In the office of Flower Drum’s general manager, Jason Lui, is a cache of old menus covered in scrawled signatures. Next to listings of sweet corn chicken soup for $5.50 and dim sum (“4 different varieties in a steaming hot bamboo basket”) for $4 are the scribbles of diners such as Lenny Kravitz, Nicolas Cage, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Hugh Grant, Jackie Collins, Tom Jones, David Bowie.
That roll call of famous guests is only one sign of the 50-year-old restaurant’s hold on the public. Its regulars include politicians, underworld figures and captains of industry, as well as food-world luminaries, all of whom come for their own reasons. But most would agree its consistency and standards are second to none.
“It has always served the best ingredients it’s possible to source in Australia, coupled with the most intuitive service you’ll ever find; I don’t know how you progress that even if you wanted to,” star chef Neil Perry says of the place he has frequented for 40 years.
Flower Drum’s impressive run was recognised this week when it was named Restaurant of the Year by The Age Good Food Guide 2026, the fifth time the Chinatown restaurant has earned the top gong.
In a food world fuelled by the glitzy and progressive, it is revolutionary that a restaurant that dates to the 1970s won the Guide’s highest accolade, particularly since it has barely evolved since the day it opened.
Perry’s connection to the venue runs so deep that there’s an off-menu dish named for him: “Neil Perry’s Noodles”, or egg noodles tossed with handpicked mud crab, ginger and shallot.
Those secret dishes and whether they’re available to those in the know has been much debated over the years, only adding to the venue’s allure.
Lui confirms there are indeed many off-menu items, including shrimp paste-marinated chicken wings; steamed savoury custard with crab or lobster; and a whole fish whose flesh is removed and made into a fish ball-like paste with pork sausage and tangerine, then stuffed back into the fish.
The restaurant has played host to the likes of underworld figures Mick Gatto and Graham Kinniburgh, and has been named as the favourite restaurant of former premier Jeff Kennett and billionaire Lindsay Fox. Racehorse trainer Bart Cummings and Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski were also fans.
Asked why Flower Drum is such a mecca for the power-broking, famous and influential, Lui says: “It’s the spacing of the tables and the privacy we offer; you can have a conversation without being overheard.
“Time and time again, people tell me how much they appreciate the tables being well separated from each other. That and the plush carpet that deadens the sound.”
For many of his regular famous clients, Lui says the restaurant has a comforting familiarity for them which is like “coming home”.
“It’s actually more than a restaurant,” Guide co-editor Emma Breheny says. “It’s a living, breathing organism that has never dropped out of the national dining conversation, all the while retaining the Cantonese classicism and blue ribbon service it opened with.”
‘Time and time again, people tell me how much they appreciate the tables being well separated from each other. That and the plush carpet that deadens the sound.’
Jason Lui, general manager
It was an inauspicious start for the Cantonese fine diner, which opened in a converted car park on Little Bourke Street in 1975. The original owner, Gilbert Lau, said the restaurant did not become popular for at least three years. He did not have to resort to borrowing more money, but survival was not guaranteed, Lau said at the time.
In 1980, Flower Drum scored two chef’s hats in the inaugural Age Good Food Guide. In 1985, it moved to the much bigger current premises in Market Lane, and by the late 1980s international celebrities joined the swelling ranks of diners jostling to book a seat in the crimson-carpeted, crisp table-clothed dining room.
Tony Tan, chef, author and educator, regards Flower Drum as one of the best – possibly the greatest– Cantonese restaurant in the world.
“That’s not being patriotic or parochial,” Tan says. “I have been to the best Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong, Lung King Heen with three Michelin stars, and Flower Drum is better. Everything is uncompromisingly brilliant, from the food to the service to the 35-page wine list.”
Breheny says that maintaining such high standards over decades is rarely seen in fine dining. “It’s an enormous accomplishment, especially when we’ve just lived through one of the rockiest periods for restaurants in recent memory.”
Flower Drum changed Australia’s understanding of Chinese cuisine. When it opened, Chinese food meant chop suey, sweet and sour pork, and deep-fried ice-cream to many people.
“What it has done since is put Melbourne’s reputation for Chinese food on its back and carried it across the globe,” Frank Sweet, co-editor of the Guide, says. “It celebrates Victoria’s Chinese history and connects us to Chinese culture.”
Jason Lui is the son of chef Anthony Pui Lui who, together with two other staff members Patricia Fung and William Shek, bought the restaurant from Lau in 2002. At 78, chef Lui still oversees the Cantonese-speaking kitchen.
“He is in about four nights a week,” says son Jason. “He oversees everything but often by 9pm he is swanning around with a glass of wine.
“After running this kitchen since 1981, at this point he can do whatever he wants.”
Out of the 100 staff in the kitchen and in the dining room, about half of them have been at the restaurant for more than 20 years. About eight of those have been serving from a menu that has been tweaked to modern standards, but “a lot of items are very similar” to more than 40 years ago, Jason Lui says.
‘It has always served the best ingredients it’s possible to source in Australia, coupled with the most intuitive service you’ll ever find.’
Chef Neil Perry
Only three other restaurants that existed in the first edition of the Guide in 1980 are around today: Abla’s, Jimmy Watson’s and Vlado’s Charcoal Grill. But it’s Flower Drum that has survived at the top of the dining tree, as evidenced by winning the Guide’s Restaurant of the Year four times between 1999 and 2004, and being recognised as one of the world’s top 50 restaurants by Restaurant Magazine in England four years consecutively since 2002.
“In an age of diminishing attention spans and disposable trends, its sure-footed leadership is as vital as ever,” says Sweet. “A table at the Drum is as coveted as at any point in its 50-year history.”
The 50th birthday in May was celebrated with a staff party for current and former staff with “plenty of food and booze”, according to Lui.
“I left at 3am, and Dad [chef Anthony Lui] and Gilbert [Lau, former owner] were still there, the old war horses, having a yarn about the good old days.”
The Good Food app is the home of the 2026 edition of The Age Good Food Guide, with more than 500 reviews including 123 Critics’ Picks. The app is free for premium subscribers of The Age and also available as a standalone subscription. You can download the Good Food app
