Big Gun Chinese Restaurant

Late night yum cha. I never seem to go here at regular hours, I've also never gone here on a day off. I always go here just randomly on the way home after work cause we feel hungry, wanna treat ourselves and Maccas is not an option for some reason. On this occasion, my aunt had come back for a brief vision from Mackay and it was Lunar New Year so yeah.

Anyway, stopped by after work, sat down and started ordering. We were here for yum cha only, we completely ignored the lion dancers, who after several lacklustre minutes sat down to a meal themselves in the private dining room.

I ordered all the usual classics as well as a few other bits and bobs off their menu. Here it is by the way.

The whole menu

Top half

Bottom half

The specials

Har gao

Har gao, a nice solid prawn dumplings with translucent wafer thin skin and large whole prawns.They weren't the best I've ever eaten but they are well cooked and didn't give me food poisoning. Looking at you King of Kings Seafood Restaurant.

Siu mai and chicken bones!

Siu mai, a pork mince dumpling wrapped in a wonton wrapper, topped with a steamed diced carrot piece. ginger and black cloud fungus mushroom were also present. A tasty one, but I'm never a fan of this, my aunt loved them though.

Black bean chicken feet!

Black bean chicken feet, served piping hot and until recently, this restaurant served one of the best chicken feet ever barring my mum's recipe. They are very much a snacking sort of food, as you don't really get much nutrionally from this dish. You eat a few when bored and enjoy the delicious braising sauce.The texture of the skin is like when you steam chicken and the skin is left on, or when you have chicken skin in soup, soft and gelatinous. Generally you chew off a knuckle, suck off the skin and munch on the cartilage before spitting out the bone. This one had a nice dark colour, garlicky sauce, giant feet and had four to a serve. We liked this so much we ordered another serve straight away.

So much oil

Rice noodles and char siu. I haven't had a good rice noodle at a Chinese restaurant in ages, they tend to make them too thick and it loses its appeal. They should be soft, translucent and falling apart no matter how good you are at using your chopsticks. The char siu wasn't very good, composed of very small shreds of meat.

Chinese mayo is weird, its super sweet

Prawn spring rolls, they contained only three large peeled prawns and that was it, on top of a bed of mayonnaise. That being said, they were good, being scorching hot out of the deep fryer and a nice golden brown colour.

Chiu chao! Its fun to say

Chiu chao dumplings, I ordered these out of curiosity, sort of a mistake. These are a vegetarian dumpling containing peanuts, shiitake mushrooms, radish and garlic chives. I think it was an odd combination, and seemed very chunky. I didn't like it and only ate one, my mum tried one and disliked it and my aunt plain refused. Here is their wikipedia article.

Deceptively good looking

And a plate of seafood fried noodles. The seafood was overcooked, the prawns were fine, but the squid was chewy, the scallops were like bullets and the unnamed white fish was very soft. The noodles tasted like glue for some reason, like they hadn't been cooked properly from raw.

All in!

All in all, it was a bit mixed. Some things we liked and some things we didn't. At least service was prompt that night, most of the time its terrible there. The tea was a bit odd, it tasted like it had been sweetened for some reason.

I just remembered as well, I didn't get a picture of it, but I probably wouldn't eat the fish here. The day I went, there was a large, barely swimming silver perch fish that had several large white tumours erupting from its side. Something like this.

Gross

Big Gun Chinese Restaurant:
Atmosphere: 5, typical Chinese restaurant, chandeliers, red and gold everywhere.
Service: 6, hard to flag down, but they came out with everything. My memory of previous occasions has been even worse than this though, being ignored a lot comes to mind.
Food: 5, half were good and half were terrible. Five is a good average.