Restaurant Reviews – Page 28 – 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?

Barry

Being trendy can be an affliction – just ask anyone wearing heel-less heels. Viewed more optimistically, trends can be a joyful manifestation of the here and now expressed, for example, in lovable emojis, salted caramel or bushranger beards. The menu at Barry, a big, bright, new cafe, bursts with on-trend ingredients and preparations. There’s coconut water, freekeh and tri-coloured quinoa, cold-drip coffee, gluten-free granola and Korean fried chicken sandwich. Still not convinced? Activated almonds (in raw beetroot salad with Persian feta), raw zucchini lasagne, and five dishes with hip, leafy green kale are on the list too! Stand by for trendometer boilover.

Uncle

Uncle is a new-school Vietnamese restaurant that opened with a queue at the door a month ago and hasn’t drawn breath since. It’s a cool, fun place with tasty eats and great drinks, and it’s easy to see why there’s an hour’s wait for dinner (reservations are available for groups), especially when you consider Carlisle Street is amazing for bagels and sorted for coffee but wouldn’t know pho if it fell into a large lake of it.

MoVida Aqui

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.

Mister Bianco

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.

Hannah

I’m all for the ‘I always dreamt of opening a cafe’ passion project but it’s a pleasurable relief to walk into a place that’s professional and poised from day one. That’s the water-glass-half-full vibe at Hannah, a new hangout from Jason Bates, the guy who ran Middle Park’s Mart 130 and St Kilda’s Grocery Bar in its grousest days. The corner cafe is at the base of an apartment development near Carlisle Street – this notch on the latte belt is well supplied but there’s always room for one more cafe if it is really, really good. The corner premises is spacious; pot plants, stucco, watchful elephant figurines and music on vinyl add texture to a clean fit-out. A window bench has delightful views of St Kilda cop shop.

The Commoner

I can’t see why you wouldn’t like The Commoner. Lovely modern Brit-ish food is amplified and underpinned by capable and cluey service, wrapping up a warm experience that had me glowing all the way from ‘hello’ to ‘here’s your coat’.

Little Big Sugar Salt

There are so many cafes in Melbourne that I’m sure there is room – indeed, need – for Little Big Sugar Salt, a place that takes the traditional menu paradigm and transmogrifies it into a document that may make you feel confused, delighted and hungry all at once. Instead of a long list of possibilities, LBSS announces just eight dishes on a menu wheel according to whether they’re little, big, sweet (sugar) or savoury (salt). It’s a talking point, for sure, but the idea is also to remove the exhausting choices offered at many cafes. Instead, diners are encouraged to decipher whether they’re starving, merely peckish, craving sweets or feeling healthy, then put their trust in the chef. While waiting (and the wait can be rather leisurely) there are plenty more jokes and wordplays to pore over.

Lakeside Bistro

There’s no rule that food in public institutions has to be crappy, somewhere between junk food hell and a boarding school nightmare. It often feels that way though. I applaud Melbourne Zoo for providing interesting and healthy options, and for backing up its conservation aims with local produce, free-range meat and eggs, sustainable fish and ethically sourced coffee.

Gramercy Bistro

So you know fried food is basically just steamed inside a crust? That’s why I am a connoisseur of the golden, crunchy, searingly hot and somewhat healthful fruit of the deep-fryer. Of course, fried isn’t always fab: clean oil at high temperature and watchful cooking are as important as the quality of the gear that’s dunked. Gramercy Bistro, the diner at the boutique Cullen Hotel, has some good fried dishes on its New York-style menu of sandwiches, salads, sliders, steak and ribs.

Brutale

Humour is hard to pull off in a restaurant. One person’s hilarious ‘schnitz and tits’ is another’s chixploitation [subs: ‘tits & schnitz’ is a well-known Melb pub tagline; chixploitation is supposed to be a double joke – chick as in chicken and woman – hoping you can leave! DV]. Puns are risky too: Thai Tanic, Has Beans, Pho King and their ilk make some groan with delight while others simply lose their appetites. Brutale, a new laneway bunker with Croatian food, finds a little fun in the Balkans’ troubled history with tongue-in-cheek war chic: a disco ball bomb, soldier helmet lightshades and a knuckle-duster logo. That’s all softened by cheerful service, vibrant food and an enthusiastic approach to Croatian cooking. If you leave thinking Eastern Euro eats are all stodge then they’ll be very sad. On the other hand, if you leave feeling anything less than overstuffed, please let me know how you managed it.

© Dani Valent 2024