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Just Open: Tina's Noodle Kitchen, Melbourne CBD

Gemima Cody
Gemima Cody

The Dainty Sichuan crew, masters of spicy surprises, not only quietly shut their Bourke Street venue a few months ago, (the space is now occupied by the very similar-looking Lost Heaven – another Sichuan joint by the Hutong group), they've also very slyly opened another branch of Tina's Noodle Kitchen (there are two others in Preston and Box Hill).

This branch is on Swanston Street. But before you get ideas about quickly smashing a bowl of noodle soup between Comedy Festival gigs, just a warning that you're neither getting in or out of there in a hurry.

Despite the quiet opening, there's always a queue. It takes serious commitment to make a dent in the gigantic bowls that hit your table still bubbling and often covered with an insulating layer of chilli oil. After an hour I'm a shirt down and only an inch into a bowl containing beer-braised bone-in bits of duck, floating around with fistfuls of thin rice noodles, ruffles of black fungus, nutty soy bean sprouts and gelatinous strips of konjac cake (it's the mysterious grey jelly – plant-based! Very healthy!) in a chilli-laced broth with a few rogue sichuan pepper stings.

You've got a lot of choices here, most of them are noodle soup-based. There's beef and pickles, and pork liver for guts fans. Dainty Sichuan's famously numbing chongquin chicken makes an appearance – spicy fried chicken and soup, together at last.

It's a simple room of bare bricks and folksy Chinese ballads and people sweating bullets. It's cash only and there's no liquor licence yet, but there are fermented soy drinks, frappes topped with hundreds and thousands, and glasses of whizzed up watermelon and ice. Game, set, fire.

237 Swanston Street, Melbourne, 9041 6382, daintysichuan.com

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Gemima CodyGemima Cody is former chief restaurant critic for The Age and Good Food.

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