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?
If you were visiting Melbourne and staying in a city hotel, would you also choose to eat in it? Most people don't or, if they do, they get a cheeseburger sent to the room. The "capture rate" for most hotel restaurants (the proportion of in-house guests filling their bellies on premises) is under 20 per cent.
Just when you thought there was nowhere new to go with avocado toast, along comes Oppen. The Scandi-style cafe specialises in smorrebrod (say "smairbrud"), a Danish open sandwich on rye, generally smeared with butter and topped with herring, cured meats, pickles and other such delights.
It doesn't happen often but when it does I tend to listen. Another diner – overcome with joy – recommends the dish they have just eaten. It happened at Curly Whiskers, a curious, original and charming little restaurant in the Gardenvale shopping strip.
Just as we've borrowed umami from the Japanese to describe the deeply addictive savoury lure of foods such as parmesan, tomato and mushrooms, cafe owner Reiji Honour thinks we need to add another concept to our culinary lexicon. It's encompassed in the name of his new cafe, Hibiki, which is Japanese for "sound" or "echo".
There's a special art to crafting a restaurant that feels like it's been trucking on for decades and Ercolano, on site for a year, has it nailed. It's the timber beams and family photos, the hanging salami and mantelpiece knickknacks, the Italian menu which makes a virtue of tradition and – probably above all – the warm welcome which suggests that there's always another seat at the family table.
How do you feel about nachos for breakfast? I feel great about it, especially if they're the chilaquiles at Hotel Jesus which, praise the lord, has finally brought Mexican breakfast to Melbourne.
Melbourne owes much to Sandy Tran, original owner of Minh Minh, and an honorary aunty to thousands of Victoria Street eaters, many of whom ate their first pho in her presence. When she opened in 1995 (across the road from the current location), many customers picked nervously through her menu and plumped for familiar Chinese-Australian dishes like lemon chicken and sweet-and-sour pork.
I love dropping into ABC Radio Melbourne to chat about what I've been eating, cooking and learning. This time, I came in to talk about restaurant etiquette. What are diners doing to drive restaurateurs crazy and what annoys diners about eating in restaurants? This has been a hot topic recently - the spur for this discussion was the founding of Restaurant School by restaurateur Angie Giannakodakis.
