Iconic St Kilda eatery is plating up the past to celebrate turning 30
Nostalgia is the hero ingredient at Stokehouse this month as the restaurant celebrates three decades of delicious dining. The venue’s best known chefs are returning their old favourites to the menu — but for a short time only.
Inner South
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The Stokehouse is gearing up to party like it’s 1989, inviting alumni chefs — Maurice Esposito, Michael Lambie and Andrew Blake — to put their favourite dishes back on the menu.
The trio will also share menu specials from the past with existing head chef Ollie Hansford recreating the dishes for lunch and dinner at the landmark St Kilda restaurant.
Dishes being returned to the menu include Blake’s smoked salmon stack with pickled cucumber, horseradish cream and lattice chips (1991-92), roast wild barramundi with sauce vierge (created by Lambie between 1994-98) and baby calamari filled with prawns and served on slow roasted tomatoes and couscous (from Esposito’s 2001-2007 stint).
Mr Hansford said the dishes being showcased were a “real reflection of the restaurant’s culinary journey”.
“The Stokehouse owners (Frank and Sharon Van Haandel) have always been very generous with their space and placed a great deal of trust in their head chefs over the years,” Mr Hansford said.
“Michael Lambie came straight from the UK where he was trained by Marco Pierre White and you can see that influence in the dishes he created during his time at Stokehouse (1994-1998).
“The highly technical, French-influenced barramundi with sauce vierge is an example of that.
“At the time it was cutting edge cuisine in Melbourne.”
On top of the barramundi, Lambie’s time at Stokehouse will be remembered with a seared tuna tataki.
He said the cuisine was an example of how multicultural Melbourne was.
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“It’s an amazing dish which I have kept in my repertoire since moving on from Stokehouse and it continues to appear on the menus at my restaurants,” Lambie said.
He said the restaurant’s 30th anniversary was an “unbelievable milestone”.
“Stokehouse has been a huge factor in my career and I learnt so much in my time with the Van Haandel Group; it was an excellent finishing school which has helped me immensely during my 20 years in Melbourne,” he said.
After his Stokehouse stint Lambie went on to help the group turn St Kilda’s Circa the Prince into a three-hat restaurant in its first year.
Today he helms South East Asian eatery Lucy Liu with George Sykiotis, Zac Cribbes and Scott Borg.
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