Member Review by Chris Turner

Twenty years ago the Supper Inn was about my favourite place on earth. I'd be there as often as three times a week, trying everything from the coral trout with spring onion and ginger to the duck tongues with seaweed. For someone who thought Chinese cooking was lemon chicken from the suburban restaurants of 1980s Melbourne, the place was a revelation and an adventure -- a chance to discover the most exotic and delicious tastes of the mysterious East without leaving home. Low prices, white table linen and friendly, attentive waiters were an added bonus. (The decor was pretty ordinary but that sort of added to the magic!)

Then it became popular.

The food was still delicious, but maybe a little less so. The service was OK, but the waiters were often grumpy and things went wrong more often. And those now famous queues on the stairs began to reach the street. For me it was the end of an era and I went into mourning, returning only occasionally to console myself with stuffed scallops or perhaps some lamb's belly in pot.

With the queues getting longer, the service getting poorer and the place getting grimier, since then my return visits have become more and more infrequent. And after my last visit in December 2005, I doubt I'll be back.

The food is still delicious and the prices are still low, but everything else seems to have hit rock bottom. At our table, a teacup and the tablecloth were dirty. The waiter brought us a new cup but refused to change the tablecloth. When our food arrived, one of the plates had old food stuck to it, which the waiter scratched off with his finger and then put the plate back on the table. (And that decor that was pretty ordinary 20 years ago now looks plain shabby.)

I've never been hung up about polite, smiling waiters, fine napery, glassware, ambience and all that extra stuff -- if the food's good, that's what counts. But at the Supper Inn the quality of that extra stuff is now detracting from the food. And I'm not willing to put up with shoddiness when nowadays those suburban restaurants are serving food that isn't all that far behind the Supper Inn's in quality and that costs about the same.

But then again, every night the Supper Inn, and its stairs, are full of people who'd disagree with me.

Member Review by

I recently came across a definition for the word Icon on the internet. It read:

'those worthy of worship, beloved by many, achieving cult status'

and after eating out recently at Supper Inn I'd say it certainly meets the above definition.

For pretty much all of the 2 years I've lived in this fabulous city, I've wanted to eat out at Supper Inn. I've heard the name bandied around by so many Melbournian foodies that I felt I actually needed to eat there just so I could say I had! So, after (quite) a few post-work bevvies, friends and I arrived at the door of Supper Inn - slightly ravenous - and found a conga-line of other seemingly ravenous people lining the stairway.

Being from Perth, a town with so many restaurants and so few people that you generally don't have to wait for a table, my friends and I figured this line business was all a bit silly?especially at 8.30 on a Thursday night! We took matters into our own hands and sent the least wobbly of our high-heel shod friends up the stairs to negotiate?and voila, the Supper Inn actually expanded to fit us in! The staff obligingly opened the bottom section of the restaurant and the entire conga-line of waiting diners shimmied down the steps and off to various laminex tables.

Once seated however, our little Perth crew decided the atmosphere was non-existent (but for our rowdy banter) and we sashayed back to the (now empty!) stairs and politely requested a table in the Supper Inn proper - with a lazy-Susan if you don't mind (come on, everyone secretly loves a lazy-Susan). I think at this point we realised we had kinda pushed our luck as we were shown to a regular table by a silent, militant waitress. 'Ravenous' had now become 'I must eat or I shall gnaw your arm off' for at least one of our party, so we ordered sang chow bow to carry us over while we read the rest of the menu. The mince-in-the-lettuce was absolutely delish and definitely worthy of worship.

A nice touch was the contribution made by other cult members; previous visitors of this iconic eatery choose to spread the joy of their culinary delights - with the back of the ladies' toilet door containing a running texta, eye-liner and lipstick written list of what they consider to be the 'good', the 'gooder-er' and the 'bestest' dishes on offer. We went for the 'bestest' crispy skinned chicken and loved it. We also shared the szechwan sliced beef, the west-side duck, a very garlic-y seafood dish that came in a little dog-bowl ceramic dish and the requisite Chinese greens with oyster sauce.

All up, a mere $20 each?well worth it considering the food was fabulous, we got served and fed promptly, and were otherwise left to our own devices to be a boisterous little table of boozers, (though I got the feeling this little hide-away became beloved by many for these very reasons!)