David's

IT'S the first words out of your mouth after leaving a restaurant that say the most. The immediate post-meal mortem. Who said it about David's? Was it me? Whatever the case, the verdict: that was underwhelming.

If restaurants are fundamentally about supply and demand, good Chinese at this point in Melbourne's dining life cycle is a sellers' market. When I came of restaurant age, the city's dining landscape was dominated by the Italians and Chinese. Where I hailed from, the Italian was for everyday; the Chinese was for big-ticket occasions.

The Canto barns - too many to name - were emblematic of a time and place: notions about ''fine dining'' married to the excesses of the 1980s and the tax-deductible business lunch. Only Flower Drum continues to excite.

David's was another matter. It came later, opened by Shanghai-born tea importer David Zhou about the end of last century in a split-level warehouse off Chapel Street. It made its mark thanks to a canny play for the wine market - ditching the status-obsession with show-off reds for a broad list of locals, plus a BYO policy to lure in the big fish with their private cellars. The food also went a different route, by way of Shanghai, long before regionality was a buzzword.

So what happened at David's to undermine its reputation as a place where it's altogether easy to be whelmed?

It's not difficult to see where they're going wrong. On a quiet night it's a mystery why everyone is seated in the dingy raised dining room to the rear, near the toilets and kitchen, when the street level is far more aesthetically interesting. A couple of banging house tracks courtesy of New Order put the following 10 minutes of silence into stark relief before the Bangles assault everyone with Eternal Flame. Have mercy.

Such taste glitches could be written off as a simple annoyances but it's emblematic of a deeper malaise. The staff approaches the task of waiting as a bunch of formalities to go through rather than an intuitive experience. And I'm sure I'm not alone in getting panicky ordering from a Chinese menu - typically lengthy documents that bamboozle with choice.

What's good, we ask. Depends what you like, comes the answer. Pressing the case, we're directed to the most popular dishes, which also read like the most prosaic.

So the food we tried at David's, trying to stick to dishes hailing from Shanghai, was better than the service, the room and the music. It didn't hit the heights of expectation but then I'm not sure we ordered particularly well.

The soup, for example. David's has an endearing concern with the health-giving properties of various ingredients and dishes - very Chinese, very appropriate given Zhou's other hat as a tea importer. So am I to judge the merits of the double-boiled chicken soup on flavour or virtues alone? On the former scale, there's a thin, underpowered broth, a single wolfberry (deep red, with a consistency like a large-seeded fig) and oversized lumps of dry, chewy meat. Triple boiled? I can only hope my immune system is the better for it. My appetite wasn't.

The other side of the table fared better with a duck soup - the broth silken and rich, with shredded duck, a few different types of mushroom, bamboo shoots and a discernible taste. The bowl has a large chip in the rim, one of the small details that add up to a bigger picture.

The ''mock crab'', a reluctant recommendation from our reluctant waitress, appears like a sexless, all-white vision: sliced scallop, small pieces of ling camouflaged inside a feather-light egg-white scramble. Its subtlety requires concentration but it's a lovely dish, with tiny pieces of ginger and black vinegar sexing up the dossier.

Da Qian chicken - we were told it was Shanghainese but Google says it comes from Sichuan - lavishes a dark and pungent soy sauce on a soft tumble of chicken pieces, tossed with fat slivers of garlic and ginger with the odd spring onion. It satisfies but there's nothing really to differentiate it from a thousand similar dishes.

From the specials list, an unusual-sounding lamb dish comprises soft tiles of what appears to be the belly, informed by vigorous dry spicing courtesy of cumin seeds, chilli powder, sesame seeds and salt. A lot of salt.

Each rectangle is overlaid with a thin golden pastry shell for a subtle effect amid the soft-textured, big-fat taste and there's a punchy chilli sauce, certainly house-made, on the side. This is more like it.

Also good - a vegetable dish of bamboo shoots and spinach, finely chopped so it becomes more of a soft green sauce informing the chewier attractions of the bamboo, all lifted by a viscous, stock-based sauce.

Desserts are entrenched in the oriental-meets-occidental ghetto: banana wontons with hawthorn fruit (they sound like a bit of exotica but look and taste like small raisins), wrapped in thick fried pastry with a heavy snowfall of crushed black sesame over the top. If you really can't head home without having something sweet, then go for it. A steamed chestnut pudding with that firm-set jelly consistency characteristic of glutinous rice flour - a bit like Play-Doh - doesn't quite make it into that category, despite the chocolate sauce squeezie-bottled over the top.

Some time after leaving us among the debris of dirty plates the waitress looks up from table resetting to fetch the bill. I can't feel the love tonight, although I wouldn't be surprised if Elton John started warbling about it on the stereo.

The food might have dazzled more if it had been attended by a sense of enthusiasm. Even some garden-variety interest would have raised the stakes. But - nothing. Like I said, underwhelming.