restaurant reviews

jellybread

~ maireaddoyle ~ Leave a comment

Jellybread
561 Barkly St, West Footscray
0432 637 822

Jellybread used to be a tiny little cafe in West Footscray that served really good coffee and a tiny bread-based menu. It had three or four tables inside and two or three outside on the Barkly Street pavement. I never could figure out how the young couple made a living out of this little place.

A few months ago, they extended into the old chemist shop next door, and made the back yard part of the cafe too. The old chemist part still has some of the old shelving which is littered with out-of-date Encyclopaedia Britannicas, vintage mags for the grown-ups and plenty of children’s books for the little ones. Unashamedly child-friendly, this place is run by young parents and it shows.

That’s not to say that the food isn’t good, the coffee isn’t well-brewed and it’s not for a grown-ups-only table. I recently spent a long lunchtime down there, generous helping of avocado, tomatoes and feta on sourdough toast and a nice pot of tea, laptop on the go as I downloaded the contents of my brain into a detailed operational procedure. It was a quiet day and I felt no need to rush, no distraction from little ones. Instead I spread out across a big old kitchen table, listened to some rare funk tunes on the old-school turntable and had a most productive hour or two.

The menu is simple and mostly bread-based: things on bread or between two pieces of bread. Fillings and options are simple. The hot drinks list is also short but the coffee is pretty damn good and they know how to serve a good pot of tea.

My grapevine tells me the backyard space “JellyBread Park” is a favourite amongst coffee-morning mums’ groups and their offspring. That might be a deterrent for me, but as a weekday morning coffee or lunchtime haunt, it’s firmly on my shortlist.

Jellybread on Urbanspoon

besito

~ maireaddoyle ~ 8 Comments

Besito Bar & Cafe
590A Barkly Street, West Footscray
http://www.besito.net.au

Footscray will always be… well… Footscray. But West Footscray (or WeFo as we insiders call it) is up-and-coming. On-the-edge. An Emerging Destination. Oh yes, West Footscray is the new Yarraville, people.

When we moved here six years ago, West Footscray was still pretty basic. The high street had an average local independent supermarket, an old Croatian/Italian/Whatever social club, a local library and a dwindling number of shops: pharmacy, greengrocer’s, school uniform shop, charity store. Soon after, it started turning into Little India and a fair number of Indian grocery and clothing stores sprung up. Then the Indian restaurants started multiplying. Now we have a decent little shopping street with really good Indian groceries, a couple of good greengrocers, and one or two really good restaurants with a good following.

The only thing we were really missing was somewhere to go for breakfast.

Then Gusto at Barkly opened, with decent pizza in the evenings and a pretty good breakfast menu (just too many pushchairs for my comfort levels). Jellybread bought the shop next door and expanded but their menu remained limited. And then a few weeks ago, Besito opened.

Owned by a young Colombian couple, Shan and Andres, it is a small, colourful cafe serving the best Colombian flavours and pretty decent coffee. They are not open in the evenings (yet) but they do a pretty good breakfast/all day menu which nicely covers breakfast, lunch and sweet things to go with coffee.

Side orders can be ordered together to augment a simple dish of eggs or arepa, a white corn bread visually reminiscent of rice cakes. The side orders are generous portions: chorizo is a full sausage, scored to help with even cooking, and well-seared on a hot plate or barbeque. The in-house hangover cure is changua – eggs poached in coriander-infused milk. Mild and seriously hot chilli sauces are within reach for another blast of South American flavour.

Most things are made from scratch in-house including the pastries and desserts: the lady of the couple who own this place is a pastry chef and it shows. Orlando showed an interest in some shot glasses in the chill cabinet one morning: we were immediately given one on the house with two spoons. A creamy, not-too-sweet caramel base was covered in the best chocolate ganache, giving just the perfect blast of  sweetness without being overpowering.

A question from me about gluten-free options on the menu resulted in a clear and concise overview of what was gluten-free and what was not, reassuring me quickly that they knew the provenance of all their food and made sure all their staff did. Most menu items, for the record, were either gluten-free or could be served as such if requested.

