Master Restaurant

MASTER Restaurant is a rough and tumble spot on the north-western corner of Footscray Market that makes its culinary intentions immediately clear.

Open the door and you are confronted by a gallery of burnished hanging meats; some slow-dripping with sticky juices - pieces of pork in both roast and char siu hues, ruddy ducks, sausages in deep fuchsia pink or rusty brown flecked with a marbling of white fat, golden chooks and quail. Behind them, like metal grain silos, are two huge, rather ominous metal ovens that support the restaurant's claim to roasting all its meats on site.

Opposite, funnelling you into the restaurant, is a wall of fish tanks. In one a valiant eel is trying to escape by swimming against an inflow pipe's current. He's getting nowhere. In the next tank there's a large zebra-striped fish that might be a pet as its tank has a kid's picture stuck to it, although I'm not sure whether the Chinese characters on the poster read "This is Charlie Fish; he is five" or "$58 a kilo".

The long, narrow dining room is lined with tables filled with a mixed bag of customers and like many we order a plate of three roast meats to keep us going as we digest the minutiae of a multi-lingual menu and the technicolour snowstorm of specials posters on the walls. There's some rather fine roast pork cut into rectangular lengths with well-rendered fat, a decent piggy flavour and good crust of crackle. Equally good are slices of saveloy-pink snag filled with a fine mix of pork and chicken that is surprisingly light and sweet with a stickiness reminiscent of an Italian cotechino sausage. Cross-sections of Cantonese roast duck make up the numbers.

Less impressive is a squab dissected by cleaver into a half dozen pieces or so. Its head is laid on the plate half turned around as if it's wondering "hey, what's that glinting behind me". The squab tastes to us as if it has sat around and even a dish of salt and Sichuan pepper mixed with lemon juice fails to pep it up.

Inspired by the prospect of channelling some of those valiant properties shown in the tank, we order sliced rounds of eel under a good black bean sauce. It's very muddy and almost bouncy in its texture. Worried about cultural insensitivity before passing comment, I ring Gilbert Lau (as you do) and ask him how the Cantonese like their eel. A little muddy and certainly firm is his answer. So the correct, culturally sensitive, comment on the eel is that for my Western palate I found it too muddy and rubbery. We leave a lot so it's a relief to see the escapee eel still swimming when we depart and avoid the guilt of taking his life in vain.

Equally pleasing is the sight of a malty brown liquor being ladled from a large wok over banjo-shaped ducks that look as if they have had a run-in with WileE. Coyote and a steamroller from the ever-helpful Acme company. This is the famous delicacy of butterflied and roast pipa duck, named after a 2000-year-old Chinese lute that, along with the sausage and the roast pork, would be a good reason to return. As for the eel, I'll leave that until the next time I'm entertaining Cantonese friends.