food geek

Restaurants, recipes, rants.

Melbourne CBD

~ maireaddoyle ~ Leave a comment

>Syracuse, 23 Bank Place
(03) 9670 1777
This beautiful old building with high ceilings and marble-top tables reminds me of Prague or Vienna. The focus is totally on the wine at Syracuse. The wine list is dozens of pages long, with prices ranging up to the thousands of dollars. The food is served in smaller tapas-like platters, mostly with a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern flavour.

Our garlic prawns were sublime, and the ordinary-looking chicken liver pate was amongst the best I have ever tasted. The waiters are knowledgeable and helped me navigate the encyclopaedic wine selections without taking out a second mortgage.

City Wine Shop, 159 Spring Street
www.citywineshop.net.au
Opposite Parliament and downstairs from the fabulous Melbourne Supper Club, the City Wine Shop feels as if it has been a part of Melbourne for years. Sit on the tiny outside terrace, inside at the bar or in the back room on the high stools surrounding the communal table.

Sample the cheeses of the day and choose from a wall of wine worthy of the famous Cul de Sac wine bar in Rome. The tiny menu is hard to resist too. But the best thing – of course – is the wine. Sample the fruits of unusual varieties such as arneis, viognier, durif and langrein without having to fork out for the whole bottle.

Ezard at Adelphi 187 Flinders Lane
www.ezard.com.au
Teage Ezard is the gastronimical high priest of Australian fee style food, as he calls it. A visit to this restaurant is less of a night out than a pilgrimage. The eight course tasting menu is recommended.

Bennetts Lane Jazz Club, 25 Bennetts Lane
www.bennettslane.com
The Melbourne equivalent of Ronnie Scotts and the home of the Bennetts Lane International Jazz FestivalCookie, 252 Swanston StreetYou will find an obscenely long bar in this place, with a similarly impressive wine and beer list. The balcony is a good place to people-watch.

Victoria Market, 513 Elizabeth Street
www.qvm.com.au
Victoria Market is a historic landmark in Melbourne – it is the largest open-air market in the southern hemisphere. Originally known as a food market, it is now the place to buy anything from organic fruit and veg, authentic Mediterranean food, hardward and of course Aussie souvenirs.

The Night Market takes place on Wednesday nights in summer, Its major focus is on food and entertainment. About 20 food hawkers provide a culturally rich range of food including African, Mexican. Spanish, Malaysian, Indian and Middle Eastern street food – not to mention the wineries who set up stall and sell fantastic wines by the glass or case! A great place to spend a summer’s evening.

Feddish, River Building, Yarra Terrace, Federation Square
In a city like this, sometimes a sunny spot is not what you seek. On one of the hottest days of the year, the outside terrace at Feddish is a shady spot where you can relax and watch Melbourne melt whilst you sip a cold martini. The food is not bad either: modern Australian staples with interesting choices such as peking duck risotto and char-grilled crocodile on rainforest rice. Pretty good wine list, with a decent by-the-glass selection which actually offers non-Aussie wines too.

Lygon Street and beyond

~ maireaddoyle ~ 1 Comment

>Our slow food appetites sated (for now), we headed off again on the bus, inspecting our purchases and reading from Mena’s Australian Countrywomen’s Association Book of Cooked and Uncooked Slices. There were no less than three Cherry Ripe slices to choose from.

We hopped off at the top of Lygon Street and Sam marched us all into Percy’s Bar. It wasn’t until we saw the footy on the TV that we realised what all the rush was. It is week one of the 2006 Finals, which is sort of the quarter-finals onwards. All very crucial games of course, especially in footy-mad Melbourne.

Percy’s is an old-fashioned bar, with little room for more than a U-shaped bar, lots of bar-stools, a TV in the corner, the local character in the other corner, and a well-endowed pretty barmaid. But this is Little Italy: the men at the bar avidly watching the footy were not sat in front of pints of beer. On the bar in front of each of them sat an ice bucket or wine cooler, with a nice bottle of white wine. Or in the case of the burly Mafia-looking bloke beside Mena, a lovely fruity sparkling rose in a pretty Mateus Rose type bottle. A refreshing look at masculinity in the twenty-first century, we thought.

