Blooming Orchids Thai Restaurant — Restaurant in Melbourne

We tried this restaurant for the first time and certainly the last time on Valentine's Day, which so happens to also be my daughter's birthday. So I thought I would treat them to a Thai meal in close to our home.

I lived in Thailand for 40 years and have just returned to retire in Australia. My daughters are both half Thai and half Aussie. So we are all quite familiar with how Thai food should taste and be presented.

The restaurant gets one star for the decor and the polite staff. But that's where it ends.

1. We asked for all the food to be delivered at the same time, since that's just the way it's done in Thailand. You don't have starters and then a soup followed by mains. Everything arrives at once and is eaten together.

The server said, "Sure, we can do that." Needless to say, the Prawn Spring Rolls and Chicken in Coconut Soup arrived first, and without even any rice. So we waited and waited for the other dishes, at the very least expecting the rice to come along. But no. So I asked the same server where the rest of the dishes were. Lame excuse, that they are starters, even though I specifically asked for everything to come at once.

The Prawn Spring Rolls were ordinary. The Chicken in Coconut Soup tasted nothing like how the dish is supposed to taste and was sickly sweet. It's a savoury soup, NOT A DESSERT!

The rice arrived. We were all shocked to find that it was also sickly sweet. We weren't asked, which rice we wanted and were served something called "Coconut Rice"... Fusion food perhaps? But not a Thai dish, to be sure. Not one Thai person I have asked since had ever heard of it.

Finally, the other dishes we ordered arrived. A stir-fired Hokkien Noodle with beef, which was an odd thing to have on a Thai menu, but the birthday girl wanted to try it. And a Stir-fried Beef with Thai Basil. Both dishes looked very similar. Both were sickly sweet and tasted so similar it wasn't funny. The Stir-fried Beef with Thai Basil even had Hokkien Noodles in it! Meaning that both dishes were cooked in the same sauces and the same pan separated and a few basil leaves and half a chilli thrown in to make the Thai Basil dish sans the proper sauces. Hopeless!

Another interesting point is that none of the staff we interacted with can speak Thai... Not the server whom I believe is also the proprietor, the chef (he served us the stir-fried dishes) nor the bartender/cashier. They all spoke with distinctive Manglish accents.

I also pity the people waiting for takeaway, one chap waited at least the whole time we were there. Another, was so angry at having to wait an hour he gave the cashier a piece of his mind and stormed out.

In summary, this is not a Thai restaurant by any stretch of the imagination. It's trying to masquerade as one, but very poorly done. The food is certainly not Thai, all the dishes we had were sickly sweet, and we were basically cheated out of a Thai Basil dish but charged for it.

I can't fathom for a minute all of the glowing reviews. Can only suspect that the writers have never had Thai cuisine before.

As The Donald would say......

REASONABLE FOOD AND LOUSY SERVICE: The headline says it all. We weren't blown away by our many and varied meals, but the service was well below the expected standard. There were hardly any customers, but our single waiter tried to deal with them, the kitchen and the many delivery drivers at the same time. At one point, he disappeared outside the restaurant to return some time later. Needless to say, something had to give and it was the restaurant customers. The food and pricing were OK, wihout being memorable, but we couldn't get away from the fact that the service was so poor and the waiting times were so long. Adding insult to injury, a service charge/tip was automatically included...

Our entrees arrived reasonably promptly and were fine. However our mains (three people) took well over an hour and the place wasn’t even busy. Two of the three mains were horrible. The Thai beef salad was a joke - just a green salad with overcooked beef and some insipid sauce smothered over it. The vegetables in the green prawn curry were hard and undercooked. The crab was however fine. Ordered a roti and peanut sauce with the mains - didn’t arrive at all. I refused to pay for the beef salad. Very disappointing experience. This place needs to lift its game considerably if it’s going to last. We...