Silks

Range at a Chinese pass

The first decision is range, not decoration. Silks sits inside Crown Metropol Perth, on Great Eastern Highway in Burswood, and it works as a premium Chinese and Cantonese dining room. The house names no chef, so the pass has to be read through the menu, which asks for control across many registers at once: dim sum, barbecue, seafood, noodles, rice, and sweets, each with its own timing and heat.

That breadth is the real technical demand here. A kitchen with one signature can drill it; a kitchen carrying steamer, wok, roast and pastry stations at the same service has to hold four kinds of timing without letting any of them slip. The useful way to read Silks is as a system of stations rather than a single dish.

Dim sum, barbecue, seafood, rice

Silks works in the broad grammar of premium Chinese and Cantonese cooking, with a menu that moves from hand-shaped parcels to the wok, the roast, and the dessert station. The dim sum side carries named pieces with clear bench-side demands: Prawn Black Gold Dumpling, Beef Siu Mai, Steamed Shanghai Style Pork Dumpling, Steamed Lobster and Caviar Dumpling, and Steamed Scallop Dumpling. Each one asks the kitchen to keep wrapper, filling, steam, and finish in alignment. A dumpling loses its nerve quickly.

The rest of the program widens the field. Silks’ Signature Fried Rice folds scallops, prawn, roast duck, vegetables, and XO sauce into a dish that depends on heat as much as garnish. Wok-fried lobster with organic tamarind sauce sits beside Szechuan lamb rack, lobster sung choi bao, prawn and pork wontons, blue manna crab fried rice, and Pan Fried Patagonian Toothfish with Home style Garlic and Ginger Sauce. There are heavier gestures too, including Dry Aged Rangers Valley Grain Fed Black Angus Striploin with Truffle Mandarin sauce, and brighter ones such as Wok Fried King Prawns with Honey Lime Glaze. Dim sum and high tea both run here, which stretches the service day as well as the menu.

Red, gold, river light

The room gives the food a formal frame. Michael Fiebrich Design’s scheme uses red and gold strongly, with a large dining room and private rooms looking toward the Perth skyline and the Swan River. It is a glossy restaurant inside a resort complex, but the more relevant detail is how much the room asks of the pass: dim sum for the table, seafood carried whole or portioned, rice dishes landing hot, desserts built with green tea, mango, mandarin, coconut lemongrass, pomelo honey, Szechuan pepper raspberry sorbet, and choux.

That variety can become noise in a less disciplined house. At Silks, the structure of the menu keeps returning to touch: folded dumplings, wok-seared shellfish, roast duck cut into rice, soft centres, crisp squid with chilli sea salt. Follow the hands at the steamer and the wok, especially when the Steamed Lobster and Caviar Dumpling reaches the table at Silks.