Le Feu, Springvale

This is the lemming phenomena! Peer pressured or should I say Facebook pressured into trying a snail dish in a new restaurant, we did not enjoy the dish at all! By the way, the scene where lemmings rushed en masse off a cliff is now known to be an engineered shot. Lemmings are smarter than that, they do not follow other lemmings blindly. They were routed and chased by humans who have vested interests in creating a sensational but fake news. 

Influenced by a review on Facebook, I ordered whelk or sea snail in butter sauce ($26). Some parts of the whelk was fine - they were firm and a bit tough to bite and chew but fully cooked through. The butter sauce actually did not do much to flavour the meat. But the 'pads', the best description I can come up with to describe the part where the whelk presumably use to walk around was like the texture of a fingernail. They were not edible and removing them was not easy. As we slide the whelk out of the shell, it was slimy and it seems like they were not fully cooked through (but could be the nature of the whelks). As we have never eaten whelks, we did not know what to expect. In comparison to escargots we ate in France, these were much less enjoyable and I would not recommend this dish.

Luckily, we also ordered the beef pho ($18). Rare slices of tender beef on rice noodles topped with beansprouts and herbs. Le Feu is a gluten free restaurant and pho is almost always gluten free (unless there is soy sauce with the chilies, but it is optional) so it fits the bill.

If you go to this restaurant, do not order the whelk unless you have had whelk before and liked it!