House of Khong — Restaurant in Victoria

This Chinese restaurant is not authentic (I'm Chinese and can cook Chinese food). Although the decor looks like the kind of Chinese elements that Australians imagine, authentic Chinese restaurants wouldn't look like this. The dishes came out quickly, and the owner was very friendly, but the quality of the food was only average, below average even. We ordered many dishes, and I could only accept about half of them. For example, the Mongolian beef was overly dark and salty because of too much dark soy sauce. The fish portion was very small. The fried rice was greasy and definitely not authentic Chinese fried rice. This experience taught me a lesson: if a menu includes a lot of non-traditional Chinese dishes, it's likely a pseudo-Chinese restaurant, and I should leave immediately. If I lived in Bendigo, I wouldn't go to this restaurant again. Out of courtesy, we told the friendly owner that the food was good, but I am leaving this review in the hope that the owner will consider changing the chef. Thank you for your candid reply. I appreciate your recognition that the food may not be "authentic" Chinese cuisine, which can’t always meet the expectations of those seeking traditional Chinese flavors. That’s exactly why I shared my review. I’m not trying to demean your restaurant—clearly, no chef or restaurant can please everyone. Your dishes might appeal to many, though they didn’t meet my personal standards for Chinese food, given my 38 years of experience eating it. 😊

Lastly, I wanted to clarify that we finished all the dishes simply out of dining etiquette—we don’t want to waste food, whether at home or in...

"House of Kong"......More like "House of Wrong." I was excited to try this restaurant, as I've heard it's a "Bendigo Institution" that's not to be missed. Unfortunately, when a restaurant starts to serve fried rice with homebrand frozen vegetables.....it's time to re-think what you stand for as a business and if you have the passion anymore to cook.

We ordered another basic dish, Honey chicken....almost on point...almost. Little to no honey sauce/gravy (whatever you want to call it). The serving was also not a full serve, but the parts of the chicken covered in the sauce...delish!

My partner ordered the coconut curry chicken.....I totally didn't rate this, my partner thought it was "not great but not bad either". I'll leave that one there.

Half of me thinks we may have gotten a rush job as we were one of the last orders for the night, if not the actual last. Even so, I still expect more than half dried up prawn toast as an entreè and cheap frozen vegetables throughout what they call "fried rice".

Everything was indicative of the food being the last order to be cooked for the night. Red flags: It came out in under 10 minutes I observed takeaway container's being washed to be reused for something I don't know, I'd like to think to hold something other than food. Rooms leading out to the bathroom were cluttered and messy. Bathrooms.....meh. Nothing different from an other restaurant bathroom.

So, you can give this a miss. Or possibly eat in to see if the quality is different.

Ps The young girl serving behind the counter was wonderful,...

If you see the sign advertising a 3 course meal for $16.90 at lunch time, keep walking. I try to support local restaurants and give them business, but this advertisement is too good to be true. Unfortunately, the customer service here was atrocious. The waitress was very abrasive and rude, she never offered for us to order drinks and this makes me glad now because I didn’t give them a cent more than I did. I don’t care if you’re understaffed or have just been in the business too long, if you treat customers like dirt you have no place in hospitality. This woman sighed when people took too long to order (in her opinion), rolled her eyes, bullied people into ordering specific items (to make her life easier) talked down to us and obviously just wanted us in and out. To top it off the place wasn’t even busy. The food was tasteless, oily, colourless and might as well have been dumped out of a microwave meal. I attempted to eat the main and just could not. This place also considers a tiny bowl of fried rice shared between people as a course. Yes, looking back, we should have walked out but because I was attempting to be the bigger person I didn’t. And to just get the hell out of there we paid and left. This experience was for a table of 6 that could have become regulars, unfortunately the behaviour of the staff member alone is enough to ensure I would never set foot in this place again. But the food, this was the nail...