Crab cafe

Our local eating precinct is in Box Hill, about five minutes' drive up the road. It's predominantly Asian and we can choose between dozens and dozens of Cantonese, Sichuan, Northern Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian and Indonesian restaurants.

I'd been wanting to try a new-ish seafood restaurant, with live seafood in the window (Hong Kong nostalgia), so last night we had our Sunday family dinner at the No 1 Cafe Seafood Restaurant.

We ordered the mud crab banquet, which started off with chicken soup. We had eaten most of it by the time I remembered to take a photo.

Next we had mud crab in XO sauce and noodles. XO sauce is a Cantonese sauce (Hong Kong again) made with dried scallops, dried shrimps, chilli and garlic. Apparently it's called XO sauce after XO (extra old) cognac. XO sauce doesn't contain cognac, but 'XO' suggests high quality, luxury stuff. 

We are very fond of deep fried crispy flounder. We had almost eaten half of it by the time I took this photo.

Does Luke ever eat Chinese without including salt-and-pepper squid in his line-up of dishes? The answer is no. Here is No 1 Cafe's version of Luke's staple dish.

Starting to feel a little full and we are slowing down now. We can still have a little creamy crab and choy sum with steamed rice. I admit, though, that we were flagging.

It was all very tasty. But some of us suspect that this banquet included a fair bit of MSG, after a restless night following the banquet. Yet another Cantonese tradition ...!