Category: Culinary

The word omakase translates, approximately, as “I leave it to you” — but that rough English equivalent misses the full weight of the arrangement. When you sit at a Japanese chef’s counter in Melbourne and say omakase, you are not merely agreeing to a set me…

A market that chefs use is a different institution from a market that tourists visit. The distinction is in the sourcing depth — which vendors have the relationships with the farms, which fish hall has the buying power to access the best catch, which deli c…

The non-alcoholic drinks world spent its early years in Melbourne making the same mistake: trying to replicate the flavour of alcohol without understanding that what people were mourning was not ethanol but complexity. A non-alcoholic gin substitute that ta…

The argument for Australian whisky has always been environmental. Not the malted barley, which is not radically different from what you would find in Scotland; not the distillation equipment, which most serious Australian producers have acquired from establ…

A tasting menu is a proposition. Behind the sequence of courses, behind the wine pairing and the amuse-bouches and the petit fours, is an argument about what fine dining should be — what a kitchen’s understanding of Australian cooking looks like when given…

Melbourne performs itself spectacularly well from midday onwards — the long lunch, the wine bar, the evening degustation, the theatre of a city that has thought carefully about what it wants to be and constructed the infrastructure accordingly. But the city…

Every serious restaurant invokes provenance. Brae, Dan Hunter’s farm-restaurant in Birregurra, is one of the very few in the world where provenance is not a claim but a structural fact. The farm that supplies the kitchen is the farm that surrounds the dinin…

Lygon Street is not the whole story. It is not even the most interesting chapter. The broad, tourist-facing strip of Carlton that gave the world its image of Melbourne’s Italian community — the red-and-white checkered tablecloths, the gelato shops, the espr…

The inner north of Melbourne — Fitzroy, Collingwood, Brunswick, Northcote — has claimed a specific viticulture as its own, and the claim is not particularly recent any more. What began in the mid-2000s as a counterculture position — natural wine as an ethic…

The Mornington Peninsula is described, routinely, as a day trip — a scenic alternative to the weekend at home, a loose itinerary of cellar doors and beaches and a lunch somewhere pleasant. This framing is not incorrect, exactly; it is just catastrophically…