A night out ...

... a friend, Fiddles, and I had agreed to try Mr Rockpool's new happening place, Spice Temple, originally because we thought it was not licenced and so would be a nice, cheap(ish) night out. Tonight was it.
We let Mr Brown tag along so he wouldn't have to have cheese on toast for dinner.
It was licenced, very, very licenced, 100 wine kind of licenced.
But what the hell, and so, to start Fiddles & I ordered a carafe of Pig, one of the cocktails based on the Chinese calendar, Mr Brown ordered some beer or other.
We had read this review just the other day, so I knew to avoid the menu items in red (and with dishes called hot and numbing white cut chicken, who could blame me) and started with northern style lamb & fennel seed dumplings (yummy) and the lamb & cumin pancakes, (we are Australian, we love lamb).
For the main courses we ordered the Guangxi style roast pork belly with coriander, peanuts, red onion and sesame seeds, my that was deliciously heady with coriander and topped with crispy pork skin. And, because you have to eat your greens, we ordered the broccolini with house made oyster sauce.
Then, we waited and waited for our tea smoked chicken and in the end Mr Brown crash-tackled one of the pretty boys in black skinny jeans and asked if the chicken had been killed yet? Apparently it had as it arrived not long after, a whole #10 sized chookie, succulent and beautifully redolent of tea – with a dusting of Sichuan pepper (no apology though, for forgetting our order).
We asked for the bill, hinting that one or our party had to catch a bus, and waited 10 minutes, the bill arrived, we plonked a credit card on the plate, popped it under the spotlight and waited. It got to the point Fiddles was going to miss her bus, with the next one in an hour, so we scrounged together the cash, no tip (we can still do that in Australia, they don't chase you down the street - hooray for a decent minimum wage), and left.
It's a pity really, the place was beautiful, the background noise not excessive, we could chat but not hear next door, the food was really terribly good, as you'd expect. But the service, what a let down. I've a mind to ping them some feedback but, I'm not a name, it's a funky new place people are clamoring to get into, so I don't suppose they give a damn.
It would be cathartic though.