和院·贵州牛羊粉 — Restaurant in Melbourne

A very poor restaurant. Upon seeing the reviews here, either this place has massively lowered its' quality or there are not honest reviews. Who knows.

So I came here with my partner. We decided NOT to get the Lanzhou beef noodles from across the street and to try this place instead.

The building is great and the environment is clean and modern.

Service was poor, with my waiter bringing me the wrong food then arguing with me about it. I am pretty sure I got overcharged for 2 items I did not want. Language was an issue, with our waiter having trouble with both English and Mandarin. No doubt this led to the confusion.

The food: My partner got a soup noodle dish with sichuan pickles, pork and thick rice noodles. The noodles were cooked ok (but they were factory made, so..), the pork slices were overcooked. The soup itself had an unpleasant taste, as if there was too much fat in the soup. However, the sichuan pickles were nice (again from a factory, it's the same stuff you use for sichuan fish soup) and there was a generous number of quail eggs.

I got (or tried to get) pan fried pork dumplings with cold noodle salad (as a deal for $15, which is reasonable). Unfortunately, my waiter brought out what they describe as a chinese burger. Chinese burger: A bao-like bread sliced in half and filled with shredded, slow cooked pork belly. As I understand it, the original dish should have red cooked pork belly inside it. That would have been nice. The pork belly in this was very, very bland. One bite was enough to avoid it, especially when I didn't order the stuff. Of course they charged me for their mistake. Pan fried pork dumplings: These were very poor. They seem to be influenced by xinjan style dumplings, as the filling is very finely minced and the dumplings are wrapped in a unique style. However, they were quite bad. They took like 20 minutes to make, yet were soggy EVEN on the pan fried side. The texture was really a let down. Like everything with this place, the taste was bland. There was a slight hint of coriander, which I found unusual in a dumpling. The texture of the filling was sort of gross, with stringy bits of collagen breaking up the monotony of hyper-minced meat. Salt was lacking. Cold noodle salad: They never brought me my salad, but charged me for it anyway. Tofu Skin Salad: This was the best dish. There was reasonably fresh coriander and a nice sesame taste. But it is...

Overall a great experience! We went to Dou Dou expecting any random Chinese food but we got so much more. We've never tasted authentic inner Mongolian cuisine hence it was quite a surprise.

We ordered cold oat noodles, braised tofu and pork, and the lunch combo bread and pork thing that we forgot the name of + the flat noodle salad.

Cold oat noodles are delicious! Surprised with the taste and my expectation was exceeded. Mind you I generally am not a fan of salads or raw vegies yet I scarfed the bowl down eagerly. I asked for non spicy. It's a filling dish.

Braised tofu and pork are sweet & sour, on the sweeter side. Delicious and we love that it's kept warm with the hot plate.

The bread pork thing is good, we suggest to eat it with the flat noodle wheat salad and chili oil since it is a dry dish otherwise. We expected this to be the case so it was fine.

The tattooed server was very kind, he didn't speak English but did his best to be helpful, double checked with another staff member when necessary and performed some traditional Mongolian musical performance for us 😊❤️

Price to food ratio was excellent too, very reasonable for what you get!

Will most definitely return to try the...

It's not very often when you come across a restaurant that serves inner Mongolian cuisine. We don't have a point of reference to compare except Xinjiang/Uyghur cuisine. The cucumber salad is great and the BBQ lamb skewer is very similar to Uyghur style and in this case is also good. The pork belly had some parts that were soft but other parts a bit dry. The lamb siumai was a first for us and it was just okay. We would definitely come back again to try other unique dishes which look like big portions. Food - 7 Service - 7 Vibe -...