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?
After an evening at San Telmo I got home and checked my bloke-o-meter. My reading was off the charts! I had minced into this modish Argentinian grill palace a woman but I left with a ruddy rare-steak complexion, a bow-legged cowboy swagger and a mysterious appetite for a cigar. That’s testament to the accomplished realisation of an impassioned vision for this laneway all-day restaurant and bar. Gringos built it but it hums with honour, respect and testosterone.
If there’s one thing Melbourne doesn’t need it’s a new eating precinct so I approached the South Wharf development with scepticism. However, on first blush, and without it being finished, I think this is my favourite urban tart-up project so far. The buildings blend old and new on a manageable scale and the pitch feels local, as though you could wrap a visit into a shopping outing, a city meeting or an after-work meander. Even though I visited on a breezy night, the wind trundled off the Yarra without whipping and sniping.
When a restaurant is open all day it can be hard to create a sense of rhythm and occasion. Breakfast rolls into coffee morphs into lunch seeps into arvo teatime bleeds into beer o’clock fenderbends into dinner. It takes a nimble game plan to manage the transitions and transmutations. The Albert Street team nails it: the handsome Victorian bank building has myriad moods and zones, including a courtyard and a casual table in the produce store which looks like a particularly friendly hangout: it’s nice to sup amongst fancy cheese, jam and wine. The menu from chef Philippa Sibley is a celebratory collection of full-flavoured Frenchy-Italian food.
Conventional cafe wisdom values street presence and foot traffic, lore that is successfully ignored in city laneways and, spectacularly, here in Mordialloc, at a cafe that’s so out of the way that the closer you get, the more you suspect you’re lost. That’s how I felt anyway, as an outsider. The 800 or so households in the Epsom Racecourse estate not only know where Oscar’s Hangout is, they also know what it represents: a community hub that’s more enriching than compost.
When you take two of the world’s most adaptive cuisines – Indian and Chinese – and two dominant emigrant cultures – Indian and Chinese, again – and plonk that combination in Melbourne, you create a restaurant that celebrates diversity and tasty cultural mash-ups. Modest, friendly, eager Mumbai Hakka showcases Indian Chinese cuisine, developed in Kolkata following the arrival of Hakka Chinese immigrants. Thickened soy-sauce gravies, noodles, stir-fries and sizzling plates feature but none of them bear much resemblance to traditional Chinese food. Indeed, Indian spices and paneer cheese are recurring components in this intriguing fusion, which is eaten with chopsticks nonetheless.
I don’t think I’ve ever telephoned a Hawthorn restaurant late on a weekday evening and heard a cacophony in the background as I make a booking. And I know I’ve never had a suburban Thai restaurant bother to ring to confirm said booking, such being the demand for its tables. But both these occurrences were part of my Bangkok Terrrace experience, an encounter that also included some very enjoyable food.
The room is lovely. The food is assured and delicious. The wine approach is joyful and the service is brilliant. Go. *clicks send* Oh, whoops, I just realised this isn’t a Tweet and I’ve still got 2000 characters to go! In that case, I’ll settle back, Union Dining style, and ease into the tale.
A full-immersion Melbourne experience can mean many things. Leaping to catch a hoiked six at the MCG is one definition. Explaining to visitors that our cobbled laneways outgun our so-called tourist attractions is definitely Melbs. And, on recent experience, I’d rank Taxi as essential Melbourne too. It doesn’t have the magnetic qualities of newer restaurants but it’s on song and, unlike most, it isn’t taking a summer sabbatical, but is forging straight into 2012.
Really fresh food leaps off the plate and grabs your taste buds with verve and enthusiasm. It doesn’t need tricking up because it tastes so bolshy and beautiful. That’s the non-secret behind the Big Vegan Salad at this sweet, heartfelt three-year-old treasure: the leaves, flowers, celery, carrots and beetroot that give the salad body and bounce are grown just up the road in owner Rhondalee Hunt’s garden. This is no token vegie patch. Hunt spends two hours a night tending 120 tomato plants, 150 strawberry plants, eight chooks and more and different, as the seasons roll. She actually calls her suburban swathe a farm because it’s so sprouty and verdant. The salad also includes avocado from further away and a simple dressing of vino cotto and olive oil. (It’s Maggie Beer’s vino cotto, which you can buy here cheaper than elsewhere, along with other pantry comestibles, many house-made.)
The words ‘comfort food’ call up images of slow-braised meat and robust soups. Winter food, in summary. But we need comforting in summer too, especially at the end of January when it’s apparent that the holidays are really over and those New Year’s resolutions aren’t going to keep themselves. Fitzrovia understands the need for a little salving so it’s serving up comfort food that’s suitable for warm weather.