Dinner at the Standard Hotel, Fitzroy

The Standard Hotel is the sort of pub that white people like. It’s hidden down a residential Fitzroy street, it has a huge beer garden, it has live music, and it is so chock full of hipsters that I’m pretty sure they won’t let you in if you don’t have either (a) an iPhone, or (b) Ray-Ban Wayfarers.

J and his mate Ben often have beers at the Standard after playing squash, and on this occasion I decided to crash their boys’-night. We weren’t planning to eat there, but the beer session went on and on (as they do), and I got hungry.

So we ordered the sausage rolls ($8.50):

which appeared to be skinless sausages wrapped in some puff pastry. Props for not using frozen ones, and nice presentation, but the sausage part tasted just like supermarket sausages.

Still hungry after sharing a plate of these, we ordered main courses. I should add at this point that ordering meals at the Standard involves approaching the bar, copping a withering stare from the surly barperson (I say “barperson” because both the male and female staff are equally surly), and apologetically whispering your order… then scuttling away before their gaze can turn you to stone.

I ordered the chicken parma ($19):

It usually does come with chips, but given that we’d already had the sausage rolls, I ordered it without. Which is the sort of stupid-yet-valiant attempt at calorific virtue that I often make, amidst drinking four beers and eating pub food. Let’s face it, I may as well have just had the bloody chips.

Aaaaanyway, the parma… well, it was OK. They do use proper chicken breast (HATE it when you get one of those frozen pieces of manufactured crap), and the herb crumb was good. But they had this prosciutto on the top that tasted a bit funky, and big chunks of feta, which in my opinion do not belong on a parma.

J had the vegetarian enchiladas, which you can sort of see in the pic behind my parma. I had a bite and they were not bad. Although probably you could get something similar up at Vege Bar for less money and less attitude.

The Standard is a good place to go if you want to sit outside and drink Coopers; good, for example, if you smoke or have friends who do. Or if you have a particular fetish for really grouchy bartenders. But I don’t think I would go there to eat again.

The Standard Hotel on Urbanspoon

January 28, 2010 | Kate | Tags: | 5 Comments »

Coffee at St Ali, South Melbourne

So last week I get a call from the Divine Miss Em, over from Coonawarra for a day and with a brief window of opportunity for a coffee in South Melbourne. “Just tell me where to meet you,” she says.

Where to take an out-of-towner for coffee in South Melbourne? Where else but St Ali – one of the original third-wave coffee destinations (i.e. coffee wankery) in this fine town of ours.

(Yeah, yeah, every other blogger has been here already. I don’t cross the river very often, alright?)

If you have any interest in coffee at all, you will probably know that St Ali roasts its own beans on the premises. All kinds of beans. Choose from impressive-sounding single origins from Ethiopian Yirgacheffe to Brazilian Nossa Senhora De Fatima, plus a few different house blends.

To start with, I had a shot of espresso with their blend of the day. And in true espresso fashion, I gulped it down before realising I’d forgotten to take a photo… oops. Anyway, it was a great short black – no bitterness, but with enough punch to give you that espresso buzz.

Not only are there a zillion different beans to choose from, you can also choose from a range of different coffee brewing methods. Oh no, silly, there’s not just espresso! (Although their espresso machine is fairly impressive.) I decided to try the syphon (or siphon) filter, mainly because it looks really cool when they make it.

I believe the idea with the syphon is that it gives a more delicate flavour, so that you can better taste all the different notes. Obviously I am a coffee philistine, as it just tasted to me like watery coffee. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

The Divine Miss Em had a latte:

which she pronounced fabulous. She asked for a skinny latte, but was told that “we’re not doing skinny milk at the moment” – I immediately got my back up, thinking “effing full cream coffee nazis”, but when we went up to the counter to pay, I noticed a sign saying that skim milk was going to be unavailable for three weeks due to supplier issues. So I forgive them. (Guessing they must use some kind of fancy organic milk.)

We didn’t eat, but the menu looked great, as did the food coming out. The woman at the next table was having a Meg Ryan moment over the baked beans.
But really, St Ali is all about kickarse coffee.

St Ali on Urbanspoon

| Kate | Tags: | 5 Comments »

Eating Queenstown and Central Otago, New Zealand – recommendations wanted!

I love going to New Zealand. It’s the overseas holiday you take when you can’t be bothered with the usual hassles of going overseas (i.e. long haul flights, a different language, brushing your teeth with bottled water, driving on the other side of the road etc.).