Onwards and upwards to Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, a Melbourne institution. We only stopped for a quick drink. A few tables inside were taken up with people long past their lunch and unable to drag themselves home. Outside in the small leafy courtyard a bunch of student-looking people sat around an obscene number of bottles of wine whilst we sat and reviewed the day and rested our tired feet for the walk ahead.

Enoteca Vino Bar is at the far end of Lygon Street, past the main strip, north past Jimmy Watson’s and Percy’s, further beyond the council flats and the new university digs, a few minutes’ walk past the cemetery. It was worth the wait.

Enoteca Sileno next door started out as an importing company, bringing the finest Italian wines, artisan-produced pastas, olive oils and numerous other Italian goodies to Melburnians. They opened Enoteca Vino Bar next door in mid-2004.

We entered through the shop itself, with high shelves stocked full of wine, pasta, olive oil, and other Italian specialities. Our table for ten was in private corner around the back with some more friends of Sam and Amanda’s. There we feasted on assaggini (the Italian version of tapas) including the most delicious whitebait any of us have ever eaten, and some amazing wines by the glass, mostly Italian.

My choice was a lovely Sardinian red, not too robust. Mena chose a rosé which was served unchilled but was no less enjoyable for it. Orlando started with a glass of proseccho which tasted incredibly sweet. The waitress noticed after some time that he wasn’t touching his glass, and volunteered another sparkling wine she thought might suit him better. Now that is what I call good service.

Our main courses were beautiful, and beautifully presented. My seafood linguine was served in a baking paper package, which was unwrapped at the table in front of me. As a result all of the flavour was trapped inside. Divine. Mena’s slow-roast lamb looked and smelled delicious, and there was a mountain of it. Orlando’s spatchcock was well-seasoned but a little dry, he said.

All in all it was a perfect Slow end to a perfect Slow day. We hopped on the tram outside the door and stopped off in Hairy Canary, a favourite haunt of Mena’s, for one for the road. Home again on the train after almost exactly twelve hours of celebrating good food, good wine, and good friends. What more can you ask for?

chocolate heaven

~ maireaddoyle ~ 1 Comment

We wandered the last little pocket of the grounds as the crowds started to die away. Many of the stallholders had sold out and were tidying up or standing around chatting. I noticed a preserves stall and Mena and I tried a Food Symphony divine raisin, tea and tokay preserve – perfect for a bread-and-butter pudding or, well, simply sitting quietly and eating with a spoon direct from the jar.

The outright winner was an impossibly rich chocolate, vanilla and port dipping sauce made with real Belgian chocolate. Even Orlando was deeply impressed. I immediately asked to buy a jar and Jamie, the owner, said he only had tasting stock and had none to sell. I vowed to go straight to David Jones the next day and buy some. We thanked him for his time, took a business card, and walked away. Moments later I felt a tug at my sleeve. Jamie stood with his last remaining jar of the chocolate sauce, and handed it to me. “A gift”, he said. “You loved it so much I couldn’t not give it to you.” What a lovely guy.

Orlando took it straight off me and put it in his backpack. I guess I won’t be seeing that again.

The Ark of Taste

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>
Back around the other side of the convent, Orlando and I entered the Ark of Taste. It was all quite mysterious: we queued for about ten minutes to get in, and stood in a dark confined space surrounded by red velvet curtains whilst a woman called Astrid explained what we were about to see.

The idea of the Ark of Taste is to try and protect some of the world’s food which are endangered. The International Ark Guidelines state that to be accepted onto the Ark of Taste all products must be:

– Outstanding in terms of taste
– Endangered or underthreat
– Related to or part of the history of a group of people
– Related to or part of the history of a place
– In limited production

Inside, we were given tasting implements (spoon, dipping stick etc.) and wandered from stand to stand tasting and hearing about the many foods which are endangered.

An elderly lady from the Australian Countrywomen’s Association explained that backing skills were being lost as so many people were too busy and relied on shop-bought cakes and sponge mixes instead of using the old methods. She patiently explained not to “go at your sponge mix like a bull at a gate” but to stir it gently so as not to remove the air from the mixture. Certainly the sample I tried was as light as a feather.

The aged beef was unbelievably tender and full of flavour. I asked the man what the ideal time was to hang beef, and how long the usual supermarket meat had been hung. His reply was that three to six weeks was a good time to age beef, whilst the stuff we buy in the supermarket was so fresh it was “still yelling” as he put it.

