Chanhouse

January 31, 2025

   

We enthusiastically accepted our friend Nat's invitation to join her and Ben at Chanhouse to try their special yum cha menu in celebration of Lunar New Year ($48 per person). Chanhouse was barely on our radar; it's a vegan, allium-free and alcohol-free Chinese restaurant in a modest shopping strip within residential Doncaster. Inside it's cute and comfortable, and we were happy to put ourselves in their hands with the set menu.

   

The staff rapidly served a first pot of Chinese tea and kept it replenished throughout the meal. Shark fin-style soup followed soon after, gently salty and flecked with tofu threads.

   

Then came plump crystal dumplings and steamed siu mai stuffed with mock pork, both tender and savoury.

   

I think I clapped my hands at the arrival of the turnip cake, with its thin crisp char on the outside and soft, velvety centre - this one included a bit of mock ham.

   

The fried dumpling was my favourite dish of the night - the golden-fried exterior gave way to a thick rice dough layer with a real chew to it, then a molten mock meat centre. It had a surprising sweetness to it!

   

The sweet & sour fried gluten was a novel rendition for us - the gluten was very soft, airy and absorbent, the least dense mock meat I've ever encountered. It had soaked up much of the sauce, which was translucent and brightly tangy.

   

The salad prawn rolls were crunchy-battered, Nat's favourite of the night as they brought her back to the seafood sticks she enjoyed as a youngster.

   

I was more fond of the fried taro dumplings with their delicate, lacy shell and sweet starchy centre.

   

By this time I was very satisfied, and it was difficult for me to imagine digging into the rice rolls. These tender layered pillows went down surprisingly easy thanks to a dark, mushroomy sauce and we cleared the plate.

   

The finishig jellyish ginger cake was more texture than flavour, and a little fruit was the best possible way to cap off an incredible feast. We were all delighted by this meal and the friendly, well-coordinated service we received. I'm looking forward to any opportunity we get to try Chanhouse's standard a la carte menu.

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Chan House

21 Rosella St, Doncaster East

8806 9056

Lunar New Year menu

https://chanhouse.tuckerfox.com.au/

Accessibility: Chanhouse has a narrow, shallow ramp on entry. Furniture is regular height with backed chairs with a mixture of dense and generous spacing throughout. We ordered at the table and paid at a high counter. We didn't visit the toilets.

Vegie Mum II

December 8, 2013

We gathered up a posse of veg*n food bloggers (featuring Rachel, Steph, Hayley and The Simple Eater) on Sunday night and headed out to Doncaster for a return trip to the popular mock-meat restaurant Vegie Mum. It's very much a typical suburban Chinese place - plastic tables, plastic plates, friendly staff and a ludicrously long menu. The only difference is that it's all vego. The manager was out and about the night we were there, organising birthday songs, suggesting dishes for us to order and generally being charming. We put our faith in Steph and The Simple Eater to do the ordering, and they put together a very impressive spread for us. A brief warning: not everything on the menu is vegan - eggs pop up in a number of dishes, so keep your wits about you.

They got us started off with a complimentary bowl of this tomato-y broth, which didn't really do a lot for me.

As part of the ordering process, The Simple Eater managed to negotiate this off menu delight - a mixed entree platter (the price is lost to the ages I'm afraid). It was made up of deep fried taro, chicken drumsticks, a fake abalone salad and a surprising batch of scrambled eggs. The taro balls were super starchy and really needed heavy saucing to really work, but the real highlight were the little chicken drumsticks, with crispy 'skin' coating some excellent mock chicken. I was already starting to get full as we finished this platter - good thing we'd ordered 8 more dishes I guess!

We also ordered a couple of roti ($4 a serve) to dip into the saucier dishes - they were thin and flaky and helpfully pre-shredded for sharing purposes.

The first main dish to arrive was the combination fried rice noodle ($10) - thick rice noodles, fried up with broccoli, carrot and a whole bunch of different mock meats (at least char siu pork, prawns and chicken). The sauce was mild and a bit sweet and the noodles fried enough to have just a hint of wok hei.

The lemon chicken ($15) was slightly different than the classic Oz-Chinese dish - rather than the usual soggy, sweet mess, this was a dish of crispy friend 'chicken' pieces with a tangy sauce to pour over. Excellent.

My favourite dish of the day was the assam fish ($18) - battered chunks of fishy tofu served alongside a tangy and slightly sour tamarind-based sauce loaded up with beans, carrots and tomato.

