Gurney Drive

284 Victoria Street, Melbourne CBD

Today we continue our trend of reviewing Malaysian restaurants named after iconic makan streets as we hit up Gurney Drive in the Melbourne CBD.

Gurney Drive proudly proclaims to serve Penang Malaysian hawker food, however the decor was anything but! I expected to see plastic chairs and tables with disposable cutlery but instead what we saw was a rather nice restaurant, with a Straits/Balinese feel, not exactly your typical Malaysian decor.

There was a large gong at the entrance with a mid-sized Penang flag which looked a little out of place amongst the lovely paper lantern lamps with mood lighting, which got me a little confused – was I in Bali, or Penang, a restaurant, or in a hawker stall? It feels like neither! Hawker food in a restaurant setting – I’m slightly dubious about this concept. But the interior decoration wasn’t why we were here for, so let’s talk about the food.

Char Kuey Teow

I always measure a restaurant on how they cook their Char Kuey Teow. It’s a very simple dish, really – flat rice noodles, prawns, Chinese sausage, fish cakes, bean sprouts, spring onions, cooked with dark and light soy sauce in a hot wok – but it is not easy to get right. Gurney Drive’s Penang Char Kuey Teow came in a rather generous serving size and a slight burnt taste (which is great! It means the temperature it was cooked in was just right) and guess what… there were clams! What I found a little disappointing was that the presence of the clams did not contribute very much to the taste of this dish – it’s still missing that little something but I just can’t put my finger on it. This dish was oily, much oilier than Jalan Alor’s and they were a little stingy with the amount of seafood served. The dish came on a small piece of banana leaf which I thought was a rather nice touch.

Penang Fried Rice

After a being a bit sick of eating the usual curry laksas and Hainanese chicken dishes, I decided to try something different and get the Penang Fried Rice, which is basically fried rice wrapped inside of an omelette.  It looked interesting and tasty enough on the menu.

Then it came and I kicked myself for falling into the trap ordering fried rice when trying out a new restaurant.  Fried rice is either a dish that you get either right or wrong with no real in-betweens and 99% of the places I’ve been to seem to cook it exactly the same way.  It was good but it didn’t blow me away.  I can say the presentation was pretty cool, and the serving size was pretty big.  If you need a hit of fried rice, this will definitely go down well.

At the end of the day, I’m pretty glad I found Gurney Drive and I’m looking forward to trying the rest of the dishes there, like the Curry Laksa and the Har Mee.

I’ll post some scans of the Gurney Drive takeaway menu in a few days as well.

Taste: 8/10

Value: 7/10