The leatherwood honey from Tasmania had a distinct smoky flavour to it. The rare smoked eelhad a distinctive and delicious taste.

A poignant stall showed Mount Emu cheese which used to be made in rural Victoria, by introducing a particular mould into the cheese making process. When the cheese-maker’s lease expired they had to move to new premises, and the new local council would not allow them to use this particular mould for health and safety reasons. Without it, the cheese was no longer special. The last of these amazing cheeses were manufactured in 2004, and the cheese maker has not gone out of business permanently. And we think that the EU has the monopoly on bureaucracy.

Orlando got chatting to a man called George from up near Albury on the border with NSW. He was there with his wife and daughter. The daughter had just graduated and was finding it as hard as we had to get a job in Melbourne, where who you know is more important that what you know. The man’s sister and brother-in-law had a stall in the Ark of Taste with locally-produced fortified wines, a fino, an amontillado and an oloroso. We tasted all three and Mena squirreled two of their tiny tasting glasses away in her pockets.

I tasted some real butter, made from the milk of a single jersey herd, and never frozen like the mass-produced butter we buy. What a completely different taste.

Slow Saturday

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Saturday started with a walk to the train station to meet Sam and Amanda for the trip to the annual Taste of Slow festival at Abbotsford Convent. We met up with Mena at Flinders Street, then managed to get on the wrong train: an express train to the slow food festival. We sat helpless as the train rushed past our destination station, before getting off some time later and flagging down a local bus heading back in the opposite direction. However, with our Slow attitudes firmly in place we did not worry.

The queue to get in was already lengthy. Sam (not a patient man) was anxious to get going, his Slow attitude already beginning to slip. The sun same and went and the weather looked changeable. In time we paid our money and got our plastic bracelets, and we were in.

The original intention was to do a leisurely circuit of the grounds, then get a coffee and make a plan. This was destroyed within moments of entering.

“Ooh, the beer tent.”
“Ooh, Mount Langi Ghiran winery.”
“What’s that over there?”
“Where is that amazing smell coming from?”

Within 15 minutes two people had glasses of wine and a platter of cheese in their hands, I had bought some Australian spices from Spice Bazaar for my Blog by Mail care package, and we were all looking longingly at the Angus Beef kebabs and mashed potatoes on the Tasmania stand.

 

Mena discovered a man from Northern Ireland selling steamed mussels and ordered some. She came back to our outdoor table with a dreamy smile, remembering his lovely accent. I went over to enquire, and ordered some too. I thought he was Canadian, perhaps from Nova Scotia. “It’s all the same”, remarked Mena. Then I asked him. He was Danish, and had spent a lot of time in California. How wrong could we have been? The mussels took forever, and were eaten in less than a minute, but they were divine washed down with a glass of All Saints shiraz.

Orlando and Sam disappeared and came back with Angus beef kebabs.

Sam and Amanda opened the cheese pack and an impromptu picnic ensued. Amanda had managed to nip back to the Mount Langi Ghiran winery tent and was drinking my favourite wine.

We managed to drag ourselves away to check out more stands, but Mena and I came back minutes later with prawn and barramundi fishcakes from the Queensland Slow Food tent. We tried the delicious Hope Bakery breads and promised to come back later and buy some (they sold out within three hours).

Around in the kitchen garden children played amongst the lettuce plants and more stalls nestled under the cloisters.

People sat and ate on hay bales. We bumped into my workmate Bernard and his wife. As the rain finally fell, we tasted the most divine chilli chutney from Susan Neville. I couldn’t resist a jar.

Next to her, more Tasmanian produce: soft cheese with capsicum, thyme and black pepper had to be purchased.

If only we’d bought that bread

Friday

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Our gourmet weekend started on Friday evening with a visit to our favourite local Vietnamese restaurant with friends. Thien An was the first local eatery Orlando and I visited when we moved here. Its multicoloured chairs and canteen feel were welcoming on a cold spring evening. Six of us squeezed in beside another couple, in such close proximity that the lady beside me formally introduced herself (Chris), and when leaving, thanked us for a lovely evening. There is no standing on ceremony here.

We chose Thien An’s famous Vietnamese rice paper rolls or spring rolls to start, then variously selected noodle soup or fried noodle dishes to follow. All the food was delicious, freshly made with the freshest of ingredients. We washed it all down with green tea served from stainless steel flasks to keep it warm.