Present: Karen, Jim, Megan, John, Lara,
We headed off to Erindale to visit an old favourite, the Oriental Terrace. It’s a family-friendly restaurant where the owners know all their regular customers, even those (like us) who haven’t been for a while. Although the menu is predominantly Chinese, there is a reasonable selection of tasty Malaysian dishes.
We started our meal with the Spicy Crispy Duck (half) as an entrée. Always a winner, the deep fried (dry style) duck is reliably delicious served with Hoisin sauce and Chinese pancakes. We then moved onto the Vegetarian Chinaman’s hat. This dish has a nice mix of stir fried vegetables (including bean sprouts) with a light style sauce and a soft fried omelette. Although we love this dish, it’s also served with Chinese pancakes and we thought it might be an odd choice after the spicy duck. However the owner suggested serving it separately as a second entrée and this worked really well.
For mains, we had 3 dishes (for 5 people) – the Shantung chicken, BBQ pork and vegetables and the seafood combination with crispy rice. The seafood was the pick of the main dishes. It had a nice selection of seafood in a lovely creamy “soup”. The crispy rice (which was added at the table to maintain its crispiness) mopped up the delicious sauce and gave the dish a nice textural contrast. It was a wonderfully filling dish for a cold winter’s night.
The other dishes weren’t as good as the seafood. Although the Shantung chicken is normally excellent, this version was a little spicy for our taste and didn’t have the crispy skin we had come to expect. The BBQ pork was also quite nice but a little bland – the BBQ pork was overshadowed by the vegetables when it should have been the other way around.
For dessert (yes, there was room again), we had a mix of toffee bananas and apples to share. It was a nice light way to finish the meal.
Overall, a great night and we’ll be back again.
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