy. The salad dressing is fine, nothing special but nothing offensive either. This is definitely the best parma I’ve found in the city.

Others agree with Parma Daze and I; Greedy Diva enjoyed it recently on Australia Day (how patriotic!); Nouveau Potato loved the vegetarian eggplant parma; Eat, Drink, Stagger liked the beers and the parmas although they were a mite expensive. The only slightly more negative review I’ve found was recently, from Sweet and Sour Fork, and the review still rates the parma highly, however found the service a bit lacking.

One final caution: this place gets busy. Get here early, or come late (after 8pm on a Wednesday seems fine!)… or be prepared to wait a bit (not excessive amounts though like Mamasita/Chin Chin etc.)

Famished at lunchtime? Head to Famish’d, Melbourne CBD

Famish’d
130 Little Collins Street
Melbourne 3000

One of my favourite lunchtime places in the CBD is Famish’d. I’m not really a salad lover in general, although I have been converted to the cause as I have grown older and wiser (and discovered Yumm dressings, I’m not affiliated with them in any way but if you see them at a farmer’s market or independent grocer snap the original flavour up, it makes any salad divine! I have tried to recreate this dressing at home but failed miserably) but I make an exception for these salads as a recovering carboholic.

Guerrilla shot from iphone of my salad being prepared, please excuse blurriness.

The salads are expensive for a work lunch ($11 large + more if you add extra things) so I tend to treat myself only occasionally. How sad is it that I “treat” myself with healthy food? But I’m a massive stinge when it comes to work lunches, although we stingy people prefer the term “frugal”.

For a while last year when I discovered that my work supplied peanut butter to staff, and a fruit box came twice a week in which I could liberate a bunch of bananas – this was back when they were reasonably priced, you understand, I was bringing two slices of bread from home and constructing peanut butter and banana sandwiches for lunch for a total cost to myself of approximately 40c. And I was proud of it.
PS If you want to go down this path, you need to use crunchy peanut butter, because the banana is smooth and mushy, and smooth peanut butter (which should be cast off the earth in my opinion, although others beg to differ) does not provide enough of a textural contrast – your sandwich will end up sticking to the roof of your mouth.

But I digress. Back to Famish’d – I’ve only ever tried the pre-made salads, which you can eat in your giant bowl in-store or take-away in a cardboard box for consumption at your desk *sigh*. They usually seem to be vegetarian, and have always been fresh and delicious. You can make your own, too, with any combination of ingredients you want.

I’ve tried the thai salad with vermicelli, and the broccolli salad with slivered almonds (was feeling particularly virtuous that day) as well as pasta salad with pesto (not so virtuous but carb cravings must be answered!). On a recent occasion, I went for curried potato, mushroom madness and excellent eggplant (a bit too much dressing on the last, my lettuce leaves were quite soggy):

Curried potato, mushroom madness, and excellent eggplant (under the bread). Sorry about the wallet being in the picture, blogger fail.

The staff are all exceedingly cheerful, even when dealing with the hungry lunchtime corporate plunderers. Plus, they cater to carboholics like me by giving a slice of grainy, seeded bread or sourdough with my salad, or the option of a baked potato or sweet potato with toppings instead of a salad. Win. I’ve also heard good things about their sweet stuff but never purchased myself but on a recent occasion, I went just for coffee (it’s St Ali coffee). Famish’d is one of those adorable places that give you a free sweet thing with your coffee, and delicious mini chocolate meringues were on offer. Yum!

Other blog reviews on Famish’d have been equally positive: Nouveau Potato shared her take and found the salads filling and healthy; Sweet and Sour Fork loved the gargantuan servings as did Eat and Be Merry For Tomorrow We Diet; Let Me Feed You thinks it’s brilliant for work lunches.

Is eating at China Red like dining in a giant vending machine? (Melbourne CBD)

China Red
Shop 6, 206 Bourke Street
Melbourne 3000

EDITED TO ADD: Well, this is a quick turnaround – I’d posted the following review on a Wednesday or Thursday, and at the same time unbeknownst to me, our PA was booking a leaving lunch for a friend on the Friday at China Red! So… somewhat reluctantly…. I went back. But this time I enjoyed it. I shared dishes with three friends (non-vegetarian) and can recommend the xiao long bao (not tough at all! and the soup was delicious!) and the sizzling chilli beef with water spinach (just the right amount of fire for my friends, I could probably have a little more heat but it was pretty good). The only downside is that we ordered pork buns expecting char siu but got plain pork in the white dough. Our menu reading at fault there, I think.

On the whole, it was a much better experience this time. I’d now go as far as to recommend China Red, as long as you order carefully (and get the xiao long bao).

