Omah’s: 338-342 Burwood Road, Hawthorn, 9818 7777
My score: 3.5/5
Reviewing restaurants isn’t a job that you get any sympathy complaining about and rightly so. But anyone who thinks it’s a parade of marvellous morsels and floor-scraping sycophants should have been with me the night I ended up at Omah’s. I started at a Malaysian restaurant one suburb away. The manager turned his back on us as we entered, the waitress didn’t have our booking, the ‘famous’ satay sauce was dishwater dull and all the other food was blah. The icing? The restaurant was chilly and when we mentioned our snap-frozen extremities to the waitress she informed us that it might be warmer later.
Luckily, by the time ‘later’ arrived, we’d decamped to Omah’s for dinner number two. Sympathetic yet? Well, staunch your tears because, apart from the pants-splitting dinner double play, this Malaysian meal was great. The new, large offshoot of the seven-year-old Port Melbourne Omah’s has birdcage light fittings and teak furniture designed to evoke 1950s Malaysian teahouses. I can’t vouch for the authenticity but the place is broodingly handsome and the comfort factor is high. Waiters are cheerful and enthusiastic and, if not always knowledgeable about the menu’s finer points, are justifiably proud of their workplace.
Mud crabs are a specialty, available year-round for a neat $39.90 (rather than the more usual market price), with a choice of five sauces, including salted egg, lemongrass, and chilli, which was our selection. First come the bibs, finger bowls and crab-crushing tools, then the plate-sized crustacean paddling in an intoxicating tomato-based eggy curry sauce. It’s messy, fun and very delicious. The roti, sadly, wasn’t flaky enough but it did a decent job of mopping up.
You don’t have to get crabby. There’s a great selection of laksas, fried noodle dishes and curries, and the good kids’ menu includes wokked noodles and fried rice. We tried seared scallops on yam cake (yummy but mostly yammy) and oysters battered with shredded vegetables (too much batter, therefore hot oysters, therefore waste of shellfish). The star dessert is the iced kachang, a wild slushy drizzled with palm sugar, rose syrup and evaporated milk, and stirred with creamed corn, agar jelly and lychee. It’s crazy and curious with so many different tastes and textures that it’s hard to stop eating it before the whole thing disappears, even if it does come at the end of two big dinners, one forgettable and one rather fabulous.
See their website.
More crabalicious:
Pearl, 631-633 Church Street, Richmond, 9421 4599.
Pearl has monthly full-moon crab feasts. Treats may include bloody mary crab shots, swimmer crab spring rolls and chill-fried mud crab.
Claypots Seafood Bar, 213 Barkly Street, St Kilda, 9534 1282.
Check the blackboard for the catch of the day but always consider the spectacular crab gumbo with mussels.
Crystal Jade, 154 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, 9639 2633.
There are crab steamed dumplings on the yum cha trolley but the a la carte specialty is goose foie gras stir-fried with snow crab.
First published in The Age, September 11, 2011
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