Eater – Page 48 – Dani Valent

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?

 

The Aylesbury

Jesse and Vanessa Gerner, the young Iberian-influenced couple who opened Gertrude Street’s excellent Anada in 2008, have just opened another more ambitious restaurant and bar. The ground floor dining room has taken over the space where Barbagallo Trattoria used to be. It’s a handsome place with large windows onto a laneway, a long bar which prods towards the kitchen and tactile wooden tables, all of which gently suggest that you should sit down, eat and drink, then eat and drink some more.

Stratus 233

Retail strips close to large shopping malls live (and die) in interesting times so full marks to long-time Ascot Vale resident Alex Marley for putting his money on the line in largely dreary Union Road rather than being seduced by the bright lights at nearby Highpoint Shopping Centre. Marley bought the shop eight years ago, then let it be as a hairdresser while he worked in corporate catering, gaining experience and gumption. In May 2010, after a comprehensive renovation, he opened an amenable restaurant that raises the bar for the area without giving local residents conniptions.

Provenance Food and Wine

Smith Street reminds me of one of my favourite songs, The World’s Got Everything in It by Tex Perkins and Spencer Jones, a guitar-sodden drawl about the world’s ‘variety without limit’. Smith Street has variety and then some, much of it resistant to urban nicey-nice renewal. The strip includes on-trend and trend-immune restaurants, cafes good and bad, fashion both questionable and questing, and places like Provenance that are just about always open, that aim to please and do a fine job of it.

Os Kitchen & Wine Bar

Hampton has long been one of those ‘should be’ suburbs: the neighbourhood is fairly affluent and the shopping strip is long and varied so it feels like there should be more and better restaurants beyond the serviceable mid-range Japanese, Indian, Greek and ‘cup of cino’ places. The problem is that the people you think should come to restaurants to spend money often don’t do so. They’re home looking at their school fee statements, eating tuna pasta, opening a bottle of Koonunga Hill.

Nshry

Let’s start with what’s great about Nshry (say ‘noshery’): the burger makes me glad I’m a creature with opposable thumbs perfectly designed for grabbing delicious items and heaving them mouthwards. The beef patty is slathered with ‘umami rub’, a salty mix of kombu and porcini powder that amps up the already tasty medium-rare mix of Angus and Wagyu mince. (Umami is the so-called fifth taste, the quality that makes things mysteriously moreish.) Parmesan, another umami-rich substance, is melted, crisped and layered on a brioche bun with gruyere, mushroom sauce and roast tomato. Crisp onion rings, creamy coleslaw and cornichons are on the side. It’s a winner.

Omah’s

Reviewing restaurants isn’t a job that you get any sympathy complaining about and rightly so. But anyone who thinks it’s a parade of marvellous morsels and floor-scraping sycophants should have been with me the night I ended up at Omah’s. I started at a Malaysian restaurant one suburb away. The manager turned his back on us as we entered, the waitress didn’t have our booking, the ‘famous’ satay sauce was dishwater dull and all the other food was blah. The icing? The restaurant was chilly and when we mentioned our snap-frozen extremities to the waitress she informed us that it might be warmer later.

Penny Farthing Espresso

Just when it seems that every niche must surely have been plugged in Melbourne’s cafe landscape, Penny Farthing pedals up with another way to do things differently: coffee cocktails at dinnertime. Who knew Melbourne was waiting to get wired, drunk and fed while contemplating a steampunk version of a vintage bicycle? Luckily, the superbly sartorial brothers that own Penny Farthing, Trevor and Steve Simmons, read the hand-picked single-origin tea leaves and got it sorted.

Hobsons Bay Hotel

Here’s happy for you. A couple sketching on their grease-spotted, wine-stained paper table covering, dreaming today’s open for inspection into tomorrow’s renovated hearth and home. Double-daters hunched over an antipasto platter, swiping bread through the last scraps of thinly sliced, smoky eggplant, keenly coveting (though gallantly offering) the last bits of salami, frittata and bitey lentil salad. Chef Rosa Mitchell walking through her dining room, aproned, with a flour handprint on the seat of her jeans: there must be more fresh pasta on the way.

Abla’s

Every fond word that’s been said about Abla’s is true: there are good reasons why this is one of Melbourne’s best-loved restaurants. The dining room is a simple stage for traditional Lebanese food prepared by a coterie of women who could do it blindfolded. That they don’t, that they take just as much care with the millionth kibbe or green bean as they did with the first is an ordinary miracle, attributable to an embedded belief in the direct pathway between stomach and heart.

Mr Burch

When I go out for dinner, I get most excited by food I couldn’t (hello, spit-roast goat) or wouldn’t (here’s looking at you, deep-fried anything) cook at home. But when I eat out for breakfast I don’t mind if the food is basic, just so long as it’s infused with the belief that the day’s first meal sets up the rest of it. Getting out of bed on the wrong side is nothing; getting swampy coffee and rock-hard eggs first thing makes it hard to feel good about the project of being human before mid-afternoon.

© Dani Valent 2024