Melbourne’s labyrinthine streets are home to Australia’s most developed food scene. Solve the cobbled maze and be rewarded with international food utopia, says Michael Harden
It’s mid morning in Melbourne’s busy centre and Hosier Lane is a hive of activity. Slathered exuberantly in graffiti and street art, this bluestone-cobbled lane just a block from the grand domed Edwardian baroque of Flinders Street Station has in recent years become an unofficial (though now council sanctioned) outdoor urban gallery. Much of the throng is here to Instagram, Flickr and Tweet the art, but there’s also a bride in full meringue regalia posing for wedding photos, schoolchildren in striped blazers sketching the stencilling, someone photographing photographers for an art project and, inevitably – this being a Melbourne ‘laneway’ – a little hole in the wall café serving meticulously sourced and crafted espresso and divine French- and Greek-influenced pastries to a steady stream of java worshippers.
Melbourne has no shortage of laneways like this one. They are a by-product of the 1837 grid that mapped out the city with main streets wide enough to accommodate bullock carts set at right angles to each other. Evolving haphazardly to service the businesses on the grid’s main streets, they developed their own unpredictable logic. Some play it straight but there are also twists and turns, dead ends and double backs in play. Even seasoned Melburnians are known to lose their bearings and get disorientated.
For most of the last century, the laneways were (not unreasonably) considered dark, dangerous passages of ill repute. But in the past decade or so changes to licensing and zoning laws have seen the laneways colonised first by small, idiosyncratic bars and then by an eclectic range of small businesses and organisations. It’s these that have come to encapsulate Melbourne’s multicultural, artistic and food-obsessed persona. Not your average Aussie city.
Trawling the laneways has become a pastime, a kind of food treasure hunt for grown-ups, complete with unmarked doorways, basement locations, tiny lifts and rickety flights of stairs.
‘The less signage you have, the cooler it is,’ laughs Kate Bartholomew, owner – together with husband Mykal and chef Adam D’Sylva – of Tonka, a modern Indian restaurant inhabiting a notorious former nightclub in the city’s old rag trade district. A favourite of Mick Jagger’s, as legend has it.
Tonka delivers the slightly disorienting, element-of-surprise feel that all the best Melbourne laneway joints have. Its entrance, hidden from the main thoroughfare by a curve in the laneway, is small and unassumingly utilitarian. Step through the doors though and you find yourself in a clean-lined, warehouse-sized space with an enormous cloud-like white mesh sculpture hovering over the main dining area and views through huge windows to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia’s largest sporting theatre. Just past the entrance, there’s a large bar mixing apt cocktails (the Tonka Lassi adds white cane and fresh mango to the traditional Indian street vendor version), and wine from an award-winning spice-friendly list that’s equally versed in the New and Old Worlds.
The menu has plenty to keep diners curious, combining traditional Indian street food like a textbook pani puri with more hybrid dishes such as a rich Goan curry, made with native Australian barramundi, mussels from Tasmania and sweet juicy Moolooloba prawns from Queensland, all given a refreshing sour note with the addition of kokum fruit, which is most commonly grown and found on the subcontinent.
Factor in that the kitchen is a ghee-free zone and that the mix also includes Southeast Asian flavours like betel leaf and coconut teamed with Tasmanian salmon or tuna tartare served with fresh wasabi (from Tasmania) and rice poppadoms and it quickly becomes apparent that we’re not in old-school Indian cooking territory any more.
‘Adam’s father is from India and his mother’s Italian and he spent a lot of years cooking Southeast Asian food so all those influences tend to surface here in some form or another,’ says Kate Bartholomew. ‘We definitely wanted to do something with modern Indian food because there wasn’t anything like it when we opened but we do it in a way that’s very Australian – we respect the technique and flavours of Indian cooking but we don’t necessarily feel bound by the traditions.
‘One of the things that we really concentrate on is using the best produce we can find, so when we get great local quails from our supplier we might cook them in the tandoor and serve them with pickled quince or we might take beautiful, locally made burrata and serve it with coriander relish and charred roti.’
The approach of respecting technique over tradition is common in Melbourne. At Flower Drum, a 30 year-old temple to meticulously cooked Cantonese food, there is mud crab in the dim sum and local lamb raised on saltbush (a native shrub with naturally salty leaves) used in spring rolls. Produce and provenance are an integral part of Melbourne food conversation. The city is ringed by open-air food markets with Australia’s oldest and largest (in fact the Southern Hemisphere’s largest), the Queen Victoria Market, sitting on the CBD’s northern border. Easily accessible by tram, it’s constantly packed with city workers shopping for dinner on their lunch breaks, older shoppers wheeling trolleys and students from nearby colleges grabbing a quick lunch of borek or grilled bratwurst shoved into a crunchy roll with mustard and relish.
The Queen Vic’s grand marble and terrazzo deli hall is quite literally food heaven – offering everything from crocodile and kangaroo meat to great slabs of butter produced in nearby Gippsland and cheese, olives, preserved vegetables and salamis both local and imported. Semi-open produce ‘sheds’ are stacked with an enormous range of locally grown Asian and European fruit and vegetables and the fishmongers hawk live mud crabs, Moreton Bay bugs (a crustacean from northern Australia) and locally caught rock lobsters. This access to great produce is as intrinsic to the Melbourne vernacular as the laneways.
