Flower Drum Chinese restaurant in Melbourne CBD has aged over the decades

DAN Stock couldn’t wait to dine at Melbourne icon the Flower Drum - but the experience left him bitterly disappointed.

10/20

Flower Drum

17 Market Lane, Melbourne

9662 3655

flower-drum.com

Open: Nightly from 6pm; Mon-Sat noon-3pm

Highlight: A night at the museum

Lowlight: The cost of entry

MELBOURNE in 1985 would be unthinkable to eaters circa 2015.

What, with parachuted jaffles, bars tucked into every conceivable nook and thousands of eateries catering to a burgeoning CBD population, the deserted wasteland that was Melbourne after dark 30 years ago is a fading Polaroid of times best left in the past.

Against that backdrop, a Cantonese restaurant moved to its current location where on Thursday it celebrates 30 years, in its 40th anniversary year.

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Over that time the Flower Drum is where countless top-of-town deals have been done, questions popped, anniversaries celebrated and milestones marked.

The crispy Wagyu beef.

I’ve never had the pleasure a Flower Drum dinner to celebrate any of the myriad moments that families gather around a Special Occasion table here.

So it was with dress-up-for-dinner delight I booked a table — for a Thursday night as weekends are booked solid a month out — and looked forward to what I’d recently heard was still Australia’s best Chinese restaurant.

Upon arrival we were ushered into a crotchety lift that wheezed its way to the second floor.

I’d imagine that once added a frisson of glamour to a meal here, but when I left two-and-a-half hours later I felt it a fitting leitmotiv for an experience that was at best underwhelming with no role to play today, save as a museum.

It’s a step back in time, from the room with its shouty Chinoisere to the show plates and waiters in ill-fitting bow ties and too large vests upon which name tags are worn.

Those waiters will fiddle and fuss with your food table-side, silver serving everything in the misguided notion that that’s a show anyone still wants to watch.

The barramundi noodles.

Ah, the food. While there were a couple of definite hits — a meaty scallop siu mai; an excellent piece of eye fillet, slices of crunchy-coated wagyu cheek — most was memorable for the skilful way ordinarily tasty ingredients were treated to render them devoid of discernible flavour.

“We reduce the sauce for extra taste,” our waiter said of the roast duck reduction he spooned over the duck wontons.

It’s a mean feat to begin with a sauce of such limited appeal that reducing it leaves it with less personality than Gravox but with the consistency of a springtime sneeze.

The only thing less likable was the jarring tangerine peel in the duck filling.

The fried pear-shaped croquette sounded intriguing, and delicious, filled with chicken, quail, duck liver sausage, mushrooms and water chestnuts.

They were somehow transformed into an indistinguishable filling in what was predominantly potato that tasted only of the fryer.

The misses kept coming. “Noodles” fashioned from barramundi meat were cold, which did nothing to enhance their weird bouncy texture with all the appeal of homemade play dough passed through a crusher.

That Peking duck is the Flower Drum’s signature dish probably tells you all you need to know about the menu. It’s very good — as you would hope for its famed dish — the plum sauce notable for its savoury depth.

But Peking duck is what it is and hardly the revelation it once was, including all the spoon gymnastics.

That table-side trickery continues with dessert, with slices of apple toffee’d and twirled to order for a “Peking” take on toffee apple.

It’s a prettier option than the deep-fried ice cream (yes, really) which was served with a berry sauce of such violent sweetness it was like being accosted by an ice-addled Strawberry Shortcake.

The deep-fried ice cream.

At least a trip to the loos provides the giggle of a Telecom gold pay phone, which would be achingly ironic in a Collingwood bar but here seems emblematic of a restaurant that might hope to use it, Batphone like, to summon the glory days.

But today, cheap paper towels in the bathroom and bulk buy Kleenex does not a five-star experience make.

Nor does clunky industrial-strength glassware, a wine list fraying at the edges, or service that’s quietly indifferent.

Memories are good. Parroted platitudes are not. And what does such a trip down memory lane cost?

For two, with one bottle of wine (Hugel riesling, $74), the bill was $336. That’s so much of a lot. The six-course signature banquet very much pushed on arrival is $190 a head.

To put that into perspective, the tasting menu at Attica — the only Australian restaurant to make the World’s 50 Best restaurant list — is $195 per person.

At Brae, it’s $180 a head.

Flower Drum is so far from world class it’s an insult to our best restaurants that it’s still mentioned in the same breath.

It’s trading on — and charging for — the goodwill of decades of made memories.

If you have happy memories of a meal here, my advice would be to treasure them.

But don’t try to relive them.