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?
Real estate agents in McKinnon have been able to spruik the latte lifestyle for a while now and they’ve had no trouble raving about the suburb’s schools. They must be so happy that they can now add ‘stylish local restaurant’ to their spiel, thanks to The Way to San Jose, a pizza parlour with neat, petite food and wine menus. The restaurant comprises a front room with a lovely broad bar and dining tables, and a snug rear room by the kitchen with carpet, an artisan produce display and close-set tables. I imagine it would feel quite cruisy if McKinnon wasn’t in such a state of breathless excitement about the restaurant’s mere existence.
Restaurateur Angelo Pace and his Brazilian chef Bruno Machado have a pretty sweet business on their hands in hilly Heidelberg. Vyve, here since 2008, is an all-day cafe and restaurant that does quality breakfasts till 3pm. When a cafe makes its own potato roesti you know they’re serious about breakfast – these roesti are house-made, as is the jam, the mayonnaise and all the muffins. The cakes are bought in but, if you want something sweet and homemade, fight the crowds for Angelo’s mum’s vanilla slice. Mirella makes two trays every night to a secret and fiercely guarded recipe but they often sell out and, indeed, the last three – towering, flaky, appealing – were whisked to another table just as I opened my mouth to order one. Apparently the locals become very restless when Mirella dares take a holiday.
It’s not that I suspect the emperor’s naked or anything, but there’s something NQR about a char-grill restaurant that builds itself up around a funky barbecue set-up then doesn’t let you use it. The grills at Seoul Soul are there but they’re off, stone cold, unused, meaning one of the big attractions of a Korean grill restaurant (cooking your own meat on a tabletop grill) is unavailable. Our waiter tells me the barbecues are just for decoration. Wow, that’s meticulous and expensive theming – they’ve even gone to the trouble of installing exhaust hoses and a rangehood.
There is an equation to determine if a new cafe is required in a particular location. You count the number of people in the postcode who can’t open a packet of cornflakes and multiply that number by the minutes until the next tram. Take the answer and squeeze it over some smashed avocado on toast. If there are then fewer grams of Vegemite in the jar than the correct code on the nearest bicycle combination lock, the point of cafe saturation hasn’t been reached and a new one is needed within 500 metres. Applying this strict formula, Cheerio is a necessary addition to Richmond, a suburb that’s densely populated in many respects but sparse in the quality cafe department. Cheerio is doing its little bit to redress that paucity.
South Wharf is still a work in progress but it’s Melbourne most promising new precinct and Akachochin is among its alluring draws. One delightful thing about this modern Japanese restaurant is how charged and charming the waiters are: no matter how pleased I was with the setting, the sake and the pretty, well-executed dishes, I got the feeling that they were even more thrilled. Not that there’s any happy dancing. The aesthetic is careful and contemporary.
If breakfast is supposed to wake a person up and inspire some day-seizing, then why are breakfast menus so soporific, listing the same old fried and poached staples? Snore! That’s not an issue at The Pour Kids. The kitchen approaches breakfast with a bistro mentality, using real cooking and attention to detail to create breakfasts that have the gravitas of a proper lunch or dinner. That seriousness is somewhat undercut by jokey dish titles – there’s a chicken baguette called ‘Bck-bck-begerk’ – but the fnar-fnar names don’t diminish the excellent food.
Recently, in the interests of science, I drove around Melbourne for two days visiting cafes. I hit 19 cafes in the north, south, east, west and city. I hithered and thithered so much I crashed my maps app. I so soused myself with coffee that I briefly saw the Yarra as a percolated brew. I took home so many sweets and biscuits that I felt very domestic goddess, as soon as I hid the telltale paper bags. My overwhelming feeling at the end of my gluttonous ordeal was this: Melbourne is amazing. We are so lucky.
The contemporary cafeteria may not have trays, communal tables or point-and-pick food but it’s fuss-free, fast paced and flexible. Dining Haul is a smart reinvention of an institutional dining room with a leaning towards seafood and fancy drinks. I love the sleek plywood fit-out, somewhere between a boatshed and a nightclub. Sleek does suggest noisy, however, and it can get screechy in here: think seagulls and a bag of chips. Seating is diverse: there’s a long freestanding countertop, window seats and tables for six that become communal when the numbers lean that way.
Most of the cuisines that sweep through Melbourne emerge from waves of immigration. But Mexican? No, hombre. The Mexican munching movement must be based on waves of tequila but when the result is as winning as Radio Mexico I’m all for it. Next door to St Kilda’s ever-sailing Galleon cafe and with some of the same owners, Radio Mexico doesn’t rope itself to the mast of Mexican authenticity but the flavours are true, the menu is fun and varied and the price is nice. However, beware: no bookings!
I knew Steer was serious about steak but I wasn’t expecting a floorshow. But then, not long after we sat down – the only ladies in a restaurant dotted with beefy, chomping blokes – our charming and solicitous waiter staggered over with a massive board laden with raw beef. He proceeded to talk us through the different cows and cuts: Wagyu here, Black Angus there, these ones grain fed, those ones pasture fed, this cut from the ribs, (the explanation accompanied by a finger dragged across his torso), that one from the rump (but let’s keep this G rated).