Favourites

Innovative food is often very showy, a culinary yell, a prima donna trying to impress the palate. Not at Lee Ho Fook, where much of the Chinese food looks straightforward: a crunchy battered prawn, seafood with a dab of XO sauce, glistening fried rice, mushrooms smooshed with tofu. It even tastes pretty straight – at first. But the flavours in each dish develop as you eat, coming into themselves slowly, like a Polaroid. For example, the battered prawn crunches like any well-behaved crustacean but it tastes extra intense because it’s crumbed in more prawn (dried, grated prawn mousse mixed with tapioca flour) and dusted with freeze-dried honey and soy. It’s a simple dish boosted by mysterious wiles.

It’s been 10 years since chef Frank Camorra and front-of-house partner Andy McMahon opened MoVida Bar de Tapas in Hosier Lane. Melbourne’s laneway love affair and fondness for Spanish food has grown with MoVida, which is now a powerful and well-loved restaurant brand with five outlets in Melbourne and two in Sydney. In all its iterations, MoVida is a fantastic exponent of how a venerable cuisine from far away can be turned into a contemporary Australian pleasure.

It’s a shame you have to break a neighbourhood’s heart to learn that you’ve won it. That’s what happened with Mister Bianco’s beef cheek, a sticky wintry braise which ducked off the menu last summer, only to be reinstated because Kew burghers started a ruckus. The beef cheek is now bolted to the menu. It shouldn’t be radical to be a customer-driven restaurant but Mister Bianco’s eagerness to please is notable. After a solid two years in business, there’s palpable care and thought in everything from the decorative door screen to the comments sheet slotted next to the bill. Along the way, there’s expert, solicitous service, accomplished food and an intimate, classy dining room that works for romance, business, a girly gossip, or family catch-up.

Unless I’m wearing a stupid skirt I’m always happy to sit at the bar. I like grabbing that little slice of workaday restaurant life – the glass polishing, the change counting, the greeting and the grumbling. There’s also more opportunity to engage with or spy on fellow diners and to glean must-haves and best-avoids among the dishes and drinks. However, I’ve never before experienced what happened to me at Bar di Stasio, the new holding pen and hangout next door to love-it-or-hate-it institution Cafe di Stasio.