J and I had such a ball in Marlborough last February (where we had one of our Top 5 Meals of All Time at Herzog), that we’ve decided to have a crack at another of NZ’s wine regions: Central Otago.

To that end, I want your recommendations and suggestions on where Eating Melbourne should eat and drink! We’ll be there for a week, and based in Queenstown most of the time, with a hire car to drive around to wineries etc.

January 20, 2010 | Kate | 9 Comments »

Dinner at Rae’s Restaurant at Balgownie Estate, Yarra Valley

Rae’s Restaurant at Balgownie Estate, Melba Hwy, Yarra Glen. Ph (03) 9730 0774

Have you ever been hot-air-ballooning before? I hadn’t. You have to get up early. As in, long-before-sparrows-fart, may-as-well-have-just-stayed-up-late, early. Having anticipated this when giving J a hot-air-balloon ride over the Yarra Valley for his birthday, I’d booked a room at Balgownie Estate, so as not to have to drive all the way to the balloon check-in from Melbourne. (Mind you, we still had to get up at 3.45am.)

Anyway, we checked into the Mercure Balgownie resort the night before, and decided to have an early-ish dinner at Rae’s Restaurant which is just next to the Balgownie cellar door.

Nice view out over the vineyard and hills; white starched tablecloths; menu comprising handpicked produce from the estate’s own vegetable garden. Looking good, right?

Until we sat down – with a thump! The chairs are too low for the tables!!

As my pixelated dining companion demonstrates, the chairs are so low that one’s elbows are way below table height, giving one the feeling of being a little kid at the Grown-Ups’ Table. Not ideal.

We moved on to perusing the wine list. The very short wine list, comprising only Balgownie wines (and mostly current vintage), with the exception of a couple of white varieties that Balgownie doesn’t make at all – a riesling and a semillon, if I remember correctly. I was a bit surprised by this, given the $30+ price of main courses – the other high-end winery restaurants I’ve been to (most notably Ten Minutes by Tractor, and Herzog in NZ) have had fairly extensive lists. Others such as Daniel Alps at Strathlynn (in TAS), while focusing on the estate’s own wines, will at least offer a large range of back vintages.

We chose a glass of the Balgownie Estate Black Label Sparkling Shiraz 2008 to start with. I don’t usually go much on sparkling reds but I really liked this, so much so I bought three bottles to take home the next day. It’s just the right amount of sweetness, not sickly like a Lambrusco, but just sweet enough to go pleasantly with the bubbles.

As a starter, I ordered the “warm Romano onion compote tart, basil, goat’s cheese, anchovies and olive jam” ($18). Sounds like a few too many ingredients going on, I thought to myself, but the waiter assured me that this was the most popular entree dish.

I was right; there was too much going on in this dish. What was with the eggcup filled with watermelon granita and pesto?! What was with the three random green olives?  I think this could have been a pleasant simple dish if they’d taken out about half of the ingredients.

By this time we’d finished our glasses of sparkling, and I ordered a bottle of Balgownie Estate pinor noir. (I think this is the only restaurant where I’ve ever been able to say “I’ll have a bottle of the pinot noir” and not have to supply any additional information. Aside from perhaps the local pizza joint.)  The waitress returned to the table with the bottle; presented it to J, not to me, even though I’d ordered it; and then unscrewed the top, poured two full glasses immediately (no tasting), put the bottle back on the table and left. A different waiter returned a few minutes later with a saucer to put underneath the bottle. Hmm.

The main course arrived while I was in the bathroom, so please ignore the broccolini on my plate – this was a side dish that J served up before I had a chance to take the pic:

I’d ordered “confit of duck leg on a bed of onion jam and a cantaloupe mocha jus with candied turnips” ($34). The whole thing was sticky, jammy and sweet. The “cantaloupe mocha jus” reminded me of 1980s apricot chicken, and I wasn’t a fan of the presentation, being all smeared right up the sides of the dish.

I am not sure which bit was the candied turnips – the brown slices that look like beetroot, or the green thing? If it was the brown slices, then I have no idea what the green thing was. It tasted kind of like pear. But why was it bright green?? HOW did they make it bright green?!

I didn’t eat much of my main course – fortunately the entree was pretty filling – and the waitress cleared my plate without asking whether anything was wrong. I’ve always thought that this is the truest indicator of whether or not a restaurant is serious about their food: if you don’t eat it, do they ask why not?

