Eating Melbourne

It’s a rainy, freezing, depressing Monday in Melbourne, and you’re hosting interstate visitors. What to do?! Bugger off to the Yarra Valley for lunch, that’s what.

The Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander winery is on the main street of Healesville, and it’s a huge barn of a place comprising a bistro, cellar door, bakery, pizzeria, cheese room and coffee roastery. So yeah, pretty much foodie heaven. I’ve been there a couple of times before, usually at lunchtime on a weekend when you’ll have to wait an hour for a table… I can happily say it’s much easier to get a seat on a rainy Monday. (I hereby give you permission to chuck a sickie to go. I’ll write you a note for your boss.)

There were four of us, so we got to do my very favourite type of lunch: Let’s Order Way Too Much Food and Put It All In The Middle To Share.

Their menu consists of Antipasti, Pizza, Not Pizza (cute), Pots (i.e. casseroles and tagines) and assorted sides. We ordered a mix of everything, to be brought out in no particular order.

The pizzas are really, really, really good. Lovely crispy thin sourdough bases. We had the puttanesca, with olives, Spanish anchovies, capers and mozzarella:

and also the plain old margerita – mozzarella, tomato and basil:

Mmmmmm… pizza…
Moving on, the mushroom and manchego aranci were cute little mini balls of nom. I only have a picture of one of them because I wasn’t fast enough with the camera and everyone pinched them out of the dish too fast, but you get about six per serve:

There was a great little pocket of melty gooey manchego cheese in the middle.

There was also the eggplant and pumpkin tagine with giant couscous and labne:

This was not bad, although could have been a bit more spicy. (And personally I feel “giant couscous” is misleading. I wanted couscous the size of a fist! This was just “Slightly Larger Couscous”. … OK, I’m being silly.)

The house cut chips with aioli were fine:

To drink, we had one of their house wines, the Giant Steps Gladysdale Vineyard Pinot Noir 2008. Really delicious – juicy and fleshy without being too over-the-top. I was vaguely irked by them effectively charging corkage for it though, considering you’re drinking it right there in their winery. (It’s $45 if you walk over to the cellar door counter and buy it, but $54 to drink it there. Yes, I know they have to wash the glasses… but still. It’s their own wine!)

For dessert, I’d saved room for the Portuguese tart, which was to die for on my last visit. This time it was less exciting, I think because it wasn’t warm? The pastry had congealed a bit. Last time it was fresher out of the oven, perhaps. Still really good custard.

I also had an espresso with their own roasted coffee. They give you a double ristretto (with 20g of coffee) – zing!

Alas, on this occasion I did not get to attack the cheese room. Which just means that now I have an excuse to go again soon.