last night, k and i decided that we felt like pho. unfortunately footscray was too far to sample the pho that all our friends have been raving about, and we couldn’t agree on the right place to go to on victoria street. i’m partial to pho dzung, but there aren’t any fresh rice paper rolls there and k prefers tran tran but i always leave with that horrible loaded-up-with-msg feeling and i vetoed that suggestion immediately.
we swapped cuisines, considering ichi ni (no guarantee of a table), izakaya chuji (didn’t want to drive into the city) before going down mellie’s recent visits at tummyrumbles, taking turns to veto locations. FINALLY we decided to give richmond oysters (437-443 church street, richmond 03 9428 5121) a shot. i got a booking pretty easily and when we arrived the place was only half full anyway.
after umming and aah-ing over the choices we decided to start off with some oysters. being a seafood restaurant it was slightly disconcerting that the oysters were done 7 or 8 ways, but only 2 of which didn’t involve the oysters actually being cooked. also, although i’m sure we could have requested for it, there wasn’t the real natural option without anything on top on the menu. both of us feel that kilpatrick is an abomination, and really the only way we’ll have cooked oysters is if it’s in oh chien (an oyster omelette that i fully intend to take pictures of during my upcoming KL trip, so stay tuned if you have no idea what this is!).
Anyway, we went for a dozen naturals, half done with a ginger, lime and chilli vinaigrette and the other half with a dill aioli.

positive – oysters were undeniably fresh, crunchy and perfect. wouldn’t have settled for anything less from an oyster bar though.
negative – the accompaniments. you can tell for yourself that there was wayyy too much on there for starters. the aioli was heavy and we both ended up scooping about 90% of it off before eating the oysters and it was still too much. but what really got me was the chilli, lime and ginger vinaigrette, which tasted like sugar syrup mixed in with sweet chilli. totally not the light lime juice with cut chilli and slivers of ginger mix i thought it would be. it really ruined the dish.
k went for the clam chowder…

a good serving of large prawns and huge mussels, but the chowder itself was quite average. k did finish it though which was pretty impressive in itself, the serving was huge!
we also shared an entree platter for two.

now THESE oysters were so much better! a strong dollop of tabasco and a squeeze of lemon is all you need really. the mussels were pretty good too, as was the battered calamari although we couldn’t have too much of it. while we would have preferred the whitebait batter to have some more flavour the whitebait itself was good dunked in tabasco and lemon.

unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the singular prawn and scallops. one, if you’re going to specify that the entree platter must be shared between 2 people, how exactly do you propose we split the prawn??? and two, you’re a seafood restaurant. if nothing else, you should know how to cook your produce. the scallops were overdone which was a major letdown.
we’d actually had our dessert (panna cotta) picked out before we ordered but after the average meal we had we decided against it for fear of getting something you could find in the dairy section of your supermarket.




































