Flower Drum restaurant review outrages Melbourne foodies
MELBOURNE foodies have made a meal out of a newspaper food reviewer who dared to give an unflattering review to revered 40-year-old Melbourne restaurant Flower Drum.
A Melbourne food critic has copped it for a less-than-flattering review of the Chinese food institution Flower Drum. (Picture: Nicole Cleary, Source: News Corp Australia)
Food reviewer Dan Stock found the Cantonese restaurant dated and didn’t share the view of diners who call it “Australia’s best Chinese restaurant”.
“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,” he wrote in his review today in the Herald Sun.
Stock told news.com.au that he has been inundated with negative feedback on Twitter, email and talkback radio after his review, in which he gave the restaurant a mere 10 out of 20.
“About 40 per cent are saying, how dare you, you know nothing, you’re an idiot,” Stock told news.com.au.
Flower Drum is consistently ranked among Australia’s top restaurants and among Melbourne’s best two or three.
A newspaper review of Flower Drum publish in 1985, the year the culinary institution opened in Market Lane, described the restaurant’s food as “fit for an emperor”.
Reviewer Jim Clarke added in his 1985 appraisal: “It has a gentle touch of what the Chinese call elegance.”
Stock, however, today uses words such as “crotchety” to describe the restaurant itself and “eminently forgettable” in reference to the food.
He even compares the consistency of one of the Flower Drum sauces to that of a sneeze.
“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,” Stock wrote.
“My taste is a bit avant garde,’’ Stock tells news.com.au.
“People say, you don’t actually know what’s terrible food, you’re up your own fundament.
“You Google my name and what comes up is a Macca’s story that I wrote when I test drove McDonald’s DIY fancy burgers, so people are like, obviously, he doesn’t know anything about Chinese food because, I rest my case, he’s writing about Macca’s.
“Because Flower Drum is a 40-year-old restaurant that’s spent 30 years in its exact spot, much of Melbourne has a relationship with it.
“Most people are responding to a memory. They haven’t been for five years, 10 years even.”
News.com.au reached out to Flower Drum for comment.
Source: News Limited, June 17th 2015