The Sichuan eggplant hotpot ($18) was tender and oily, with lovely sweetness but minus the chilli hit that I'm looking for in my hotpot.

The curry chicken ($15) had a bit more heat to it and had a nice balance of coconut fattiness and fresh veggies as well as plenty of chunks of soy-based chicken. This worked particularly well with the roti.

The mapo tofu ($14) was probably the most disappointing dish of the night - the tofu, veggie and mock-pork combo was ideal, but the sauce was completely lacking in chilli, leaving the whole dish a bit bland.

We ordered a serve of Chinese greens ($15) to break up all the mock meat - just wasted calories as far as I was concerned.

The final dish was the Char Kuey Teow ($10), which had been delayed via the initial inclusion of egg. This remade version was solid - smokiness from the wok the dominant flavour (the side of chillies was good idea to add a bit of punch).

For those of us who could still fit more in, things were wound up with some refreshing orange slices and little jellies.

I'm still stunned that we managed to work our way through most of this food - it was a ridiculously big meal, with lots of highlights. You can see why Vegie Mum is so popular (it was heaving with people the whole time we were there) - the service is friendly and the food is decent. You get more out of it if you go in a group and can order widely - it's definitely worth putting together a gang and paying it a visit.

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Read about our first visit to Vegie Mum here. Since then it's been given the thumbs up by vegan about town, melbourne with the rocket, egg tarts and apple pie, The Food Society and The Good Hearted.

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Vegie Mum
27 Village Avenue, Doncaster
9816 322
entrees $3.00-12.00, mains $9.50-25.00

Accessibility: There are a couple of steps up at the entry, then things are flat and relatively high density inside. We ordered at the table and paid at a low counter. We didn't check out the toilets.

Vegie Mum

November 5, 2012

Cindy and I decided to make the most of our lazy long-weekend in Melbourne by hitting up some of the more far-flung vego restaurants in town. Having ticked off Aum Shanti on Saturday, we made plans for an early Sunday dinner at Vegie Mum in Doncaster. Nestled in a pretty unappealing looking strip-mall, Vegie Mum isn't trying very hard to win style points. The basic tables and chairs and sparsely decorated walls gives this place an almost food-court ambience. Still, the menu looked promising - pages and pages of Chinese and Malaysian-style mock-meat dishes, covering the regular chicken and pork dishes but also incorporating a few wackier options like coconut prawns, kung-po squid and furry mushroom hotpot.

It's a pretty overwhelming menu, and it would be wonderful to come in a bigger group and just go for one of the many banquets they offer ($20-$30 per head, for groups of four or more). We ended up just ordering from the specials page, splitting two mains, a serve of rice ($2) and a roti ($4) between us.

First up was the Malaysian-style dried veggie beef rendang ($17).

The combo of mock-beef and big chunks of zucchini worked surprisingly well in this curry. The sauce was sweet, spicy and fragrant but fell a bit short of the standards set by Loving Hut. By the time we got through this, I'd decided the problem was too much sugar - it wasn't bad by any means, but didn't quite hit the heights I was hoping for.

In contrast, the Soy Fish with Nyonya Sauce ($18) was a complete winner.

The sauce was spicy and tangy, with a citrussy flavour shining through alongside a decent chilli kick. The combo of green beans, okra and excellent soy fish slices worked perfectly - this is possibly a challenger for White Lotus' famous tamarind fish. 

We were pretty stuffed after getting through those two dishes, so the lack of a dessert menu wasn't too upsetting. Our waitress did drop off these weird little jelly palate cleansers to wind things up, paired with a couple of slices of orange. It was as much as I could squeeze in.

Vegie Mum is an excellent mock-meat option, particularly if you find yourselves in the eastern suburbs for some reason. I'm not sure we'll board the 908 bus again in the near future - we've got a bunch of equally good (or better) options more locally - but I'm glad we checked it out. There's clearly a market for mock-meat in Doncaster though - they were doing a roaring trade at 6pm on a Sunday and have been around for nearly 10 years. Long may they continue.

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Surprisingly few bloggers have made the trip out to Doncaster. There are positive reviews from RaWd's Food Diary, OISHINBO and Wandering Vegans, while The Journal of the Whills weren't really excited by the mock meat experience.

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Vegie Mum
27 Village Avenue, Doncaster
9816 322
entrees $3-12, mains $9.50-25

Accessibility: There are a couple of steps up at the entry, but things are flat and relatively spread out inside. We ordered at the table and paid at a low counter. We didn't check out the toilets.