tien tien - 217 barkly street st kilda 3182 9593 9988

you might remember we tried to get into claypots recently? we ended up in wild rice. you can read all about that little fuck up here. well, we tried again last night with the response, 'yeah, should be a few hours wait.' these jokers don't take bookings in the regular sense. you have to turn up and put your name down or something like that. i don't really know because i've never got that far! so back on the street again and looking for a substitute - not having learned from the wild rice affair - tien tien was next door. byo, room for us, what more could we want?

now i'm not saying we're slow to order but we're slow to order. maybe we enjoy the fact that it pisses them off that we're eating on our terms but, hey, get over it. they finally gave up asking if we wanted to order after about an hour and we were halfway through our vino. i like to wait until they give up, declare victory, and then look around for a waiter to take our order. unfair? probably. do i care? no fucking way. i'm paying, i eat at my pace.

in the end we ordered a starter and ate that before ordering anything else. the mixed starter is, well, mixed. it's ok - spring rolls are very small and there's obviously a world excess of satay sauce (satay sauce mountain) because we had to root around for the chicken skewers under the sauce (oh, wait, was that sarcasm?). don't order roti expecting a large slab of bread either. looks like the excess of satay sauce is balanced by a shortage of roti. the bloody peanut sauce made an appearance here too. see what i mean? your meal may contain traces of peanut.

we shared our main which was a toss up between chilli octopus and amass (the chef's name?) fishpot. the fishpot won and in fairness it was better than we thought. a few raw chillies spiced it up annihilating the tastebuds a tad. we brought wine with us so for $50.00 we got a mixed starter, a main, roti and steamed rice. edible but not cheap.

we outlasted everyone again at the restaurant again including the four assholes at the next table. there's quite a thick line between loud and witty and being stupid assholes. these four built themselves a shanty town on the wrong side of that line. sure, we've been assholes ourselves but nobody wrote about it, right? we might go back to tien tien. probably fucking not unless we can't get into claypots again. claypots better be worth all this over priced, second rate food we keep ending up with.