Place: yourthai
Physical: 255 Swanston Street, Melbourne
yourthai follows a philosophy I dislike: lots and lots and lots of food for next to nothing. I've got nothing against cheap meals. Nothing. Few things are finer than paying $15 and getting a beer and a reasonable curry or platter of dumplings or whatever. Meals, I guess, are a choice of two out of three attributes: good, cheap and plentiful. yourthai gives you the latter two. A bad bad bad combination.
yourthai's Thai is the McDonald's of Thai. Or perhaps that's an exaggeration. It's not that bad. It's just ... bland. I didn't like the two mains I've tried but I didn't like them, either. It's greatest crime is that it's bland. There's just nothing exciting going on. Thai food, even Westernised Thai, is interesting. This is fucking biege.
The service is fast and efficient. You eat with a stern man watching you, mentally willing to eat fast and fuck off so he can herd in the next lot of cattle. This is not a unique or necessarily bad thing. You can't expect a restaurant that charges $10 for a plate of food to be too warm towards diners that like to sit and chat when the place is packed cheek to fucking jowl.
I'm not going to be a cunt about this because, you know, we're talking about $10 meals served speedily by ladies wearing funny BreadTop-style hats. One must always keep the price tag in mind when judging an experience. Still, there's just so much stuff that's better--perhaps not amazing, but reasonable--at that price range that there's no real reason I can think of to eat at yourthai.
Place: Teapot Restaurant
Physical: Level 1, 17 Balmoral Ave, Springvale
I spent much of this afternoon craving pork. I wasn't sure what I wanted but I knew I needed some form of pig. I work in Springvale on Saturdays so really, I didn't have far to go to get my mix.
I felt like going somewhere new so I wandered around. A couple of places caught my eye but turned out not to have pork on the menu. I ended up, somehow, at this Teapot place. Teapot is a place you could imagine being hired out for weddings. A large, bland dining room. A team of waiters floating about, even through a grand total of three--out of about two billion--tables were occupied.
I only wanted takeaway but still, the service, at first, seemed to be okay. The waiter opened the menu to 'the food Aussies like' and asked if maybe I'd like something like sweet and sour--racial profiling is always helpful--and was keen to be helpful. There wasn't a huge selection of pork dishes but something crispy and salty sounded sensible, so the ribs it was.
The food arrived quickly, although I was a little surprised at the reaction to my request for chopsticks or a spoon or somerthing--any form of disposable utensil--so I could eat the rice. There was a ridicolous but apologetic 'no' followed by shouting to someone else and three people wrestling with a sealed packet of plastic spoons and lengthy discussion and apologies and, eventually, two plastic spoons slipped silently into the plastic bag. If I'd known it was going to take five minutes of theatre to get a fucking spoon I'd have pinched chopsticks from the fucking table.
The ribs were okay. In fact, by themselves they would've made decent beer food ... after a six pack. Salty and crispy as advertised but otherwise fairly bland. Cut small and mostly boned out. The problem was the fucking fried onion flakes. I like onion in many of its forms--it's one of my favourite vegetables--but what I don't like are mass produced fried onion flakes of the sort you, as a kid, mixed into bowls of two minute noodles. Maybe Teapot's onion flakes aren't mass produced. Maybe one of their cooks tried really fucking hard and got the right taste and everything down pat. But either way, they--and there were lots of them, strewn upon the ribs like some horrible snow--didn't work at all.
The shame of it is, as I walked towards the train station, I wandered past a little out of the way cafe. On the photographic menu was a great bowl of pork that'd been braised until it was fall-apart-tender served with noodles and broth. The photo was a work of art. And it's a real fucking shame I didn't see that place before going upstairs to Teapot. Still, there's always next week.
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