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23 Oliver Lane, Melbourne, 9639 5777
My score: 4/5
A lot of dishes land on a lot of tables every day, provoking thoughts like ‘yum’ and ‘oh dear’ and ‘I wish I didn’t have to share’. It’s a rare dish that elicits a ‘wow, I have never seen that before’. That’s what happened when Lucy Liu’s blackened pork hock arrived. In my mind, the surging sizzle of the open kitchen ebbed to spacious silence. The chatter of adjoining tables became soundless gesticulation. The metallic halos of faces over phones turned to an air-brushed blur. And sharp and shouty among all this was a pig’s foot. Chef Michael Lambie deserves applause for that: it’s hard to come up with show-stoppers.
The hock says a lot about Lucy Liu’s genre-hopping verve. It’s marinated in Korean chilli paste, braised in Chinese masterstock then deep-fried to a caramelised crunch. The pig is served like Peking duck with pancakes, kimchi-spiced slaw and chilli-jazzed hoi sin sauce. To eat, stab the meat, and wrap shredded flesh and fatty crunch in a pancake then race gravity to get it gob-ward. The pork follows a parade of smaller dishes: maybe supple-skinned dumplings of barramundi and scampi, a snazzy version of kingfish carpaccio with coconut foam and green chilli, or crazy-good fried-egg pancake rolled with soft-shelled crab and a chilli-mayo dressing I didn’t mind chasing down my forearm.
Lucy Liu has reimagined the old PM24. The entrance is now at the cobblestoned rear adding laneway cachet. It’s a bit of a scene but, refreshingly, you can book to be part of it. This is the era of street food in smart new buildings; this simulacrum includes kitschy-cute 3D menus, stylish ply, lazy Susans at larger tables, spice-friendly wine and helpful staff. A Beijing hutong it ain’t. Using an Asian woman’s name as a moniker is a slightly dodgy appropriation (and a weird trend) but there’s no knocking the hock.
See their website.
More modern Asian:
LadyBoy, 394 Bridge Road, Richmond, 9421 3206
New, light-hearted and mostly Thai, the menu includes favourites like betel leaf roll-ups, curries and salt and pepper tofu. The bar out back does banh mi and fried chicken wings.
Susie Wong, 12 Chapel Street, Windsor, 9510 1875
The food of Thailand, Vietnam, China and Korea gets a look-in at this casual restaurant. There’s an especially cruisy mood on Sundays with a menu that’s big on snacky skewers, spring rolls and dumplings.
Supernormal, 180 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, 9650 8688
Proving that it’s possible to open a modern Asian restaurant and not call it after a woman, Supernormal is a big, classy canteen with excellent food. I keep going back for the cold rolled pork belly and the mushrooms with sticky rice cakes.
First published in The Age, August 31, 2014.
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