Maple House
Level 1, 81 O’Connell Street
North Adelaide Village
North Adelaide South Australia 5006
W not available
E not available
T 8361 9005
F 8361 9002
OPEN 7 days, lunch 11.00am to 3.00pm, dinner 5.00pm to 10.00pm — take away available
FOOD In the last few days I’ve had a couple of fights with floor staff in restaurants. One was at Ying Chow the late night haunt of the Adelaide restaurant trade mainly because it is the only place left open at about midnight that doesn’t serve bad pizza. The long beans were in fact ordinary old (literally) French beans and came without blistered skins, XO sauce and had just four miserly slices of chilli. Our complaint met with a contemptuous shrug and no attempt was made to put things right. Add to that the beef tendon hot pot a long time favourite had a couple of mingy slices of tendon and mainly badly cooked beef and not enough juice. So it was cheap, so what if it’s bad? What’s the point? It makes me especially furious, because I work with people who go to extreme lengths, not just to please their customers but take every complaint personally because they are always trying to do their best and to be truthful I want to give me money to them.
Sometimes when you start writing a review you wonder just how to get the tone perfectly right so that anyone who takes up the review will be led to the right dishes and enjoy the same experience. The Maple House has been open almost a year but hidden away on the first floor of the North Adelaide Village Centre without someone drawing it to your intention you’d be pretty unlikely to notice it driving past a street as busy as O’Connell street.
Described as “Asian” the menu is long and a mish mash of just about every dish from the continent. As is common with restaurants of this type the floor staff have little English and absolutely no knowledge about the menu (or the wine) so there is very little guarantee a having a good time unless you’re a regular with a relationship to the restaurant or in the know. A family we know as keen cooks and restaurant goers (North Adelaide locals) were clearly at home, the chef and manager Luent Hoi wandering to and from their table making sure they were okay and promising their Thai favourites on their next visit. On another table a single diner also clearly at home received a fabulous big crab, conveniently cracked for easy eating. He ate so precisely and enthusiastically and rapidly demolishing the monster to a small pile of shell and vanished clearly satisfied. It did look terrific, reminiscent of the fabulous chilli crab of Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the isthmus from Singapore.
Luckily we had come pre warned and knew exactly what we wanted to eat thanks to a tip off from the Rockford Stonewall Table chefs Alison Cribb and Michael Voumard who had told us precisely what to order. Belechan Kan Kong (Malay style water spinach $10) on their menu, salted fish and chicken fried rice $12 rice and ma po tofu $14.50. To that we added a seafood dried scallop soup $8 and sang chow bow $7 (their spelling not mine).
The scallop soup, transparent and gently thickened was delicately flavoured, subtle with different seafood textures. It was good. The sang choy bow came with two lettuce cups nicely cooked chicken filling with the crunch of puffed rice noodles; generous for the price it also tasted good. The rice and tofu were mammoth portions. The rice was perfect, each grain separate, the chicken tender and seasoned and the whole dish nicely spiked with the chewy salty fish. This style of rice is not and “in your face’ type of dish but relies on very subtle complexities to make the whole. Last year if we had been asked for the best ma po tofu in Adelaide, without reservation it would have been Dumpling King on Moonta Street in China town, but whilst we still love their crispy bottomed dumplings their success with a westerner clientele has seen their version become laden with commercial sweet chilli sauce and a shadow of its former self. At Maple House it works with one small exception of having a slight sweetness (yes commercial Thai sweet Chilli sauce) but administered with a very restrained hand. The texture of the bean curd and taste of the dish in a thick tasty velvety sauce was excellent and next time we’ve warned the chef we’ll be ordering both dishes again and being explicit about not having any sweetness with the tofu. It took two tries to get the kang kong and whilst it was minus the traditional sliced chilli that is fried almost black with the blachan it was terrific. Many westerners baulk at the taste of stinky shrimp paste and to my amusement our Shanghainese estage Joyce Ying, here for work experience in several Adelaide restaurants baulked at the taste of the blachan finding it really unpalatable.
It is a funny thing that more things go wrong on a quiet night in a restaurant than on a busy night. The lack of pressure seems to make everyone languid and forgetful and two floor staff looking after about 14 people doesn’t make for them looking efficient and we are mindful of the fact that an enormous amount of food and two glasses of wine worked out to just $57 for two people, so Maple House is very good value for money.
Luent Hoi repertoire’s is broad, he’s been around for a long time and could rattle of working for restaurants that were around when I was young (a very long time ago) but now we’ve found him next time we’ll be sticking our head in the kitchen and making sure we get exactly what we want and we’ve warned him behind us there will be plenty of diners who share our sentiment about the sacrilege of putting Thai sweet chilli sauce, even a tinsy bit, into ma po tofu. We’ll also be giving that mighty great crab a go!
WINE wine list is devoid of vintages and a mish mash without any particular form but there are a quite a few favourites and prices are modest. Knowing what you like and want will undoubtedly be an advantage.
CHEF MANAGER — Luent Hoi