They tell us they will be open soon in the evening, serving South American street food which goes down perfectly with a beer or a glass of wine. I can tell you now this place will become a regular haunt. The owners and their staff are friendly and knowledgeable, it’s a lovely relaxing place to eat, the menu is a knock-out and it can only get better as word spreads.

No free wi-fi yet, but we will keep working on them…..

Besito on Urbanspoon

china red

~ maireaddoyle ~ 3 Comments

Shop 6, 206 Bourke St. Melbourne
china-red.com.au

Orlando took me to this place for a Saturday evening casual dinner, having been introduced to the place by friends one lunchtime. China Red is inside the shopping mall  full of Japanese boutiques that runs between Bourke Street and Little Bourke, emerging onto Chinatown by Dragon Boat restaurant.

The gimmick here is that you order your food and drinks from a tablet perched on the wall above your table. In this way you don’t have to interact with the wait staff at all; in fact as far as I can make out this is what they prefer. All of my attempts to make eye contact and say thank you when our food was being served were studiously ignored. In two visits I never saw any member of staff smile.

That said, the food we ordered was of very good quality, quickly cooked to order and worth a repeat visit. The shao long bao we ordered were some of the best we have tasted outside Shanghai, and there is plenty of competition in Melbourne. The wontons in spicy sauce were a favourite of Orlando’s, but I found them a little too greasy to the palate. The prawn dumplings were plump and perfect. The chilli sauce on the table was laced with Szechuan pepper, just the way I like it.

The pork ribs in chilli and special sauce are chopped into bite-sized pieces, cooked until they are falling off the bone and taste just like the ones we used to get from Hong in our local takeaway in London “Hello!! Good Taste!! Hello Doy!!” Hong, a cheerful, efficient Chinese takeaway owner by day, and manicured drag queen by night, knew our Friday night order by heart. The special sauce on these ribs is a plentiful dollop of black bean sauce to augment the chopped chilli, and it tastes divine.

There is a dozen or so red wines to choose from, a similar number of whites, and a handful of wines by the glass. You can choose from jasmine, oolong, chrysanthemum or pu er tea.

Most dishes are around the $10 mark except for chef’s specials and our favourite pork ribs which are more like $18. Both of us have a healthy appetite, and three dishes is plenty for us. A bill of around $55 including two glasses of wine is good value in anyone’s language.

Once the novelty of the tablet wears off it’s probably just another modern Chinese place in Chinatown, but I can see this place becoming a favourite  of ours just for the shao long bao and pork ribs.

China Red on Urbanspoon

chez olivier le bistro – take three

~ maireaddoyle ~ Leave a comment

121 Greville Street, Prahran
www.chezolivier.com

Third time’s the charm: after an offer by Chez Olivier’s owner to try the restaurant again, and a $100 voucher as motivation, Robyn and I headed back for a quiet, anonymous dîner à deux.

It was a hot Melbourne evening and the cosy restaurant was all but deserted. We chose a table in the cooler back room near the air conditioner but after a few minutes the draught got uncomfortable, so the waiter happily moved us to a larger table away from the direct blast.

A bottle of 2006 Château Noaillac from the Médoc hit the spot despite the heat of the day. We sensibly ordered first and talked later, otherwise we’d never have gotten to the food. For starters, we shared a pissaladière – an onion, anchovy and olive tart – with a serving of coquilles St. Jacques. The tart was tasty but not as substantial as I would have expected. The coquilles were just divine, and I quietly wished that all three were mine. They would be worth going back for themselves.

For main course Robyn chose the confit duck special and I, predictably, chose steak frites. Robyn’s duck was good but, she said, a little overdone. My steak frites was plentiful, perfectly cooked medium-rare and just what I wanted.

Dessert was out of the question but the waiter chose us a glass each of an alternative red to finish the night. All told, the service was friendly, unobtrusive, helpful and attentive. The food and wine were most agreeable, and most importantly, the company wonderful.

