Eating Melbourne

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.