Bamboo House

Little Bourke Street has changed around it many times since 1984, but this fine-dining room has held its ground as the address that first brought a full northern-Chinese menu to Australia. Four decades on, the cooking still reaches north for its signatures, tea-smoked duck with its perfume of camphor and leaf, pan-fried pot stickers, Shanghai dumplings, while the Cantonese side of the kitchen turns out barbecue pork and steamed scampi in a delicate garlic sauce. Peking duck remains the centrepiece, carved with the ceremony the dish deserves. The setting leans traditional and considered rather than fashionable: white linen, attentive floor staff, the measured tempo of a restaurant that has hosted a generation of family banquets and business dinners. Private rooms handle the larger celebrations, and the cellar is properly stocked. In a city now crowded with regional Chinese specialists, its distinction is one of precedence, this is where much of Melbourne first tasted the food of the north, and it has kept faith with that menu while the trends came and went. Come for the duck, stay for a table laden with dishes that helped teach a city what northern Chinese cooking could be.