I’d heard about this mysterious dumpling restaurant where you order off touchscreens from the cronies at work, but didn’t know anything else about it (such as, it’s a sibling of Hutong, which I learnt from I Eat Therefore I Am’s review). Ordering off touchscreens sounded like something I’d like to try next time I had dumpling cravings though, so when my friend and I were looking for a quick bite to eat before heading to see Royksopp at the Palace (food for the ears!), China Red popped into mind.

When you get there, they ask you if you’ve been before. We said no, expecting a long-winded explanation about the touchscreen, the process, etc. but refreshingly the waiter was succinct in his explanation: “Press dish, press yes, NO CANCELLATIONS!”

O-kay then. We think we’ve got this. Anyway, we only wanted a smallish dinner, and my friend is vegetarian, so we scroll through the menu (below).

No cancellations! Touchscreen at China Red

In the end, we ordered peking dumplings (pork) and two serves of the vegetarian dumplings, because I’m quite partial to vegetarian dumplings in general. Seems fair, right? A plate each, and a plate for the table?

I’m sad to report that the dumplings were not the best. Sure, it’s hard to really stuff dumplings up. But the dumpling skins were thick, tough and chewy, and the pork ones tasted like they had been steamed hours before. Maybe we came on a bad night? Now I know it’s a sister of Hutong, I’m even more disappointed in them! The pork dumplings too, repeated on me for hours. HOURS. I was dancing… and burping.

Tough as Peking dumplings at China Red

The vegetarian dumplings were much better. The filling was a nice mix of veg and chopped up tofu, and I liked the green colour of them. However, the skins were still tough and stuck to our teeth (but not in a good way). I’ve had better dumplings at David and Camy (and Shanghai Village, and Hutong, and…).

All in all, we were not impressed.

Slightly more steamed vegetarian dumplings

Positives though: the decor of the restaurant is really nice. Oh, look, there’s more positives than that:

• No, per the title of this post, it is not like dining in a giant vending machine – in fact you get nearly as much human interaction as you would at the other dumpling joints, in fact even more and nicer service when you take into account the sometimes surly staff at a couple of the places I mentioned above!
• You can see the chefs preparing the food upstairs (although we were seated in the basement)
• The chilli oil had Szechuan peppercorns in it.
• The lychee drink I ordered was a great foil to my liberal over-use of chilli and vinegar on the dumpling.
• And the food came at lightning speed, without begging the waitstaff to ‘go and see if the vegetarian dumplings are coming’ – as I’ve had to do one too many times at Camy for example.
• You can continue to play with the touchscreen after you’ve ordered – sometimes I really wish waiters would leave the menu with you so you can peruse it and decide what you’d order next time, or an extra dish if you’re hungry – the touchscreen obliges!
• Plus, instead of catching someone’s attention, you can just press “request bill”, and it comes to your table. Total cost of meal was approx $15 each, so also a bit pricier than some of the other Chinatown joints for what we ordered. Gotta pay the rent on the spiffy new place, I assume.

Final positive, and possibly the greatest of all: if you’re anything like C and I, the touchscreens will spark conversations like:

“Do you think humans will all be replaced by robots one day?”
Leading to speculation on whether you could continue along this technology bandwagon to completely take out the hospitality staff and have food delivered by conveyor belts to the table (dismissed as unlikely).
You may then move on to considering at what point the machines will realise they need to protect themselves from being unplugged, and as a tangent to that, explore your beliefs that the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner is far, far better than the original with voiceover (table unanimous).

It’s quite the conversation starter.

I’ve heard good things about the larger dishes here, but on the whole – would I go back now I’ve tried out the novelty screen? Probably not, based on this experience, unless I was going in a group that really wanted to go. If I did, I’d try different dishes such as the xiao long bao and some of the stirfries.

Other bloggers that have been to China Red include Because I Can’t Cook, who also thought the dumplings were average; Nouveau Potato, who enjoyed the vegetarian dishes (must have had the dumplings on a better night!); and Foodie About Town liked the experience.

A little brunch and a little lunch at Brown Sugar Cafe, Melbourne CBD

While out doing a marathon five hour Christmas shop in Melbourne CBD Mr Behemoth grew hungry and tired (after only two hours, pffft! Weak!) and took me to a cafe that he has frequented with friends before for lunch: Brown Sugar Cafe. It’s in Block Place, ie. that lane everyone knows as the one you walk down to get to Haigh’s chocolate shop from Bourke Street Mall (it joins Block Arcade).

First up we ordered drinks: hot chocolate for me, a departure from the norm – perhaps occasioned by my staring at the Haighs sign prior to ordering? – and iced coffee for him, very much one of the the standard Behemoth drink orders.

Hot choc on the left, iced coffee on the right (duh), Mr Behemoth elbow on far left.

