We’ve all got to eat so it might as well be good! I’ve been a restaurant critic for almost 20 years, and have been writing a weekly restaurant column in Melbourne’s Sunday Age since 2006.
My approach is to always take a restaurant on its own terms: there’s no point slamming a burger joint because it doesn’t have white tablecloths. I try to be constructive in my criticism and I’ve always got the diner in mind: there are many places you could choose to go. Why should it be here?
Why do we love hidden places? It’s the childlike thrill of hide-and-seek, the explorer’s victory of discovery, the smug feeling of being somewhere that not everyone knows about and, more soberly, the satisfaction of being part of an urban environment that’s well used.
I’m sitting in the open-air dining deck out the back of Northcote Social Club. My friends are late but I don’t care. It’s a warm night, the sun is lazing around in the sky beyond the pub and I’m hanging with a frosty beer. The promising new menu in front of me is stacked with button-pushing phrases like ‘popcorn chicken’, ‘chilli cheese fries’, ‘jalapeno poppers’ and ‘pork belly burger’. Mm, pork belly burger. There’s also good awareness of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free needs. The music is good, and I’m not talking about the guitar and drum scramble that ambles from the sort-of-soundproofed band room that’s at the heart of this iconic venue. I mean the chef shaking a metal bowl of hot fries in the kitchen just past the bar. The crisp chips, salt shower and steel dish: it’s high-hat and drum roll and, even better, this is percussion you can eat.
“It’s my destiny,” says Trinh Diem Vy, when I ask her why she opened her first restaurant outside of Vietnam in lucky, lucky Melbourne. Ms Vy (say ‘Vee’) is from Hoi An, the graceful, coastal, central Vietnamese town where food is an obsession. In Hoi An, she’s a restaurant rockstar with four eateries, a cooking school and a boutique hotel. There were three big lures to Melbourne: excellent produce, her business partner is here and, most powerful of all, Ms Vy’s daughter came to Melbourne to study.
Easey’s has altitude but it doesn’t boast postcard views. Close by, it’s weedy empty blocks, dour commission flats and grey grids of streets. There is a slice of city skyline but Melbourne isn’t showing her best side: she’s more down-at-heel than Blue Steel. None of that matters, though, because you’re taking in the sights from a graffiti-covered train carriage plonked five storeys high. Anyway, a burger as big as your head is bound to take up most of your attention.
Food from a truck is fun, at least until you’re balancing beer and burger while wondering if there’s a prize for licking sauce off your elbow. Food from a truck tastes great, especially if it’s a pleasant day and you’re not having to use your taco as a shield against whipping wind. Food from a truck feels special, if you get in before the ‘sold out’ sign goes up and the vendor turns off oven and starts up engine, leaving you hungry and eating dust.
Melbourne is in the midst of a breakfast menu smackdown. Fronting up in the green corner: cheeky chia, hale kale, fresh coconut and all their activated cousins, toting superfood cred and not afraid to use it. Kicking back in the naughty corner, there’s brioche to the horizon, bacon on bacon, caramel both crisp and gooey, plus chips for ballast. Lurking on the sidelines, looking forlorn, are yesterday’s heroes: eggs every which way, toast with spreads and your standard fruit salad. Who’d be a cube of melon in 2015? So yesterday.
Is this Melbourne’s most magical transformation? Late on a steamy Saturday night DJs tag team, the room is heaving, and the conversation swells and crashes like waves. Just a few hours later, the sun beams handsomely through tall windows, everything gleams and you can converse in whispers. It’s a rare creature that can morph from party monster to bright-eyed darling in mere hours but maybe that’s the enchanted power of Magic Mountain. This place is, variously and vigorously, an old pub, a Thai restaurant, a cocktail bar, a hangout for curries or coffee, and a Tardis-like two-storey pile that wants to fill you up with food and fun.
Like Minded Projects is a small food court with three complementary outlets and all the neon signage, raw food and nut milk necessary to denote a hip, modern hangout. The three businesses are Coffee Supreme (coffee to have here or away, brew gear to take home), Fred Gets (healthy vegetarian food, some raw, all gluten free) and Ace (raw, gluten-free, sugar-free cookies). It’s all very bright and cheery. Just looking at the profusion of pot plants makes me feel oxygenated and energetic.
Let’s start with the gnocco fritto, because I’d love an excuse to think about them again. Not to be confused with gnocchi, these gnocco are fried bread puffs laced with pork fat, served very hot, and eaten with cured meats. You tear gnocco, stuff them with salami, prosciutto or mortadella mousse and let the fat melt in your mouth. Eating is always in the present tense but it doesn’t always seize a moment: this does.
If dumpling dogmatism delivered us from evil I’d screech and shout about them until dusk on doomsday. However, it doesn’t, so I’m not going to make a pronouncement about which of Melbourne’s dumplings is best. Rather, I’m going to celebrate the fact that we’re in any position to have hair-splitting arguments about dumplings at all. It wasn’t always so. Shanghai Street is not the newest, biggest or most photogenic purveyor of pastry packages but it’s so unrelentingly popular that there are three branches in the city (all with queue management policies) and another in Prahran.