Rosa Mitchell is co-owner and chef of two Melbourne laneway restaurants, Rosa’s Canteen in the shadow of the Supreme Court dome in the legal precinct and Rosa’s Kitchen, near Chinatown in the city’s east. Her food reflects her Sicilian background but what she cooks is also heavily influenced by what’s in season on her farm and winery about an hour outside the city.
‘We’ve got heaps of late tomatoes right now, really sweet and full of flavor, so we’ll be using those and some lovely aubergine too – you’ll be seeing some of those, probably with pasta but I’m also slow-braising some goat so I’ll use them with that as well,’ she says, explaining what’s making an appearance on the menu today. And that menu is a moveable feast, changing from day to day depending on what she’s harvesting on the farm, what’s available at the markets and even what country neighbours leave on her doorstep. ‘I’ll come out in the morning on my way into work and someone will have dropped off a box of heirloom pears from an old tree in their backyard, or wild mushrooms they have growing in a secret spot or perhaps some lemons. I learned from my mother to cook seasonally and so it’s how I like to cook in my restaurants too. I love the challenge it brings.’
Rosa’s Canteen is housed in a sleek new building – climbing up a flight of stairs you enter a light-filled room with sloping walls of louvered windows. At lunchtimes in particular, this space is filled with expensively suited lawyers and other well-heeled types. In contrast, the food is consciously, unapologetically rustic.
Homemade pasta, perhaps spaghetti or casareccia, might be tossed with a fennel-fragrant ragu or with an earthy mix of artichokes, peas and salted ricotta. For dessert, there might be (if you get in early enough) authentic cannoli dusted with crushed pistachios or a custard tart studded with pears, quince or berries that have come from the farm. Neither Rosa’s Canteen nor Rosa’s Kitchen has an espresso machine, choosing instead to make stovetop coffee, served black. It’s a bold statement in a town where the coffee culture nudges the fetishistic.
It seems appropriate, given the depth of feeling people in Melbourne have for coffee, that one of the city’s great cultural monuments is a slim, terrazzo-floored, neon-signed espresso bar on the corner of a laneway just down the hill from Victoria’s parliament building. Pellegrini’s opened in 1954, in time for the Melbourne Olympics, and while these days it’s more a shrine to the city’s espresso pioneers than a serious caffeine boutique, it retains a rakish retro charm.
One of Pellegrini’s near neighbours is Traveller, a standing room only coffee joint, owned by Mark Dundon and Bridget Amor. Two of the major figures in the new-wave Melbourne coffee scene, they came into the trade at a time when the approach was old-school Italian.
‘I really wanted to change what was happening because I felt that the product was a lot bigger and a lot more interesting than what I’d ever imagined,’ says Mark. ‘It felt boring to sit and listen to everyone else and what they were saying and not explore it myself.’
The pair have certainly explored with a coffee roasting facility, a stake in a coffee farm in Honduras, importing and sourcing their own beans and pioneering the siphon, pour over and cold drip techniques that are now commonplace across town. Their cafés include two laneway locations, Traveller and the slightly larger and constantly churning Brother Baba Budan. What’s notable about these new coffee places that have completely colonised the city is that, unlike the bars and restaurants that tend to be more tribal with the kind of crowds they attract (suits this way, hipsters over there), the coffee crowds are less easy to categorise.
Spend some time in Brother Baba Budan with its communal table, ceiling full of hanging chairs, tiny bar and 15 seats and you can observe urbanite Melburnians from all walks of life – from office workers and couriers to students, journalists, artists and academics – cohabiting while expertly ordering seasonal espresso blends and single-origin batch brews.
Dumplings are another area that attracts this demographic cross-pollination. Melbourne’s long history of Chinese immigration (starting in earnest during the 1850s gold rush) has meant that Chinese cooking is one of the food scene’s integral components.
There are scores of traditional dumpling restaurants in and around Chinatown but Supernormal, a stylish timber and concrete canteen opposite the Adelphi Hotel on Flinders Lane, encapsulates the Melbourne laneway style of technique over tradition. Chef-owner Andrew McConnell spent five years cooking in Shanghai and Hong Kong and has travelled extensively in Japan. Supernormal reflects those influences filtered through a Melbourne sensibility.
‘When I was living in China I became accustomed to the flavours and the way of eating there and after I came home, I realised that they’d become intrinsic to the way I like to eat,’ he says. ‘When you eat dumplings every day, it’s not something you let go of easily.’
Supernormal’s dumpling menu includes traditional pork and cabbage potstickers, steamed chicken and prawn dumplings and fried dumplings with less-traditional fillings like braised Wagyu beef shin. But it’s not just about the dumplings. There’s also Japanese-style raw hapuka and locally-caught bream, lobster rolls, grilled octopus spiced up with Korean chilli and slow-cooked Sichuan spiced lamb. It’s food that takes its cues from many cuisines and countries, made with local ingredients and served in a beautifully designed space dominated by a bar. Dropped into the context of the unexpected twists and turns of Melbourne’s laneways, it reads like a reflection of the city.
‘I think the food works really well with the way Melburnians like to eat these days,’ says McConnell. ‘It’s a social habit where people might pop in for a snack and drink here and then head off to another laneway place to do the same there. You visit several places in a night, sampling different food. It’s just how we do it here now.’