At Project Forty Nine, the country comes to Collingwood

PROJECT Forty Nine has yet to capitalise on its regional heritage and is not the warm celebration of country it could be. At least not yet.

Dan Stock

3 min read

May 29, 2017 - 5:04PM

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The main course of pork neck. Picture: REBECCA MICHAEL

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AUTUMN is such a glorious time throughout our state, but it’s especially true of the northeast.

It’s where the poignant transience of the seasons is highlighted in stark relief; where the brilliant yellows and auburns and flame oranges of change add their triumphant crescendo of colour before withering away to a winter’s grey.

So I can only imagine Rocco Esposito and Lisa Pidutti, who have done a reverse tree change, might be missing their bit of Beechworth. Seasons are the story of the country. Less so the city. Collingwood, as they will find out, looks pretty much the same all through the year.

The duo, who have spent the past dozen years or so in Beechworth — first at Wardens Food and Wine, more recently at Project Forty Nine — have returned to the city. And they’ve come back in a big way — 550 sqm big — across two distinct spaces with three distinct businesses.

There’s a cafe for mushroom and fontina omelets for brekkie and baked gnocchi for lunch, a deli backed to bursting with cured goodness, and shelves stacked with wines to drink by the glass or grab by the neck for home. And next door, the restaurant, the newest addition to the Project Forty Nine canon that also includes a wine label and the original Beechworth cafe. It’s quite
the clan.

While the restaurant space certainly has more warmth and personality than many that take on a ground floor of a new apartment building lease, it’s yet to really shake that that’s what it is.

The large raviolo in porcini broth. Picture: REBECCA MICHAEL

A central open kitchen is the focal point of the room, and demarcates the space that’s lots of brushed concrete softened with a bit of greenery, blonde wood contrasted with a few pops of blue.

Tables come with linen napkins, water glasses and gold sparkly plates.

Esposito works the floor, while Tim Newitt, who worked with the team in Beechworth,
is in the kitchen, cooking up a fairly tight, Italian-leaning menu of northeastern produce. Five main-size dishes priced in the early 30s are augmented with a range of small plates in the high teens.

A few bites are on offer to get started, but the smoked eel wasn’t even that — a thumbnail-size square of meat on a slight taro crisp with a dab of apple puree and a touch of eggplant, it’s a tiny, fussy, $4 introductory crumb I wouldn’t bother with again.

A large raviolo is more in keeping with the season with a tasty chestnut and mushroom filling, though the porcini broth it swam in was too enthusiastically embracing the end of autumn, as it, and the mushrooms atop, was cold. Brrr. The crisp-roasted brussels sprout leaves that finished the dish the best thing about it ($16).

A generous portion of ox tongue seemed to have spent a too long in the water bath before getting branded by the grill, rendering it flaccid and spongy.

The promised mustard fruit came as an underwhelming puree, which needed much more spicy personality to properly sing ($17).

A main course of pork was much better. Though the pork — again generous — was cooked pinker than many would like, it was a lovely piece of meat (neck), and the roasted onion puree underneath was excellent. Atop, a tumble of soft, dressed cabbage is a happy match, though the cold roasted chestnuts scattered throughout were so tooth shatteringly hard they might need
a local dentist on speed dial ($31).

Good ideas, but unfortunately the menu reads better than it eats; the converse is perhaps true of the wine list.

Rocco, who makes his own (very good) chardonnay and until recently was the wine director at Vue de monde, has created a high end-aiming list with some gobsmacking mark-ups that those drinking up on the 55th floor of the Rialto might not baulk at, but down here in the backstreets
of Collingwood are astonishingly bold.

And while there’s a healthy selection of Beechworth region wines included, the four beers offered to me were all Italian, with anything from Bridge Road or Bright Brewery conspicuously absent.

A long wait for dessert — the kitchen is yet to find its dancing feet — that suffered from deconstruction. Excellent lemon curd, puckering and comforting in equal measure, was rather pointlessly attended to by a few dots of syrup, shards of meringue and a scattering of crumbs ($13).

Project Forty Nine has yet to capitalise on its regional heritage and is not the warm celebration of country it could be. At least not yet.

File it under potential.

dan.stock@news.com.au