chicken curry Archives - One Piece Left

The Piano is a contemporary Thai restaurant situated on Bridge Road, Richmond. We found these guys based purely on the fact that we were craving for fish! For some reason, one weekend we found ourselves starving at 5:30PM. We knew there were a lot of Vietnamese/Thai restaurants in Richmond who were capable of serving up a mean dish of fish. Which one were we going to? We had no idea. So we literally drove to Richmond, parked the car and started looking for restaurants. We found The Piano because they had a steamed barramundi on their menu, perfect for a Melbourne winter night!

We arrived at the Piano all smiles, but the waitress managed to wipe that off in about 5 mins. NO BARRAMUNDI! I looked at the time and it was only 6:30PM! It’s always been puzzling to me how restaurants can not have something right near their opening times. She offered to replace the barramundi with salmon, what choice did I have? We agreed on the salmon. Helen and I decided to drown our barramundi sorrows with some cocktails, which just happened to be $10 each because we it was happy hour.

We decided to get a dry martini and espresso martini. The waitress informed me that it was going to be an extra 10min wait because they needed to turn on their coffee machine. In my head I was thinking ‘yeah whatever, I’ve lost my barramundi already’. What proceeded was quite possibly the two worst cocktails we’ve ever had! The dry martini had a weird sourness to it, and the espresso martini was way too sweet. This happy hour was turning to be not very happy at all. Just as we were mumbling to ourselves how crap the cocktails were, the waitress came back out and told us that it was going to be a 30min extra wait on the confit duck, because they needed time to slow cook it! At this point I was about to flip the damn table and walk out! Fortunately for them, the waitress was extremely nice and apologetic, otherwise I would have put a $20 note on the table and walked out. I couldn’t remember a time where we hit this many roadblocks before any food even hit the table.

As it turns out, there was light at the end of the tunnel. The food here was absolutely impeccable. The Penang chicken curry was one of the best curries I’ve ever had. It had great flavours with a smooth creamy texture, and went beautifully with the coconut rice. I soon forgot about the barramundi because the salmon was cooked wonderfully. Salmon is unforgiving in the sense that it gets tough as soon as it’s a bit overcooked. The ginger broth was delicate yet flavourful, the mushroom, baby corn and spring onion all doing their part to compliment it. We couldn’t stop sipping on the broth, it was deeeeeelicious! The stir fry beef was an angry order because of the confit duck, I didn’t even realise I ordered it until it was placed on our table. Whilst it wasn’t as good as the other two dishes, it was still nice and I couldn’t fault it.

Well there you have it peeps, after a horrid start, The Piano finished on a positive note. The experience as a whole was mediocre, but the food was legit here. I feel as though there’s room for improvement with their stock management and also their drink mixing. It wasn’t worth getting a cocktail here for even $10, as they’re simply horrible. I’d be happy to come back purely for their food, but even then it feels like I’m dodging bullets in order to get the dishes I want. I’m conflicted, so I’ll leave the decision up to you guys for this one!