I don't know if the review by Shadow V giving this place five stars is a real review or a manufactured review.
BUT
The place deserves five stars all the way - bots or no bots.
This very real very live and bona fidely objective Yelp Elite reviewer thinks this is a fantastic place.
* * *
Claypot King is a Chinese Claypot restaurant in the gigantic Chinese food court at Box Hill Central shopping center.
It is actually a chain. There are other Claypot Kings elsewhere in the greater Melbourne area.
The menu is large for a food stall in a shopping court, but small for a sit down Chinese place.
As you can guess - claypots are the order of the day.
Claypot restaurants generally do soup as well.
I had a dried scallop, winter melon, chicken herbal health soup.
If you think Jewish chicken soup will make you healthy,
(and Jewish chicken soup really does work),
Chinese herbal health soup will make you even more healthy healthy.
It is lighter, more refreshing, and just as nourishing.
It has Chinese healing vegetables to boot.
Even though the soup was light and mostly broth,
The solid ingredients were delightful and fascinating.
The shiitake mushrooms were powerful and flavorful.
Dried scallops aren't as good as scallop scallops, but they had their charms.
Winter melon is to fill you up and is a background player.
There were various herbal bites I could not identify.
The chicken stock was light as Chinese chicken stocks tend to be.
This was no French double consomme.
The chicken was chopped the Chinese way.
(Take cleaver. Whack chicken randomly. Throw all the fragments, mis-formed or not, back into the soup. Go off and do something else.)
Chinese chicken chopping is not one of the magical attractions of Asian cuisine.
But the soup was absolutely positively divine.
I noticed while waiting for my soup that the claypots coming out of the kitchen looked outstanding.
I would love to have another thirty-eight dishes from the great Claypot King-dom. read more