New Kum Den

For those of you who are familar with Melbourne City Chinatown food, you would probably have eaten at Kum Den at one time or another, especially when you were still students.

The place served cheap Chinese/Cantonese food in large, hungry-student portions. This was practically the place that students came to feed themselves. It wasn't about classy dining. It was about feeding the hunger. I can still remember that this was the place where the waiters would literally throw the plates & spoons to you (almost at you) when arranging the table cos they were too busy & business was exploding.

So when our cousins Michelle, John and Sharon made the trip down to see us, all the way from Clayton, Roger suggested The NEW Kum Den which is an upgrade of the earlier version.

There were six of us and we wanted to be comfortable. The New Kum Den, which is Kum Den No. 2.0 is opened one alley away from the old one and it has packaged itself as a family place, seemed to have maintain their tradition of cheaper food (without the cheapo frisbee-throwing service) but served in a more cozy & customer-friendly environment.

We also chose the place because we were suspecting that those three sweeties would want to pay for dinner which we would not allow as they were still in the category of students. But just in case they moved faster than the old folks, it would not be too taxing on them. Well, we were right but Greg managed to move faster. He had enough of boot-camp foochow training in bill grabbing (100 metres sprint).

These were what we had:

Duck with Yam deep fried

Spinach with 3 kinds of eggs

Some fried chicken with salted eggs

This was my favourite ~ Pipa Tofu.

The tofu was mashed and mixed with other ingredients like ham & vegies before being lined onto a chinese spoon to be steamed into the Pipa shape. It was then deep fried and served with sauce and some greens.

Kingdu Pork Ribs

Steamed Baramudi ~ Roger saw it still swimming in the tank before it was sacrificed to our table.

There were altogether 6 dishes including complimentary soup, rice and tea for AUD120 (RM280). Not bad for the price. But we do find the dishes slightly on the salty side. And you may notice we orderd a tact bit too much of deep fried food. Oops I wonder who did the ordering?! Nevertheless, the whole point was to meet up with the cousins, & we really enjoyed their cheerful & loud company, as always.