Chinatown Cafe — Restaurant in Adelaide

--Goto O-Town-------------------------------------- WOW**WARNING* ---------------------------------------Goto O-Town-- TL;DR - DO NOT GO HERE ... ... GOTO O-TOWN (Walk left from CTC)

I used to love this place for over 30 years Why I now hate ChinaTown Cafe (CTC): • The presentation of the food • The quality of the food • The sheer balls on the price hike

What happened CTC, you have sold out, you don't even have your own toilets to cost you any extra. Goto O-Town!

Astonished by the price for Chicken Rice $19.23 I grabbed a menu to see what the rest of the prices were like and to my surprise no prices at all, as they know they are way to expensive for sub standard cooking and ingredients. The cooks are over cooking the chicken; the laksa broth that used to be Adelaide's Gold Standard is now Maggie at best; and the presentation now looks like someone chewed it first and spat it out.

Wholesale cost (max price) • Chicken $4 for 250g (If chicken is $16/kg, if you even get 250g) • Bok Choi $1 • Rice 50c • Laksa broth 50c • Cost to cook it all $2

You are making $11.23 (and it's really bad bad quality)

So $8 in total and you have the indecency to charge EFT fees, actually anyone charging EFT fees should be ashamed of themselves for doing that to customers, as you have already inflated your prices.

Menus with no prices is super sneaky, not only have you already saved money as you don't have to make any changes, BUT you can easily just increase the price at anytime and no one can see how often or how much extra you are cleaning out your customers for every 3 months (and that is being generous).

Nothing got better, it ALL got worse :( Shame on you...

My friend who lived in Adelaide 30 years ago told me that this restaurant had been opened since then. After my arrival to Adelaide for 6 months, finally I tried this Asian (Malaysian / Chinese) restaurant today.

I didn't try it earlier because it was always packed with customers or having long queue. Besides, I considered it to be a Malaysian restaurant rather than a Chinese restaurant. Perhaps it is something between, so call it Malaysian-Chinese Restaurant might be more appropriate. I reckon most Malaysian can speak Cantonese, so I placed my order by just speaking Cantonese, and it worked well 😆

I ordered Fried Kway Teow today. The appearance was slightly different from others, but the portion size and taste were both good. The price level was reasonable, just $16.

Update: Re-visited on 31 May, tried their Hainanese Chicken Rice. The portion was really big, $18 with soup and veggies ($17 if no veggies). The taste of chicken was a bit plain. The ginger rice was quite nice, though. Overall, this dish was just average. If you aim for good Hainanese Chicken Rice, I would not recommend this one as there are some better choices available...

Visited Chinatown in Adelaide and based on recommendations this Chinese restaurant was supposed to have good Malaysian food, but I wouldn’t call this Malaysian at all, this is more local Australian Chinese restaurant attempting to serve Malaysian food unfortunately.

From Sydney, I’m not saying Malaysian food should be better than in Malaysia, but this by far has to be the worst attempt in Australia at serving Hainan chicken rice. Never have I ever had a worse Hainan chicken rice in Australia…

The rice was flavourless and borderline plain white rice and the chicken was also poorly cooked and flavourless. Just look at the skin of the chicken in the photo and you’ll see what I mean.

The other dish ordered was a stir fry wat tan hor combination noodle dish and they use meat that has been soaked in bicarbonate. Calamari was literally like...