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?
Humour is hard to pull off in a restaurant. One person’s hilarious ‘schnitz and tits’ is another’s chixploitation [subs: ‘tits & schnitz’ is a well-known Melb pub tagline; chixploitation is supposed to be a double joke – chick as in chicken and woman – hoping you can leave! DV]. Puns are risky too: Thai Tanic, Has Beans, Pho King and their ilk make some groan with delight while others simply lose their appetites. Brutale, a new laneway bunker with Croatian food, finds a little fun in the Balkans’ troubled history with tongue-in-cheek war chic: a disco ball bomb, soldier helmet lightshades and a knuckle-duster logo. That’s all softened by cheerful service, vibrant food and an enthusiastic approach to Croatian cooking. If you leave thinking Eastern Euro eats are all stodge then they’ll be very sad. On the other hand, if you leave feeling anything less than overstuffed, please let me know how you managed it.
Sitting at Zurouna, holding the dessert menu up so it didn’t splodge in the unwiped debris of our main course, I had time to think about why I was there. We go to restaurants to eat, obviously, but we dare to hope for professional stewardship that adds warmth and atmosphere to calorific nourishment. There’s some good food at Zurouna, and I did sense love and care in the business, but it could be expressed with more energy and polish.
We’re Melbourne diners, so we live our lives in the back streets, don’t we? We’re au fait with laneways, we disappear into basements, dart to rooftops and find it very boring to eat on main roads (unless from a van). Well, sometimes, and not always and perhaps just a bit. But still, I’m a little weak-kneed about Hell of the North and the frisson started with its side-street location (off Smith Street) and its beckoning, yellow door set in a window-free bluestone wall that seems to say, ‘Come on funsters, good times await, and we won’t tell if you don’t.’
It’s not normally a great sign when a restaurant doubles up on cuisines, which is why I haven’t rushed to the ‘pizza and curry’ place that’s opened in my neighbourhood. However, I’d heard good things about Sri Lankan and Indian restaurant Elephant Corridor, so I joined the throng one night in bustling Glen Waverley and grabbed the last table at this two-year-old restaurant. Elephant Corridor has its heart in Sri Lanka but most of its menu in India. I focused on the Sri Lankan offerings and was rewarded with delicious food (and lovely leftovers). A sense of pride seemed to imbue each dish; I’m sure it makes meals taste better.
It’s not the usual cafe story. Gene Kapaufs, the 24-year-old co-owner of Seddon sweetie Advieh, was wrestling for Australia at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi in 2010. His mum, Sandra Farrugia, rang to say she’d found a place for the cafe she dreamt of opening, a pet supply store near the family’s home. Farrugia had worked in lunch spots while Kapaufs and his sister were growing up but she’d always wanted a place of her own. Kapaufs leapt in to help.
I had a Hungarian grandmother who taught me funny songs, card games and 100 ways with pancakes. She would have found plenty to like at The Hungarian. The restaurant is a small and homely mom-and-pop operation with folk artifacts, zillions of photos and a menu full of chatty jokes that wore me down, groan by groan. One dish is called ‘Meat with Meat’, capital letters are used with ABANDON, garlic cream is ‘obnoxious’ and dieting is pooh-poohed with delight. I arrived hard-bitten critic, I was soon jelly-kneed victim of humour.
“Oh no, no, no,” I thought, reading Saint Crispin’s menu. “This is a disaster.” The problem was that I wanted to eat everything I was reading. I couldn’t rule out anything because it sounded too try-hard or gross or boring. Every item was a big, fat ‘yes’ dotted with button-pushing words like ‘scorched cauliflower’ and ‘hand-rolled macaroni’ and ‘miso eggplant’. So, it was a long night but a tasty one.
In many cities you go to the hotels to find the great restaurants. In Melbourne, not so much. I’m suspicious of our hotel restaurants, imagining unwitting travellers prey to uninspired venues doing exactly as much as they can to get away with it. Orient East busts that mold open. It’s a fun, clever post-colonial homage to British Malaya in the Seasons Botanic Gardens on St Kilda Road (opposite the Shrine). It serves visitors to the hotel but also has a handy office worker catchment, making it part of Melbourne life, rather than a sterile tourist-only zone.
Surely, Melbourne is ready to relax about Mexican food. There are now enough Mexican restaurants for the cuisine to have escaped the frenzy of ‘exciting trend’ and become just one more way to feed ourselves. Sure, we may still need to ask what sope, epazote and huitlacoche mean (they’re a thick corn tortilla, a herb, and an edible fungus that grows on corn) but we’re down with the basics and we’re as likely to hanker for tacos as for pasta or tapas.
Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, was an exciting food strip in the 1980s and early 1990s, strung with seminal restaurants and cafes like Mario’s, Joe’s Garage, Rhumbaralla’s and the Black Cat, plus a reasonable representation of immigrant cuisines like Afghan, Thai and Greek. Some of those golden oldies are still going but the buzz hasn’t always lingered. Today, I wouldn’t quite put Brunswick Street on my Melbourne must-munch list but there are definitely good things happening here.