Restaurant Review: Nine Elephants

Location: 67 Village Street, Docklands
Phone: 03 9670 9909
Link: http://www.nineelephants.com.au/
Cuisine: Thai
Overall Impression: 6/10

Voted the #1 restaurant in Docklands on Urbanspoon (at the time of this blog post), Alanna and I were excited to dine at Nine Elephants. We both love Thai food and were keen to see if the restaurant would live up to its reputation.

One thing is for sure – a dining experience at Nine Elephants is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Our dishes were smacked full of spice. If you are not keen on spicy food, my advice is to let the chef know well in advance!

I was asked whether I would prefer my Tom Yum soup medium or spicy. When I chose “spicy”, I was warned that it would be “the real spicy”. Having asked for “extra spicy” at a lot of other Thai restaurants in Melbourne, I was confident I would be able to handle the spice just fine. I did not. It was a struggle albeit a tasty one. To be fair, I had been warned.

Apart from being the spiciest Tom Yum I have ever had, the noodles were tasty and full of flavour.

Alanna’s green curry had a nice balance of flavours and tasted very authentic.

We both thought the items on the lunch menu were very well priced. However, we both noticed that cheaper cuts of chicken meat that still had a lot of fat on them had been used in our dishes. 

Unfortunately, Nine Elephants did not live up to our high expectations. That is not to say that our experience of Nine Elephants was a negative one. 

The service was attentive and the ambience pleasant. Each dish was good, just not particularly special. The presentation of the dishes, much like the flavours, is conventional.

At the end of the day, it is the ambience and the service that impressed us the most at Nine Elephants.