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?
I don’t remember minced chicken stopping conversation before but the tsukune (chicken skewers) at Mugen shushed my table of sake swillers in an instant. Chicken is often banal but this is so outstandingly rich, juicy and textured, thanks to the incorporation of ‘soft bones’ (cartilage, but that doesn’t sound as nice), a common addition in Japan but little seen here. One bite and I lapsed into happy reverie.
Summer dining rolls along pretty happily if a side order of sea breeze comes free with your meal but it’s not always so simple in Brunswick where the air can be so still and the streets so baking that your best chance of catching a breeze is in the dusty wake of trucks and trams. A more pleasant option than chasing the grit kicked up by Sydney Road’s grumbling traffic is Maddox which offers summer salvation in many sweet and lovely ways.
Surprises aren’t always welcome when it comes to eating out. It’s not ideal, for example, to be surprised by a hair in your curry or the beefiness of a vegetarian pastie. But the surprises at Jinda Thai are happy ones. There’s the initial unexpected delight of the massive warehouse dining room, tucked down an alley at the city end of Victoria Street. The exposed brick, the portrait of grandmother Jinda, the elegant lanterns, even the pretty sinks with decorative taps are all evocative and open-hearted.
Long ago, before espresso coffee arrived in Carlton, back in the days of beer, more beer and unironic moustaches, Jimmy Watson opened a wine bar. It’s still there 78 years later, run by his son and grandson who persist in the glorious mission of highlighting wines from up-and-coming producers and sharing bargains from bigger names. This place has shouldered much of the load of weaning Australians off spumante and towards connoisseurship and it still deserves a fond place in drinkers’ hearts, not least because it focuses on wining well at moderate prices.
Mornington is not quite the city and not quite not the city but it definitely feels like a coastal holiday destination when you’re sitting on the terrace at Counting House, wine at hand, fancy fish and chips on the way, gazing at an expanse of grassy foreshore dotted with palms and pines. The restaurant is in an attractive timber building, built as a bank in 1912. Now it’s about as close as Mornington gets to fine dining, done up in breezy French provincial style. The fit-out is charming and comfortable, incorporating historical features like the original bank vault, now a wine cellar.
It’s more fun to eat waffles with chocolate mousse than to parse Latin texts. That’s why I’m glad to visit Brighton Schoolhouse now rather than in the mid-19th century when it was school number 44 and, if records are to be believed, sadly lacking in bircher muesli, kale juice or espresso. No wonder it didn’t last.
If summer means anything it means fish and chips but they too often entail grease overload and lingering self-loathing. Tommy Ruff makes it easy to avoid the oil and the ‘oh no’ with lighter, fresher options and an eat-in restaurant at takeaway prices. The owners are John and Helen Stamoulis, who have wrapped up about a million paper packets of steaming seafood and spud at South Melbourne institution Clarendon Fish and Chippers and Malvern’s Red Mullet (they no longer have a stake in either).
A good pub meal makes life better, turns hearts fond, eyes bright and generally helps the earth spin at a jauntier angle. If you’re doubtful, fight the regulars for a table at O’Connell’s. You’ll see that I’m right.
Bayte (say ‘bait-ee’) means home in Lebanese and I don’t think there’s anything more homely than the flatbread here, baked to order, branded with the grill then piled up like a rumpled doona to serve. The bread is a brilliant scoop for the smashed broad bean dip and a palate-smoothing sop for the bitey pickled cauliflower, fennel and turnip plucked from big jars lined up in the rustic interior. Vintage railway luggage racks holding old suitcases tell of immigrant journeys, a man-and-donkey mural in the sheltered courtyard speaks of peasant repasts.
East Melbourne is a funny place, defined more by its proximity to the city, parks and Melbourne’s sporting precincts than by its own mansions, rooming houses and general leafiness, or by the various established and just-visiting folk that live there. It’s a suburb that wants to feel like a neighbourhood and this new easy, honest all-day eating house is just the thing to give it tasty focus.