Manuka's last champion of cheap

Lee. Ah, Lee. If it weren't for you and your self-titled Inn Manuka would be soulless. Because even the very, very trendiest hippest coolest jivest priciest place only has true cred if there is an underbelly of some description. Some small splash of grunge. A vestigial throwback to when the area was NOT cool. Because places born cool will never have that a la mode vintage feel of places that started life with at least one visible deep fryer.

Manuka has become like the Toorak of Canberra. It has the shopping, and the restaurants, the coffee. It's a sort of village for city folk. Note well, the hamlet atmosphere is just by day--by night Manuka fancies itself a club zone. Manuka, like most places in Canberra, has to be versatile: the same venue is a coffee house in the morning, an executive eatery at lunchtime, a sports bar after work, an a la carte restaurant for dinner and a nightclub by the time the last screening begins at the cinema. There just aren't enough patrons in Canberra to warrant many dedicated Canadian themed make-your-own pancake cafes, for example (although we hear they are very popular elsewhere...)

But one place that has no chameleonic tendencies is Lees Inn. It is a Chinese restaurant and take away. That's all. That's it. It has been there a long long time and will never in my lifetime try to 'diversify' with a Barista and live bands on Fridays (or live anything, for a matter of fact. Fish here probably comes from the freezer). Coffee costs $1.50 at Lees Inn. If you spill it by accident in your haste to get to the food on the Lazy Susan you can mop it off the vinyl jellybean tablecloth with the serviettes provided in a handy Diner dispenser on each table.

When we went in late on a Sunday evening there were two other tables occupied. One was full of bright young things in pre-club mode looking sozzled and sated, ready for a big night of posing in Minque. Lees Inn must work in symbiosis with the more elite establishments in Manuka--everyone can afford to go out to the best places if they already gorged and got drunk at Lees beforehand. The other table was taken up by a lone man who the waitress remembered, according to my eavesdropping from at least 3 years ago when he was last in with his partner. She inquired about the partner, and the lone man, being lone, was able to tell her they had been broken up for over two of those three years. We felt oddly included in this washerwomanesque interaction. This place was homely and gossipy. They weren't play music on the twin-deck radio cassette player above the counter--they were playing the Cricket.

The only problem was before we finished our meal the young male waiter, obviously keen to go and join the posing, abruptly came from out the back, turned off the air conditioner and switched off the radio and left. How do you spell 'uncomfortable' in Cantonese? We bounced back, though, when the friendly waitress broke the ice with some happy persiflage about the kind of food her toddler likes to eat, and she insisted we didn't rush. And it would have been hard to accelerate our eating very much more anyway--the servings at Lees are more than generous and everything tastes good. Possibly too good to be strictly salubrious, but for $30 for soup, entrees, drinks and mains for two people we weren't complaining.

Lee's. Ah. Edible juxtaposition. Homeliness and hostility, lots of food and little prices, trendy block and outdated decor. But not the deliberately outdated kind. It's authentically outmoded. Our kind of grunge.