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?
In the inner-city cafe crush, the various Melbourne tribes find their own slots. But in Rosanna, there’s Miss Marie and not a lot else so all the tribes gather here. The day I visited, there was a granny with a trolley filled up (or emptied) at the op shop next door. There was a goth-girl knitting, so perfectly pierced I suspected she was an installation. There were a couple of soldiers, elbows planted, knees wide, eyes laughing. And, up the back a large table was commandeered by prams and their caffeinated wranglers. Babycino central.
Tables. Pah! Yawn. Blah. Sit me at the bar where I can spy and chat and send my feet into wild orbit. Sure, sometimes perching on a barstool is as slippy-slidey as sitting on a toboggan and often there’s nowhere to put my coat and purse. But I’ll wear the hardships because I feel part of something.
One-year-old Carlton Wine Room is infused with the passion of its host Jay Bessell, who owns the place alongside fellow alumni from city stayer Il Solito Posto. Bessell is an enthusiastic wine nut who bounces from table to table to wax lyrical and to cheerfully, theatrically confess, ‘I like to drink.’ Cue stage whisper. ‘A lot.’
More than a cafe and not quite a village, The Commons is a community hub that turns near neighbours into new friends, enriches local life, and generally sends little shafts of sunlight into its vicinity. The multi-function operation is run by Friends of the Earth in old primary school buildings owned by the local Catholic parish. Visiting here doesn’t feel churchy or hippy though – it just feels nice.
Just as cooler weather sees my shivery hands reaching for coat and scarf, it sees my yawning appetite leaning towards rich and comforting food, stuff that warms the bones with gelatinous creep. That’s why I’ll be back in Black Rock before spring is sprung.
‘We have to get serious now, folks,’ says our waiter, gently placing a quivering mushroom soufflé on the table. ‘It’s not going to get any better than this.’ He’s right. Souffles don’t spend a long time in peak condition: this one is puffed and golden and fragrant, smugly eating up its moment. So we ruin it with spoon and fork and appetite. It’s very good, light but flavoured with an intense mushroom duxelles, boosted with cep powder, a careful touch of truffle oil and tarragon. It’s a visually impressive dish and it also shows respect for vegetarians, who are often fobbed off with dull main courses.
It’s a still, blue-sky autumn morning but the Frankston waterfront is dead quiet and shockingly deficient in cafe latte. The buzz is one street back at Vada Cafe, where the view (six lanes of traffic and a row of real estate offices) doesn’t compete but the welcome and the coffee certainly does.
In the months after The Atlantic opened in March 2011, I thought it was panicky and expensive. The prices are still high but the restaurant experience now justifies them. It’s settled and seamless, the service is classy, and the food is subtle, clever and frequently outstanding. If you ever feel like splashing out on seafood in a fancy restaurant, this is the place.
I’ve long considered excellent coffee an essential element in a good life, ranked alongside proper butter and phone chargers that come when you whistle. But I haven’t leapt on the so-called coffee third wave, with its farm-to-cup journeys, multiplicitous brewing methods, and obsession with the perfect pour. There’s as much science in it as the synchrotron and its proponents are as ardent as young lovers. For someone who sees coffee as a pleasant morning medicine, it’s been a little too much. But Ora turned me on as it dosed me up. This small, simple, bright six-month-old cafe is so cheerfully, winningly passionate about coffee that I am happy to hop on the bandwagon (just so long as it’s okay to hop off for a boring old cafe latte whenever I like).
If I see the word ‘rotisserie’ on a menu I see it larger and bolder than every other word. When I’m hungry, the word flashes at me as though illuminated by marquee lights and, if I’m really ravenous, a stern ‘We Want You’ apparition hovers in front of the R-word, making demands to which I’m only too happy to yield. The Wayside has a red rotisserie gleaming in its open kitchen and each day a different meat is skewered and slowly, lovingly rotated, allowing the flesh to bathe in its own fatty juices. The result is moist meat that tastes so overwhelmingly of itself that it doesn’t need much tricking up. Lamb, goat, sirloin, duck and venison are on the rotisserie roster but it’s hard to beat Friday’s suckling pig, rolled and trussed, sticky and tender, with crackling that snaps like toffee and melts like caramel.