As fun as it was to sit at the Grown-Ups’ Table, we decamped to the adjoining lounge area for dessert. This is a lovely spot to sit at twilight and watch the bunnies hop across the lawn.

None of the sweets particularly appealed, so we chose the cheese platter ($30), which arrived promptly:

The cheeses were quite a nice selection, as far as Victorian cheeses go: Yarra Valley Dairy Black Savourine, Gippsland Blue, Tarago River Jensen’s Washed Rind and Milawa Camembert. The crackers were a bit naff for a $30 cheese plate, but maybe that’s just me being overly picky, given the meal up to that point.

Sadly, I have to also make mention of the music that played in the restaurant throughout our meal. Celine Dion, Leo Sayer and the Bee Gees are fine artists, but surely a fine-dining restaurant is not the right context? Same goes for “Holiday”-era Madonna.

Overall, while we enjoyed our stay at Balgownie, this meal was not one I’d choose to repeat. You’re better off saving your money, driving 15 minutes to Healesville, and having a great pizza at Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander.

(The
ballooning was great, by the way.)

January 12, 2010 | Kate | Tags: | 10 Comments »

Lunch at Cafe Vue at Heide

Happy New Year, fellow foodies! I’m back after a brief blogging hiatus and ready to step into the breach once more. Let’s do some eating!

Occasionally I do feel mildly guilty that most of my social events and outings revolve around food and wine. There’s more to life, right? Culture, and stuff?

So this week I decided to trek on out to the Heide Museum of Modern Art, to infuse my mind with Art at their current Cubism exhibit. Purely coincidentally (cough cough), Heide also happens to be the location of one of the most recent additions to Shannon Bennett’s empire: Cafe Vue at Heide. Who knew!

Well, figuring that one oughtn’t let such an opportunity pass, my partner in crime and I decided to have some lunch.  It was already over 30 degrees at midday, but we were told that all the inside tables were booked out, so we took the last outside table under an umbrella. (Incidentally there were still inside tables empty by the time we finished our meal.)

For some reason, the bread here arrives in a drawstring cloth bag, that’s attached to the corner of the table with a clip.

The most obvious reason, aside from novelty, ought to be space-saving. The cutlery however is not set in place-settings, but placed on the table all together with napkins etc in a large carry-box, which takes up a fair bit of space. Surely if you set the place-settings, you could have the bread on the table rather than hanging off it?!

The menu appeared to be fairly similar to the other two Cafe Vues (see http://www.vuedemonde.com.au/cafe-vue.aspx), with the addition of the “Heide Garden Menu du Jour” – $35 for two courses, $45 for three, with a choice of two options each for entree, main and dessert.

J went with entree and main, and chose the gazpacho with crab and avocado for entree – the perfect hot-weather dish. (The other choice was pumpkin risoni.)

The tomato soup was flavoursome, not too salty, and the avocado and crab “mash” in the centre was lovely. I am also obsessed with their crockery. Can we get a close-up?

Have just discovered that they have it for sale on the VdeM website. My birthday is in March, everyone. HINT HINT.

But I digress. For main course, the two options were lamb rump with saute potatoes, or mulloway with Tunisian cous cous and fennel puree. It was too hot for the lamb, so we both went with the mulloway:

God, I love that crockery. Sorry, where were we? Oh right – main course. Hmm. I didn’t love it. I confess I’ve never had Tunisian cous cous before, so maybe this is just how it is, but the texture of the cous cous balls reminded me of those chewy little balls in bubble tea. (I like bubble tea, but not with fish.)  The fish itself was ok, but overpowered by a whole lot of fennel and dill… the dish as a whole just didn’t float my boat.  J wasn’t keen on it either.

I’d gone with main and dessert, and had picked the Eton Mess as my dessert choice. (The other choice was madeleines with Heide honey custard, which also sounded nice.)

Eton mess is a pretty simple dish really, and next to impossible to stuff up - it’s just crushed-up meringue, strawberries and cream. (A deconstructed pavlova, if you like.)  I liked the presentation, and the freeze-dried strawberries sprinkled over the top were a nice addition.

Service throughout was pretty attentive and cheerful, not a bad effort considering how stinking bloody hot it was.

We each had a glass of wine with lunch, and the bill came to around $90 for the two of us. Not too bad, but I think next time I’d probably go for a cheaper option, such as the Cafe Vue lunch box – which at $15 a head (including starter, salad, savoury and sweet) would probably feel like better value.

Café Vue at Heide on Urbanspoon

January 11, 2010 | Kate | Tags: | 3 Comments »