The night we met John Lennon, his wife and their sidekick

Dinner, a show and performance

We ummed and ahhed about going to this place and I’m glad we decided to go in the end. I was thrown first and foremost because this place had a price per head, unusual for a typical Chinese restaurant.

We’d been told this was a must do dining experience and very authentically Chinese so off we went.

The first hurdle was finding the place. We had a print-out that said the restaurant was at no. 49. Our taxi dropped us off out front and we marched into the building. The door had what looked like Chinese writing so we barged in confidently. We should have realized that the teppenyaki like plates and the Japanese chefs were not a good sign but we kept on. We pronounced our arrival to the hostess and were quite puzzled when she kept shaking her head, despite our best ministrations. Then the pieces fell into place, the teppenyaki chefs, the Japanese chef, the word sushi written on the menu. Nuwan, dear Nuwan, had the good sense to stick our prized printout under the nose of the hostess. She laughed….

“No, no” she said….aha wrong restaurant.

We then wandered back out onto the street. It was full of truly asian scaffolding (bamboo) and we crawled under many dodgy looking structure. We passed a doorway that had what looked like a window inside.

Except Nuwan the brave walked straight in through what I thought was a window. So what did I do? I screamed! I thought he’d walked into the glass. My yelp bought out a construction worker who took one look at our map and walked us into a building so unremarkable we’d walked right past it.

Inside we found our reservation as well as a truly underground restaurant.

There was a real artsy feel to the place. Paintings of naked men and women adorned one wall and antique photos adorned another.

We were directed to our table and served water by a man who was dressed in a red t-shirt, green apron and what looked like gumboots. He looked neither pleased no displeased. Here was a truly neutral man.

Then stepped out John Lennon, or what can best be described as his Asian brother. He had the floppy hair, the lean build and even the wire rimmed glasses. John Lennon was the boss man and nothing neutral man did pleased him. Neutral man was unperturbed, he just kept pouring water.

Five minutes after we’d taken our seat John Lennon asked if he could begin serving us. We nodded and then we were regaled with the words we would hear no less than 6 times that evening as each new guest arrived.

John bought out 2 dishes; a dish of cucumbers in a thick brown sauce (sweet) and a pickled carrot dish of some description (spicy) and did his inaugural performance.

“Let me introduce our food. First we have 2 appetisers one spicy, on not spicy. Then we have 6 main courses one spicy, one not spicy, one spicy, one not spicy. This one (points to the two existing dishes) is vegetables….eat”.

Eat we did, the cucumbers and carrot were crunchy and true to John’s words…spicy and sweet respectively.


He then bought out the third appetizer.

“ This one is sweet potato noodle, it’s a little bit spicy I think.”

John was correct again, it was also tasty. A chilli noodle dish in a sechuan sauce topped with fresh red chillies, green onions and crunchy peanuts. It was also lethally spicy.

Course 2 was a white cooked chicken in another version of the Sichuan sauce topped with sesame seeds.

Neutral man then bought out little bowls of rice and John Lennon served us a chilli beef.

“ This one is the chilli beef, it’s a little spicy, better to eat with rice.” The man was a prophet.

We ate our chilli beaf, then came the minced chicken soup, a pork rib and sweet potato dish (not spicy), tofu in chilli (spicy) and we finished with pork dumplings in a chilli sauce.

To say I’d never had a dining experience quite like this would be an understatement. Not only was the food totally different to anything Flemington offered, no a chilli lemongrass chicken in sight. It was also a performance run by John and his fremesis Neutral man.

It took us a while to realize that the restaurant ran at a particular rhythm. Regardless of when you turned up John and neutral man did their best to catch you up to their speed. Even though the couple sitting next to us arrived a good hour after we did we ate dessert (white funghi, bean curd and a sugar syrup) at the same time. It was very interesting to watch.

About halfway through the night I noticed a tall thin lady standing at the entrance to the kitchen, dressed in an apron and boots. I pointed her out to Nuwan and he was convinced that the antiquey photos on the wall were her, who knows?

At the end of our meal John pulled the woman out from the kitchen and introduced her to each of the diners.

“This is my wife.” He said proudly “She’s also the chef.”

The next part no-one saw comings. Wife/chef also turned out to be a Chinese opera singer. She stood on the stairs of the restaurant and belted out something that words cannot describe. It had notes I’d never heard before!

We literally rolled out of the restaurant, we were that full. Even thought spending 2 hours eating put a little stress on our plans to get of the hotel on time, it was well worth the stress!