At just over $150 for two (most of which was covered by the $100 voucher) Chez Olivier is not a cheap option, and in my opinion it’s still not the best value in town. However, with money no object my conclusion is not to choose Chez Olivier for a large dinner party, but for a smaller table of two or four. At this size, they acquit themselves pretty well.

 

Chez Olivier - Le Bistro on Urbanspoon

emilio’s pizza pasta

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Emilio Pizza Pasta
58 Mitchell Street, Darwin
www.pizzapasta.com.au
 

Takeaway pizza in Darwin: a five-minute survey of colleagues pointed me to Emilio’s, opposite Shennanigan’s pub on the main drag. I was tired and just wanted simple takeaway pizza to eat curled up on my hotel bed, watching Big Bang Theory re-runs.

Emilio’s is just five minutes away so I ordered on the phone. “What size are your pizzas? What size is medium?” A laugh. “Well, it’s hard to describe really. A medium would easily be enough for two people.” OK. I ordered a medium Mexican and wandered down in fifteen minutes.

$21 for a medium pizza is steep, and this didn’t feel like a generous helping as I walked back to my hotel. In the lift I came across a Dad with his young daughter with what looked like the extra-large option. “Seems like we had the same idea”, I remarked. “Hope it’s worth it”, the Dad said. “Thirty bucks is an awful lot for a pizza.”

So: how was it? I asked for well-cooked and I’m not sure I got that. The pepperoni was sparse, the vegetables plentiful and the centre of the pizza limp. Even though I had turned up a little early for my pizza it was already cooling down when I picked it up, so the last slice was pretty cold. It was tasty enough I suppose, but value for money at $21? I think not.

Maybe it would be better eating in, but I would not be sure. I could not give anything more than mediocre for this place.

casa naranjo

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Casa Naranjo
Barracks Passage, Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury, Shropshire SY1 1XA
01743 588 165
www.casanaranjo.co.uk
A fleeting visit to Shrewsbury in very late November saw Katharine and I wandering down the medieval cobblestoned lanes of Shrewsbury towards this new little tapas bar for a reunion lunch. As we reached the door leading to the upstairs restaurant, we spied a band having a photo shoot a little further up the lane. They stood one behind the other, some wielding instruments (if you can wield a double bass) and others striking a pose. A photographer directed their actions from slightly higher ground. By their stance they looked a bit weary, as if they had been at this for some time and the novelty had worn off. Wonder who they were?

On a Wednesday winter’s afternoon Casa Naranjo was not busy, but the staff were welcoming. Two men, clearly related in some way to the business, ate and talked at a larger table at the back of the restaurant, whilst a lone lady lunched alone with a book nearby. We settled in, ordered two Spanish reds by the glass and starting examining the menu.

Weekday lunchtimes and Monday evenings offer a two-page listing of two tapas for £5, and we didn’t need to go beyond the choices there although the a la carte selection also looked tempting. Katharine  is a vegetarian so our choices reflected that for the most part.

Patatas mixtas (alright, we ordered two of these over the afternoon…) were perfectly cooked however the spicy sauce was a little too full of capsicum for me. Garbanzos (chickpeas) cooked with spinach, Seville-style were just divine. The spicy lentils with vegetables were also a favourite. The dressed Zamorano cheese was just lovely but I think a little too much, especially given that we used the generous basket of fresh bread to help us eat it. It was our gluttony, rather than the cheese, that was at fault. I threw in a tapa of butterbeans with chorizo and onion as token meat-eater, and Katharine ordered the croquettes of the week: cheesy garlicky mouthfuls of heaven.

The bill was just £31 for two, including three glasses of wine which amounted to just under £10. We were stuffed for the afternoon, and in fact I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. The food was great, and the service was lovely, very friendly but on a couple of occasions a little vague: given how quiet the restaurant was, we assumed we had the new guy who was just finding his feet. Indeed, it turned out he had just moved over from near Barcelona to work there.

Definitely a place to return to, especially on a Monday night for a cheap and enjoyable dinner.