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?
I’m not sure what prohibition sounds like but I don’t think it’s the sounds filling Prohibition: ice bopping in a cocktail shaker, an explosive roar of laughter from a high-topped table, the pop of a Prosecco cork and the happy whoosh of tap beer flowing into a chilled glass. Prohibition is a handsome and instantly popular new Camberwell restaurant in a corner bank building that’s now more brouhaha than balance sheet. The name references the eastern suburb’s infamous ‘dry area’, a set of recently relaxed regulations that made it annoyingly hard to slake an honest thirst but extremely easy to locate the moral high ground. As the rules have eased, Prohibition’s customers seem to be making a mission of celebrating the lapsarian flow of liquor.
Life can be complicated. Food doesn’t need to be. And pizza should always be simple. They understand that at Cucina Povera 1889, a restaurant named for the frugal food of peasant Italy, low on flounce, coaxed into deliciousness via loving treatment and nonna’s lore. The ‘1889’ references the year pizza margherita was supposedly first made; it’s something of a year zero in Italian cuisine. Cucina Povera riffs gently on tradition but basically, this is food that is what it is, little more and certainly no less.
For a restaurant to be tempting at this time of year its first qualification must be that it is open. That’s a tick for this two-year-old Sri Lankan eatery, which is keeping pots bubbling every day including Christmas Day. The next necessary quality is that the restaurant be relaxed: when our airs and graces are hidden under scrunched piles of wrapping paper or stuck behind the ham in the back of the fridge we don’t want formality. Again, Ministry of Curry comes through. It’s a small business with all the warm-hearted hospitality that implies. If that also suggests that inexperienced waiters are sometimes roped in, well, that’s as I mean it to be. Of course, good food is always the core appeal. On this score, Ministry of Curry romps home.
I’m not a keen shopper so I approach Christmas as though I’m a trained seal. That is, I give myself a food reward for every present I buy. The new Eastland’s almost-finished Town Square makes it a pleasure to punctuate shopping hell with eating heaven. This progressive outdoor precinct shakes up mall design by embracing its neighbourhood and wrapping community and council facilities into the mix of retail and restaurants. It’s easy to mock commercial developments that take a stab at creating civic space but even the great piazzas of Rome and Athens were once new and no doubt dismissed by the toga-wearing hipsters of the day as blatant attempts to lure the consumer denarius. Anyway, seals are immune to scorn so I swam right in.
Why do we love hidden places? It’s the childlike thrill of hide-and-seek, the explorer’s victory of discovery, the smug feeling of being somewhere that not everyone knows about and, more soberly, the satisfaction of being part of an urban environment that’s well used.
I’m sitting in the open-air dining deck out the back of Northcote Social Club. My friends are late but I don’t care. It’s a warm night, the sun is lazing around in the sky beyond the pub and I’m hanging with a frosty beer. The promising new menu in front of me is stacked with button-pushing phrases like ‘popcorn chicken’, ‘chilli cheese fries’, ‘jalapeno poppers’ and ‘pork belly burger’. Mm, pork belly burger. There’s also good awareness of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free needs. The music is good, and I’m not talking about the guitar and drum scramble that ambles from the sort-of-soundproofed band room that’s at the heart of this iconic venue. I mean the chef shaking a metal bowl of hot fries in the kitchen just past the bar. The crisp chips, salt shower and steel dish: it’s high-hat and drum roll and, even better, this is percussion you can eat.
“It’s my destiny,” says Trinh Diem Vy, when I ask her why she opened her first restaurant outside of Vietnam in lucky, lucky Melbourne. Ms Vy (say ‘Vee’) is from Hoi An, the graceful, coastal, central Vietnamese town where food is an obsession. In Hoi An, she’s a restaurant rockstar with four eateries, a cooking school and a boutique hotel. There were three big lures to Melbourne: excellent produce, her business partner is here and, most powerful of all, Ms Vy’s daughter came to Melbourne to study.
Easey’s has altitude but it doesn’t boast postcard views. Close by, it’s weedy empty blocks, dour commission flats and grey grids of streets. There is a slice of city skyline but Melbourne isn’t showing her best side: she’s more down-at-heel than Blue Steel. None of that matters, though, because you’re taking in the sights from a graffiti-covered train carriage plonked five storeys high. Anyway, a burger as big as your head is bound to take up most of your attention.
Food from a truck is fun, at least until you’re balancing beer and burger while wondering if there’s a prize for licking sauce off your elbow. Food from a truck tastes great, especially if it’s a pleasant day and you’re not having to use your taco as a shield against whipping wind. Food from a truck feels special, if you get in before the ‘sold out’ sign goes up and the vendor turns off oven and starts up engine, leaving you hungry and eating dust.
Melbourne is in the midst of a breakfast menu smackdown. Fronting up in the green corner: cheeky chia, hale kale, fresh coconut and all their activated cousins, toting superfood cred and not afraid to use it. Kicking back in the naughty corner, there’s brioche to the horizon, bacon on bacon, caramel both crisp and gooey, plus chips for ballast. Lurking on the sidelines, looking forlorn, are yesterday’s heroes: eggs every which way, toast with spreads and your standard fruit salad. Who’d be a cube of melon in 2015? So yesterday.
