Hai Thien — Restaurant in Sydney

From the windows, you can see two pictures of a duck and a chicken. Evidently, they are the specialists in duck and chicken cuisine.

I walked in to the restaurant, hoping that I could try out the so-called "duck jelly". My first impression was that this restaurant smells a little...different. I sat down with my Vietnamese friends, and we flipped through the menu, and there it is. The fabled duck jelly. We quickly looked through the rest of the menu, and chose what we wanted to eat that day. Alas, luck was not on our side, as the waitress told us that they had sold out of the duck jelly for the week.

So I settled on the duck egg. What went through my mind was the delicious Chinese salted duck egg at that moment. Little did I know what would come to the table is totally unexpected.

This restaurant serves up a delicious boiled duck egg, featuring a baby duck inside. You eat that with some salt and pepper, and mint leaves. It looks a little intimidating at first, and the white rubbery portion is not at all tasty, But drink up the soup inside, and it will remind you of eating a regular fully grown duck. It is surprisingly delicious if you can force your mind to not think about how different it is!

I may come back again next time to try my luck with the...

I had the worst experience eating at this restaurant for the first time. The customer service was so-so they had trouble hearing our orders and ignored our complaints. The balut we bought came out raw the lady who severed us justified to us that "it was just turned the wrong way around and that they knew what they were doing, its supposed to be like that" (because other customers were looking) but we always eat this dish so we know what to expect, we knew it was raw. The avocado smoothies we ordered came out tasting bitter so we asked the lady why it tasted bitter she replied with "my apologies we forgot to add sugar" she took the drinks in and returned it to us looking the exact same and tasting the same. We also ordered noodles this was over seasoned with salt and msg. At this point we just gave up and paid for our meal and left. Worse experience ever! Don't...

Maybe the restaurant has gone through hard times but it wasn’t what it used to be. Was served by a woman who asked us three times what we wanted, when our congee came it wasn’t even hot let alone warm at its best. Asked for no peanuts because of allergies, and guess what..there were peanuts, politely asked can we get one without peanuts with the chicken dish we had, only to receive the same dish that was washed off with cold water and there were STILL peanuts on it!

So overall cold congee and cold chicken with peanuts(when asked for none) = recipe to lose...