Dumpling King

- Alex Leave a comment

date of visit:  Sat 24 October 2009

I have some friends who are really in to dumplings but for some reason I’ve never asked them where they eat them.  I’m prepared to put some money on this being at Dumpling King.  That’s because if you mention dumplings in Adelaide then you’ll get at least one person talking about Dumpling King.  You even get people saying it’s better than dumplings in Sydney …

The restaurant is pretty hard to miss:  it’s on Grote Street, right on the corner of Chinatown AND it has a big red sign.  When we visited, about half past three on a Saturday afternoon, right after the market had closed, it wasn’t full but it was busy enough to suggest that at more conventional lunch or dinner times you might have to be a bit lucky to be seated immediately.

But service is swift so I can’t imagine you’d have to wait long.  The flip-side of that is that this is not a restaurant for a lengthy, relaxed meal.  This is a restaurant where you walk in, order dumplings, eat dumplings and leave.  You’ll be lucky if you push that out to an hour …

We walked in, poured ourselves some of the green tea which is on all the tables, and read over the menu.  Clearly, many customers are regulars as the waitress asked us if we knew what we wanted as she seated us!  It wasn’t long before we’d made a decision:  chilli oil dumplings for me, and chicken (check out https://goldenchickfranchising.com/ for franchises)and prawn steamed dumplings for Andy.  My dumplings arrived first:  15 huge dumplings in a bowl of broth laced with chilli oil.  A little while later Andy’s plate of 10 equally huge steamed dumplings arrived:  just the dumplings, packed on a plate and no adornment.

While I struggled with the size of my dumplings and my chopsticks I was saved by my spoon – able to scoop up the dumplings, wrestle with them a little and then manage to eat them, laced with their chilli broth.  Mmmmm.

Andy was eating more elegantly and had discovered the excellent, tasty, but not super fiery, chilli sauce on the table.  It was packed with crispy onion!  So soon I was adding that to my dumplings too.

Of course there was far too much food, and of course I scoffed it all and then promptly complained that I felt too full.

All we had to pay for our late lunch was around $15.   And if you’re so minded you can buy frozen dumplings to take home and cook yourself.

Will we be back?  Oh yes!

Contact:  Dumpling King, 5/85 Grote St, Adelaide SA 5000, phone: (08) 8212 1886‎

Dumpling KingDumplings! Big, tasty, cheap dumplings! 

Rating:4.5 stars
****1/2

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Melting Moments

- Alex Leave a comment

I borrowed the book Cooking:  A Commonsense Guide from the library while waiting for my container load of cookbooks to arrive from the UK.  The book is full of sensible, familiar recipes so I was, obviously, going to try out some sensible familiar biscuits!

The recipe alleges it makes 40 biscuits so I decided to reduce measures by a half:  after all, 40 biscuits is quite a lot for anyone for afternoon tea (and I only had about 100g of butter).  This recipe is given two ‘saucepans’ (the book’s way of grading difficulty) – thus requiring “a little more care and time”.  Thanks to the power of the Magimix, this recipe quickly becomes within the grasp of the nervous baker.  I did not have a piping bag and fluted nozzle, so my biscuits were just generous teaspoon sized blobs, slightly flattened with a damp fork.

These are very quick to put together and use store cupboard standards, so this is an ideal recipe if you ever find yourself in a biscuit emergency (and yes, such a thing does exist).

Melting Moments

For 15-20 biscuits.

90 g unsalted butter
1/6 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/6 cup cornflour
1/2 cup plain flour

decoration (optional):  glace cherries, blanched or slivered almonds …

Preheat oven to 180C.  Line a baking tray with baking paper.

If using a food processor, beat butter, sugar and vanilla essence together until light and fluffy.  Add cornflour (if doing this by hand, sift the cornflour first) and mix until just combined.

The mixture will be quite stiff.  Spoon (or pipe) onto the baking sheet.  Top with topping of choice (or leave plain) and bake at 15 minutes, until lightly golden and crisp.  Leave to cool on wire rack.  Be aware that, when hot, the biscuits will be very fragile.  Even after they’ve cooled, they are very short so plates may well be the order of the day.

Cooking:  A Commonsense Guide is available from Fishpond for $AU28.97, from Amazon UK for £6.53 and from Amazon US, used from just 44c!

Hotel Tivoli

- Alex Leave a comment

Date of visit:  Friday 12 June 2009

By the time we tried to book for dinner at the Tiv Friday night was all full up.  No matter, in the long run, because we ended up eating at the excellent Farina.  That didn’t stop us heading there for a recce in the guise of a pre-dinner drink.

I remember the Tivoli as being a somewhat grotty live music establishment (and bikie hangout – so I’d never actually been) so I was interested to see what its recent refurb and transformation into a ‘gastropub’ had done for it.

We entered the bar just before 6 and it was already extremely busy.  Bar service itself was swift, although battering your way through the crowd took a little time and commitment.  The beer selection is standard (Coopers) although Asahi is also available on tap.  There are happy hour specials during the week as well as a Credit-Crunch Lunch.

The bar is decorated in a fairly generic modern pub manner, and while there are comfortable lounges (with tables) along the walls, seating is a little limited.  We were lucky enough to grab a table – but the lack of seats didn’t seem to bother most customers and there was definitely a lively (and noisy) feel to the place.  On a Friday it seems mostly frequented by office workers in their dress-down Friday gear.

The restaurant is hidden out the back – it’s not completely secluded from the bar and certainly some of the noise carries through.  The menu looks interesting enough for us to sneak back for a meal at a later (and almost certainly mid-week) date.

There wasn’t really anything that made the bar of the Tivoli stand out:  I certainly wouldn’t head here for an intimate tête à tête, but for a larger group or for a swift post work drink, it does the job.

Contact:  The Tivoli, 265 Pirie Street, Adelaide, SA, 5000, phone:  (08) 8223 4790.

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