Spring

Restaurants stand or fall on one simple premise: consistently good food. The bells and whistles – chandeliers, cutlery, glossy menus and starched table linen – are welcome distractions, but not at the expense of the food. It’s a simple reality that too many restaurants still fail to grasp. Because the more sensory hoopla a restaurant tries to pile on, the more pressure it puts on the kitchen to deliver the goods. Spring walks this tightrope awkwardly, teetering at times, but recovering its balance at crucial moments. The setting recalls a Crouching Tiger theme, with original 19th-century high walls, Chinese gabled roofs, an expansive courtyard and the whisper of history seeping from beneath the coat of fresh paint. Inside the two-storey house (sadly not the original, but rebuilt in the late 1990s), hardwood floors, a pastel palette, garish yellow tablecloths, and a mish-mash collection of stone horses and Chinese chaises are a somewhat bland background for Chef Lin Zhi’s compact southern Chinese dishes. A quick scan of the menu reveals some intriguing items, including fried prawns marinated in Fuzhou tea, cumin flavoured lamb ribs and a pot of braised pigs trotters with duck, chicken and mushrooms. But what’s annoying from the outset is how the staff tries to steer the diner away from these dishes and toward expensive items like lobster and geoduck clams. On one visit, the waitress calmly recommended the fatt tiew cheong (Buddha jumps over the wall - pictured above) at $98 a serving, when I’d already indicated we just wanted a simple soup. We got soup anyway, as small complimentary bowls of clear, sweetish, salty consommé arrived at the table with a single, snowy-white fish ball floating decoratively in the midst. The fish paste was a little too soft for my taste, but the purity of the stock held promise for the rest of the meal. But here the kitchen’s inconsistency is a little odd, because while some of the food was outstanding, the occasional dish showed carelessness and inattention at the stove; though I suspect the fault lies with the calibre of the line cooks. For instance, the bitter gourd soup – a light and smooth jade purée streaked with ribbons of egg white and tiny shreds of scallops – won plaudits. It will not be to everyone’s taste, but I loved its vividly green bitterness. Yet the kitchen that produced such a velvety, subtle soup was also responsible for stir-fried kailan overcooked to such an extent that the vegetables were reduced to dry husks, not even salvaged by the good oyster sauce. At $14 for around six sprigs, it was a very expensive failure. Equally disappointing were the siewmai from the small dim sum menu – three rounds of over-steamed pastry, filled with bland pork and topped with a clump of what tasted like shredded dried scallops; and a stir-fried beef where the flavour of little spirals of thickly minced meat was completely overwhelmed by thickets of boring shredded lettuce. Just as I was beginning to get really nervous about the meal, along came the fried vegetarian bee hoon – a perfectly moist, crystalline tumble of opaque threads, its white mass embedded with studs of green chives and slivers of carrots. It was a master class in technique, and proof, once again, of how extraordinarily satisfying a simple dish can be when done well. But the star attraction – and a dish for which I would return again and again – was the deep-fried spare ribs: lightly battered nuggets of pork, sautéed in a wonderfully gooey tomato-based marinade with pale hemispheres of crunchy chestnuts and a shower of chopped garlic. The result was first-rate comfort food that needed nothing more than a bowl of steamed rice and an appetite. With such highs, it’s a pity so many other dishes didn’t have the same impact. (Fried rice with abalone in red vinasse pictured).