• China Red

Shop 6, 206 Bourke St
Melbourne 3000
03 9662 3688
www.china-red.com.au

What a fitting way to spend Chinese New Year's Eve: eating dumplings in Chinatown.  The sister restaurant to everyone’s favourite, HuTong, one cannot help comparing China Red to its predecessor.

The décor is pretty.  The appetite stimulant of the colour red, is no doubt a strategic move - and keeping with the name - but the space is attractive and Chinese inspired.

Digital monitors are mounted on the walls for you to order.  The food will be at your table soon after.  The screens let the waitresses focus on filling your glasses and bringing the dishes to your table.  This is the next bonus of China Red, the staff are much more attentive.  It is not as busy too.  We arrived to an empty downstairs section at 12:30pm, which became more crowded but still had tables spare at 1:40pm.
China Red has far more vegetarian dishes on its menu than HuTong, four pages are devoted to vegetables.  We ate the mushrooms with wheat gluten.  This dish was delicious with a variety of funghi and a tasty sauce.  The serving was large but we managed to enjoy it all.  There were many other tempting and interesting dishes on the menu too.


We also ordered the vegetable dumplings.  Bright green and filled with glass noodles, mushrooms, carrots, greens and herbs these were perhaps even better than the spinach dumplings at HuTong.

Apparently the Shao-Long-Bao are better at HuTong’s than this newly opened restaurant, but with more class, service and choice for vegetarians, the quality of the signature dish is insignificant.

China Red on Urbanspoon