Asian food Hobart: Mr Good Guy restaurant review
As we emerge from a bewildering few years, one of Hobart’s most popular Asian restaurants has reopened its doors and the flavours of Southeast Asia are oh-so-enticing. See what’s so great on the menu.
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For months (decades it seemed like!) I would drive down Macquarie St and see masked members of the Australian Defence Force standing outside the Ibis Styles hotel as Covid wreaked its havoc on us all.
One of the casualties was Mr Good Guy, the modern Asian restaurant on the hotel’s ground floor – its wok burners were turned off and the lights were out. But now, as we have emerged from a bewildering few years, Mr Good Guy has reopened its doors and the flavours of Southeast Asia are oh-so-enticing.
Enter from the street or via the hotel lobby and you’ll find yourself in a colourful and energetic dining room – paper umbrellas hang from the ceiling and little green men act as chopstick holders.
The menus are already on the table and our waiter hands us a highlighter pen so we can make our selection. I, of course, want everything but manage to limit myself to a range of dishes that cross borders and gives us a good mix of the huge variety of food SE Asia is famous for.
We begin with a serve of Malaysian satay chicken skewers ($18). Bright with golden turmeric, this generous serve of six skewers is well charred, topped with peanuts and comes with a delicious peanut sauce that’s just as good by the spoonful as it is on the chicken.
Our other entree is the Vietnamese pork and crab spring rolls, ($20). No dainty bite-size rolls here, these three bad boys are absolute monsters and would make a substantial lunch or a light dinner.
They’re stuffed with pork and fragrant with lemongrass. Two dipping sauces deliver a spicy kick and the spring roll wrapper is crispy and bubbled. Honestly, I’d be happy to stop there, but we must push on.
Originally I’d chosen the beef rendang ($27) as one of our mains but my husband is a fan of Thai green curry ($24) and I need to let him choose his own dinner every once in a while, so we order that instead.
It’s a vegetarian version, rather than the chicken he was expecting, and is served stylishly with a bowl of creamy curry sauce topped with crisp tofu cubes, green beans, eggplant, thick slices of meaty king brown mushrooms and fresh green chilli waiting to be stirred through.
Our waiter had told us the curries were on the spicier end of the spectrum, but this green curry is mild enough to suit my chilli-averse husband with enough complex flavours to keep me happy too.
This should come as no surprise given executive chef Jonathan Prior spent 15 years working in Southeast Asia in countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Brunei, thanks to his career with hotel group Starwood.
He was inspired to move to Asia after a post-NYE 2000 holiday to Bali where he fell in love with “the culture, the food, the smells. It was all just so different.”
Hobart and Devonport (where Mr Good Guy has another location) couldn’t be more different from 24/7 Asian cities, but Prior is loving the role. His favourite dishes are the beef rendang (I knew I should have ordered it) which he has done in a Borneo style as well as the Vietnamese chicken salad.
While tropical ingredients may not grow prolifically in Tasmania, all the proteins are sourced from within the state.
Crispy spiced eggplant ($25) is on a lot of menus around town at the moment and with good reason – it’s crispy, it’s spiced and it’s eggplant – three things I’m a big fan of. This version comes in chunks with a sticky caramel sauce and a flurry of fresh herbs, chilli and fried shallots on top. Very more-ish.
Kway teow with seafood ($27) is excellent, but it’s the Cantonese version of the flat rice noodles that are found all over SE Asia rather than the charred and spicy Malaysian version I was expecting.
We round out our meal with a serve of roti banana pancakes ($12), a version of which will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the region, and which are served with lashings of condensed milk, another ingredient that’s hugely popular.
Yes, it’s sweet but gosh, it’s good, and I may have eaten more than my allotted half. Which was fine, because my husband was busy with the ice kacang – another dessert with a thousand variations but basically consisting of shaved ice topped with a wild and colourful combination of red beans, tapioca pearls, nuts, sago and rose syrup (housemade in this case).
Sometimes there’s also corn and frozen vermicelli involved and it’s the perfect thing on a humid SE Asian or, as it turns out, spring evening in Hobart.
MR GOOD GUY
173 Macquarie St, Hobart
Opening hours: Lunch Mon-Fri 11.30am – 4pm, Sat-Sun 12 – 4pm. Dinner 7 days 5.30pm -10pm
ON THE MENU
Malaysian satay chicken skewers, $18; Vietnamese pork & crab spring rolls, $20; crispy spiced eggplant, $25; Thai green curry, $24; kway teow seafood, $27; crispy banana roti pancake, $12; ice kacang, $14
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