Choose your reviewer and take your choice

The Melbourne Age announced the 40th birthday of the Flower Drum with the description "Australia's best Chinese restaurant." The Gourmet Traveller Guide for 2015 previewed the event with the words "Four decades is a long time in this fine dining caper, yet Flower Drum remains as essential as ever. It's the little things that make this veteran not just our top Cantonese restaurant but a standard setter in all sorts of other ways." The inaugural edition of Gault&Millau Australia chimed in recently extolling how "the menu is brimming with top-class Cantonese dishes, each of which emphasises quality produce" and went on to describe them as "Chef Lui's fabulous dishes..."
Then just as the birthday celebrations were getting into this cheerful swing of praise, along for dinner came the Herald Sun's Dan Stock.
Reviewer Stock booked a table, he wrote, with dressup-for-dinner delight — for a Thursday night as weekends are booked solid a month out — and looked forward to what he’d recently heard was still Australia’s best Chinese restaurant.

Upon arrival we were ushered into a crotchety lift that wheezed its way to the second floor. I’d imagine that once added a frisson of glamour to a meal here, but when I left 2 ½ hours later I felt it a fitting leitmotiv for an experience that was at best underwhelming with no role to play today, save as a museum.
It’s a step back in time, from the room with its shouty Chinoisere to the show plates and waiters in ill-fitting bow ties and too large vests upon which name tags are worn. Those waiters will fiddle and fuss with your food table-side, silver serving everything in the misguided notion that’s a show anyone still wants to watch.
Ah, the food. While there were a couple of definite hits — a meaty scallop siu mai; an excellent piece of eye fillet, slices of crunchy-coated wagyu — most was memorable for being eminently forgettable.

And his harsh conclusion?

Flower Drum is so far from world class it’s an insult to our best restaurants that it’s still mentioned in the same breath. It’s trading on — and charging for — the goodwill of decades of made memories. If you have happy memories of a meal here, my advice would be to treasure them. But don’t try to relive them.