Charming Spice Restaurant

I fairly recently moved from the US to Melbourne. And since my move, I have been trying in vain to find a Szechuan restaurant that compares well to the Szechuan food that I loved back home. Unfortunately, as with Charming Spice, it usually ends up just being bizarre.
It’s turned into an epicurean crisis and has me questioning the authenticity of the food back home. Despite my memories, maybe I never really liked Szechuan food?
I decided to take a trip to Charming Spice one day when my hankering for szechuan recurred. After perusing the menu for a bit, I finally decided to go the high risk/​high reward route and chose a hot pot of spicy fish (possibly one of many similar fish hot pot items on the menu). When the food arrived, I was a little confused how to make sense of it. First off, the fish was cut into rectangular pieces that contained an extraordinary amount of bones. This really made it almost impossible to eat the fish, especially with chopsticks. There may very well be some technique to eat the fish without chewing a mouthful of spiney bones, or perhaps some people don’t mind 50% bone content in their fish. The hot pot also had a fair amount of chili, szechuan peppercorns and lotus root, doused in a rather healthy amount of cumin. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a fish dish with cumin before, and I would not recommend it. The fishyness and the cumin overwhelmed even the chilis, making it a very strange tasting dish indeed.
Perhaps other dishes at Charming Spice are good. Some of the things that others were eating looked and smelled very nice indeed.

The (moderately) spicy seafood soup is very delicious. Serving size is big with generous chunks of smoothly cooked fish fillet. The cooked egg on top adds a unique touch to this standard Sichuan dish, and complements the taste well. Vegetables come in the form of bean sprouts (common for this dish) and celery pieces (not common but taste nice). The bowl of rice is a bit too little but you won’t notice it after eating the fish.
This dish comes as part of a lunch set menu that includes a complementary refreshing class of plum juice, or a soft drink. Overall, this is great value for money at less than $ 10.
Service is quick and efficient, which is all that can be expected for this price range. Will definitely be returning to try the other dishes.

Totally always packed with Asian uni students and people in the know who crave cheap, tasty food. It is best if you can come here with someone who can read the menu (most of it is in Mandarin) cause you probably won’t be getting my help from the staff. But you don’t come here for the service. You come here for the big portions, and the chilli. Well, I don’t come here for the chilli but it’s very hard not to get a couple hundred of those fiery little things in at least one dish you order. A very good chilli-​eating friend of mine looked like she almost died trying the chilli chicken dish. The chicken came buried in chilli. No seriously at first I thought it was some sort of joke to have a huge bowl of chilli placed on the table. But after some digging, there was fried chicken to be found underneath. To play it safe, stick to the dumplings. They’re tasty and there’s not a single chilli in sight. There are also some other dishes that don’t have a chilli symbol next to it on the menu, so go with those too.