RICE
391 St. Kilda Rd
Melbourne, Vic
PH: 9866 3886

Some time ago I amused a few people by describing how I took a saucepan to a local oriental restaurant to pick up some noodle soup for lunch. Shades, as I said, of the days as a kid when Dad would take us to the local “chows” on a Sunday night to fill our saucepans with chop suey, sweet and sour pork and chicken chow mien.

That was our introduction to oriental food. The habit stuck.

The Hungry Hinch eats Japanese or Chinese food for lunch or dinner three or four times a week. There is the occasional breakout for a crispy-based margherita pizza on the apartment balcony on a Friday night.

Luckily, I have a new Chinese restaurant about twenty paces from my apartment and from my local watering hole. It is simply called Rice. And it is good. I often drop in there – on the way to have a drink with some coppers at the Amberoom -- and order a takeaway dish for an hour hence.

You make up your own dish. Mine, usually, is slices of barbecued pork with bok choy, thin egg noodles, Chinese mushrooms and chicken stock. For takeaways they serve the stock in a separate container, so the noodles don’t get “slushy”.

It is great and it is great value. A meal usually costs about $8.50 -- which will be some ammunition for me against Hungry Hinch readers who claim I only review expensive, up-market, toffy places.

Rice is a great, old-fashioned, Chinese restaurant. It is packed at lunch for takeaways but it also pulls a good dinner crowd from St. Kilda Rd.

I am biased but I lean towards their soups. The one I described above. But there is also prawn dumpling with egg noodles and fish ball and fish cake rice noodles. Tom Yum and noodles and curry laksa. And their fried rice is a generous gem.

It sounds like a Chinese joint but they also have fresh Japanese sushi every day with hand-rolled Teriyaki chicken and tuna and salmon rolls with rice and seaweed.

They have heaps of dishes with five-spice powder – which is one of my favourite condiments at home. But my favourite Rice offering is a sizzling Mongolian lamb dish. It must be one of more than 100 dishes on the menu.

Beef, prawns, chicken, lamb, oysters. You name it. They even have scallops with lemon grass or in a mild coconut curry.

This place is eclectic. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian. The only common thread is the rice. Hence the name. I love it.