That’s the door Ho in the foreground. Two of the hottest restaurant openings in the last fortnight are Golden Fields and Chin Chin. The punters have packed both places and the brains behind each – Andrew McConnell and Chris Lucas – both say that for the first time they are seeing the message spread through social media. In the case of Chin Chin, I should declare I have a conflict of interest in writing this review as I helped Lucas […]
Eat streets
Where to eat on Melbourne’s and Australia’s famous eat streets.
Last of the summer winemaking
It’s the dream of many to buy a cute little vineyard somewhere and start making wine, good wine hopefully. It’s the sort of hobby that sends people broke with high entry costs and often inferior wine produced. But oh what a joy to drink something you’ve made yourself, even though all your friends just want to spit rather than swallow. The sensible way to make wine is not to own a vineyard. All you need is access to good grapes […]
The chaos that is Misschu
Order at the tuckshop window Click through to the MissChu website at your peril. It’s noisy, just like the restaurant, if you can call it that. The vibe is exactly the same as the crowded chaos of a SE Asian city at this joint at the top end of Exhibition St, between Lonsdale and Latrobe. The walls are pasted with refugee-style imagery. The crowd at lunch is largely office with guys in shirtsleeves wearing lanyards, groovy Asian guys in beanies […]
The great Easter bun hunt
I love this time of the year because I can indulge in hot cross buns. I love their spiceness combined with the sweetness of raisins on soft buns. Naturally, things have come a long way since I first ate them as a kid toasted, spread with a thick chunk of butter (we always at Lurpak slightly salted in those days) with home made blackberry jam and indoctrinated by Catholic brothers. Nowadays there are so many variations from chocolate chip to […]
A Temple that needs more spice
It’s very hip. It’s dark like a nightclub with individual lamps over each table illuminating the food. Not so dark that you could get away with the kind of nefarious under table hand shuffling that was reported in the defunct Bistro Guillaume bar that previously occupied the basement space. But dark enough to make any food photography futile. I could be anywhere in the world, but I’m in Melbourne in the basement dining room in Crown Casino insulated from the […]
Busting the great Pellegrini’s myth
People love Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar. It’s because of the atmosphere and the 1950s charm. It’s a great place to hang out and watch the top end of Bourke Street go by – as long as you are not eating or drinking coffee. If you have anything more ambitious than a glass of water (alcohol isn’t served) you’ll be disappointed because the food and the coffee are also both stuck in the 1950s. But the place is packed, so why would […]
Cibi: a cafe and a gallery by any other name
Cibi: try the green tea muffins Cibi is a cafe that thinks it’s a gallery. Actually, it is a gallery and regularly holds openings to launch the various (mainly kitchen) products it imports (mainly) from Japan. Housed in a modern warehouse building on Keele St, the Cibi space features a large open kitchen and grunge cafe mixing found objects and mismatched tables and chairs with a minimalist feel – if that makes sense. It’s the brainchild of former architecture nut […]
Shades of brown at The Spaghetti Tree
Fresh fish doesn’t smell. The seafood crepe ($17) at The Spaghetti Tree smelt acrid, of ammonia. I didn’t even want to taste it and one mouthful was enough to put me off the food for the evening. It was awful in smell, taste, texture and presentation and left barely touched by the three of us. An awkward yeast infection was mentioned and before even the garlic bread ($6.50) could arrive, halfway through our mains, the seafood crepe was renamed the […]
Everything you wanted to know about coffee (but were afraid to ask your hipster barista) part 1
New on the block – the “magic” at Proud Mary. Check out part two of this post. It’s complicated now ordering a coffee. No sooner do you think you have a grip on all the current vogue brewing methods and another one lands on the scene. In my case the latest ones to enter my vocabulary it’s the Trifecta (coming soon) and the Magic (see definitions below). No longer are the options just espresso-based but there a plethora of new […]