Apologies for the iphone photos but this blogger ain’t even got a working digital camera – the last one packed it in at the Taj Mahal, a so-conveniently photogenic location for a camera to pack it in. Luckily for me, innumerable Indian families wished to have their photo taken with me (it’s something about the red hair). Confession: I may have told some of them I was Nicole Kidman…

I can’t find the menu online to confirm the names of what we had, but Mr Behemoth took advantage of the all day breakfast menu and ordered the “deluxe breakfast”, two fried eggs, sausage, hash, bacon, and toast. . As you can see in the photo below he was keen to start tucking in while I faffed around with my phone.

"Deluxe Breakfast", Brown Sugar Cafe.

I must say, for a “deluxe” breakfast at a fairly deluxe price (from memory – around $18), I expected better. Mr Behemoth said it was dry and needed sauce. We’ve had pretty amazing breakfasts at the places around Melbourne so maybe we were expecting too much for the price. However: disappointing.

Not so disappointing though was my Moroccan lamb salad with couscous and yoghurt dressing. The lamb was juicy and tender, the couscous had soaked up the dressing nicely and the whole thing was served on a bed of rocket (and a few random cos lettuce leaves, as well as one giant cos leaf that I couldn’t be bothered eating). I also enjoyed the addition of some roast pumpkin and capsicum in there as well as red onion – which I generally pick out for breath purposes at lunchtime sans toothbrush but appreciate the inclusion, if that makes sense. While I guess the “Moroccan” flavour wasn’t that prominent other than the play of meaty and sweet with the tang of the yoghurt dressing, it went down a treat. Still, at around $22, you’d expect it to!

"Moroccan Lamb Salad", Brown Sugar Cafe

In summary: Brown Sugar Cafe, as long as you order right, is a nice space to stop out of the hubbub of Bourke Street Mall and get yourself a decent feed albeit a touch overpriced for what it is. (Some of the foccacias going out looked great though, and priced at a more reasonable $13-15 with side salad). Give it a go for lunch (or order better than Mr Behemoth did for breakfast).

Lunch pho two at Pho Dzung (City), Melbourne CBD

Pho Dzung (City)
234 Russell Street
Melbourne 3000

There are a few pho places aka Vietnamese noodle soup joints in the city, but the standouts for me thus far (am always excited to hear more recommendations) would have to be Mekong (on Swanston Street, just up from the corner of Little Bourke) and Pho Dzung on Russell Street (near the corner of Lonsdale).

Mekong, because I was first introduced to the wonders of the amazing fresh tasting pho at this fine establishment, and Pho Dzung because… it’s close to my work. I haven’t been to the Richmond sister shop, but I have been a few times to Pho Dzung, for the aforementioned reason. I’m a fan of most Asian noodle soups, ramen, etc., but I think the freshness of the ingredients in pho means it’s my number 1.

The first time I went, I visited late night with Mr Behemoth to introduce him to this amazing soup. We had the spring rolls and a small beef each. I also had a three colour drink. Since this was pre-blog and a while ago, let me just recall that on that occasion, the spring rolls were hot, fresh, crunchy and yummy; the pho was fine, and the three colour drink was a dessert and a drink all in one, just how I like ‘em.

My most recent visit was with a friend from work. I forgot entirely about this new interest in food blogging as we noisily slurped down our soup, discussing the gossip from the recent office Christmas party (held at Fenix in the functions area, o fellow foodies) and my impending trip to Vietnam, where I plan to imbibe MAXIMUM AMOUNTS OF PHO. Therefore, to my shame, I only have these photos to present when I remembered to whip out the ol’ phone cam (below).

Part-Eaten Pho, Pho Dzung (City)

We both ordered a small beef pho ($8.50). All in all, I’m not a pho connoisseur, but I found the broth a bit salty. Probably my fault though, cos I always add a squirt of hoisin. The noodles were good, elastic-y and and I enjoyed the availability of fresh chilli as well as those ubiquitous red chilli sauce squirt bottles and chilli oil. But – and there is a controversial but – I think I prefer the taste of Mekong, and you get your own plate of vietnamese mint ‘n’ bits to load up your soup there rather than having to politely share with your friend and not completely load up on mint and lemon as is my preference.

Part Ravaged Fresh Bits, Pho Dzung (City)

Service, as is usual with this kind of joint, is very much DIY other than begging for a small beef at the start. Oh and tea comes in a thermos, of course. Great for a work lunch. How can you go wrong? (Answer: you can go wrong only if you are wearing a white shirt/blouse.)

Ravaged Pho, Pho Dzung (City)

Other reviews of Pho Dzung’s City emporium you might like to read are Eat and Be Merry For Tomorrow We DIE(T), and mochii eats, with similar conclusions to me (good pho for the city, but you can get better elsewhere in suburban Melbourne); theworldlovesmelbourne, who loves it; and Miss Adriennely, who doesn’t rate the joint.