Man Tong Kitchen, Crown Melbourne CBD

Crown Casino is like one of the attractions in Melbourne CBD, at least to a lot of Asian tourists. LOL. The amount of Asians who dropped by the area are mind-boggling, myself included :D There is actually a mall attached and an arcade within the same area (We went to the arcade and had quite a lot of fun on the previous visit). On New Year's day, the whole family decided to try the Chinese restaurant in front of the casino plus trying our hands on the casino tables. They are almost always fully booked so be prepared to wait or make a booking before you go into the gambling den. :P

The restaurant looks sassy with red color everywhere and a lot of Chinese-y carvings and decorations thrown in. Opulence would be a word to use to describe the place. They have gigantic bottles of liquor with gold flakes swimming in them at the door! @@

Anyway, we started off with Jasmine and the tea leaves used were quite nice. The tea was clear and fragrant.

There were a few of us so we basically ordered everything in twos. The spicy dumplings was my favourite! Even though they called it spicy dumplings, it really wasn't that spicy. The sour vinegar-ish sauce mixed with plenty of chilli flakes/chilli oil was very delicious and I think it is an excellent appetite piquing dish. I love the sauce so much that I mixed some into my fried rice too! Heh!

The "xiao long bao" was not bad but I guess it tasted like the ones you can get from Din Tai Fung in Malaysia too. Annoyingly, some of the "baos" were already "broken" and the soup inside was leaking out into the basket before we managed to get them into our mouths. A waste, really.

The fried rice was amazing! They had a generous amount of prawns and meat thrown in. However, the portion (waitress told us it was good for 4 pax) was not as big as you would have thought for the price they charged. :P

The stir-fried vegetables were alright I guess but nothing special to gush about in this post actually.

The dumplings here were similar to the "xiao long bao"'s fillings but the thick handmade skin used here was not my cup of tea. I felt that it was too thick and tasted pretty "floury" as well. I wouldn't recommend this dish when you could go for the spicy chilli dumplings above that I raved about. Haha.

For a snack/light meal, the bill went up to over AUD150, so it's probably a try-once type of place for us. Look out for them at:

Man Tong Kitchen
1, Crown Entertainment Complex, Clarendon St & Crown Riverwalk,
Southbank VIC 3006, Australia
+61 3 9686 9888