Pig’s ear salad.

Spicy chicken feet.

I was just looking for somewhere to eat on a Tuesday night. Somewhere interesting where I hadn’t been before. Ping from an RSS feed on a comment thread at Cin’s A Few of My Favourite Things comes through from Marina:

“There is a divine restaurant that sells the lamb on charcoal with the Arabic influence. Beware for it is VERY addictive! ….They also have THE BEST pig ear salad (sliced so thinly).”

Who am I to resist? We find ourselves at 1+1 Dumpling Noodles (84 Hopkins St. Footscray +61 3 9687 8988).

The large brightly lit room is full of what I presume are students. Cups and cutlery are self service. The service is friendly and the food is cheap and comes in huge, and I mean HUGE, portions. Put it this way, we were the only table not serving ourselves from plates the size of dustbin lids. And we still couldn’t eat all we ordered.

Usually, we feed dried pig’s ears to our dogs. But tonight it is my turn to be fed them. The pig’s ears were marinated to soften the white cartilage you can see above. They had a bit of chew but were delicious sliced thin mixed into a refreshing spicy cucumber salad.

The cuisine here is from north-west China hence lamb is on the menu and oriental style pictures of charging horses on the walls. We didn’t order the kebabs but I wish I had seeing the many many orders coming out from the kitchen. Instead we had the dish described as tofu in English but what I assume was Ma Po or pock marked old lady’s tofu.

Ma Po: Pock marked old lady’s tofu.

The noodles are home made here and the process of transferring them from the dish of noodles and lamb to my plate was a nightmare because they were so long. By the time we left we had the messiest table in the restaurant. And a couple had wrapped around my neck to boot.
Rewind a couple of weeks and I was on assignment with the Foodies Bus Tour breaking for lunch at the Oriental Tea House (455 Chapel St, South Yarra). The chicken feet arrive. I’ve always been squeamish. Correction, almost everybody on the tour is squemish. I always was a bit worried by the cooked naked variety that look exactly like chicken’s feet.

Luckily these are covered in a thick sauce. At least I thought that until I picked them up (toenails removed thankfully) at which point they start to look remarkably like a amputated baby’s hand. I tuck in anyway and they taste very good. We mostly agree that they are great. The feet do have a lot of tiny bones than can be annoying, if not terribly elegant to spit out.

Finally, my third Chinese experience in as many weeks, the Yum Cha at David’s (4 Cecil Place, Prahran) where we start with a Szechuan dried beef, which presented no challenge to eat. But boy was it spicy.

Szechuan dried beef.

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I visited twice in two weeks, once on a Tuesday lunchtime and once on a Monday evening. Each time the place had a respectable crowd. What amazed me a few days after my Three, One, Two visit was the value offered by this dégustation.
Each portion was the perfect size. And, knowing what the proliteriat really wants from a Chinese restaurant, my old friend Crispy Duck satisfied me twice.

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“The food here not only stands the test of time, but sets itself aside for its high standards of excellence. There’s no question that Flower Drum’s Peking duck is among the finest in the world, with those hand-rolled pancakes steamed tableside, filled with slivers of young (12- to 16-week-old) local ducks, carefully raised to be moist and less fatty than most.”

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