Mother Chu's Taiwanese Gourmet

Chinese tea $1.50

It's always an experience eating at Mother Chu's. Packed with students, weary shoppers and the constant chatter of friends, there's a constant thoroughfare of diners in this quick eats dumpling and noodle house.

You're quickly steered to a table by an efficient-looking waitress, a menu thrust towards you, and then roughly thirty seconds later she appears again, notepad in hand, ready to take your order.

There's a frantic scurry in the handbag when you remember too late (again) that once you order you must pay straight away. And there she stands with palm outstretched and waiting.

So the fast-forward arrival procedure makes the wait for your tea a yawning chasm of time slowly trickling away forever. Five minutes seems like an eternity, but suddenly it's here, a glass of tea with boiling water seemingly hotter than the Earth's molten core.

Blowing on the tea does little to cool its thousand-degree temperature, and your shrieking teeth are a futile barrier to the debris of tea leaves and chrysanthemum flowers that float persistently on top.

There's no time to dwell on this though, as your bowl of noodles is suddenly plonked on your table.


Szechuan tendon beef noodle soup $7.50

The Szechuan tendon beef noodle soup is a clear soup with rice noodles (a little overcooked for my liking) with bright patches of green vegetables, bits of chopped scallion and chunks of beef with soft jelly-like tendon. The beef pieces are slightly cold but warm up well when dunked briefly into the soup.

It's not as hot as I'd expected a Szechuan soup to be, and some of the beef pieces are almost crunchy with hard bits of tendon. It's eaten easily though, the soup slurped down faster than the still-scalding glass of chrysanthemum tea.

Mother Chu's Taiwanese Gourmet
Shop 1, 86-88 Dixon Street, Haymarket, Sydney
Tel: +61 (02) 9211 0288

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