Bokchoy Tang - Melbourne, Australia

Bokchoy Tang
Federation Square
Melbourne, Australia

www.bokchoytang.com.au

Bokchoy Tang is a Chinese restaurant on the top floor of Federation Square in Melbourne. It seats just over 200 and, depending on where you sit, looks out over the central plaza of Federation Square.

It describes its food as "contemporary Chinese cuisine."

Chinese restaurants don't usually offer that much choice for vegetarians, so it was a pleasant surprise to see a good half dozen veggie (or veggo as the say over here) dishes on the menu.

I started with Jiao Zi which were dumplings served with a salad of julienne potato & red vinegar dipping sauce on-the-side. The menu offers both a meat and a vegetarian version of the dumplings and the veggie version had what appeared to be cabbage or seaweed and shredded egg in them. It was very nice. The julienne potato was very interesting. It looked like some kind of noodle, but appeared to have been made from a single piece of potato. Again, it was very tasty.

For main course I had North Chinese Country-Style Tofu Box which constisted of three 'boxes' made from tofu filled with mushrooms, fresh soy beans, carrots & bamboo shoots. This was served with soy sauce, bokchoy and steamed rice. The little tofu boxes were quite strange, to say the least and it was shortly after trying to eat one and squirting soy-sauce down my front, that I gave up trying to eat them with chopsticks and requested a spoon. Whatever the method of eating them, however, they tasted great.

My wife chose the Spicy Szechwan Chicken and has asked me to warn anyone that reads this that they really mean it when they say spicy as she had about 30 chillies in her portion!

We were too full for dessert, as the entree and main meal portions were quite sizable and the bill (including a glass of wine each) came to around A$90 for the two of us which works out at less than £20 each, which isn't at all bad for food this good.