Dan Stock’s best restaurants in Melbourne and Victoria of 2017
FROM an old CBD favourite to a winery eatery the likes we’ve never seen, respected Herald Sun food reviewer Dan Stock lists the best 10 restaurants he has eaten at this year.
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VICTORIAN chefs continue to surprise and delight with their creative and delicious dishes.
And if early signs are anything to go by, 2018 looks likely to be just as delicious.
These 10 restaurants received the highest scores when reviewed by the Herald Sun this year.
Cutler & Co
Score: 17 out of 20
Restaurants age quickly.
Andrew McConnell more than any other knows this, and, more than any other, knows how to use reinvention as a force for good.
And this most recent refresh has left Cutler looking as fine as she ever has.
The dining room, cloistered from the bar and open kitchen by archways of black-framed glass, is a candlelit vision of dark, sexy Melbourne that never forgets Fitzroy’s less salubrious past.
There’s enough spit on the polish to make the room shine; large leather booths on one side, duos by the emerald granite feature wall are opulently spacious and the pick of this room.
But it’s the back dining room where, come winter, Melbourne’s most coveted tables will be found. With carpet and comfortable couch seating, widely spaced tables — and a fire! — it’s another aspect of McConnell’s overarching vision that makes you sit back and go wow.
Details: Cutler & Co
55 Gertrude St, Fitzroy
Ph: 9419 4888
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Doot Doot Doot
Score: 16.5 out of 20
To say the fine dining restaurant at the new Jackalope Hotel at Willow Creek Winery could be a case of style trumping substance would be as understated as the 7m sculpture that greets upon arrival of the mythical half-rabbit, half-antelope from which the hotel takes its name.
But rather than this Saturday lunch being a procession of terrifying pretensions and the expensively beige to which the unfathomably rich seem to gravitate, it was instead, thankfully and somewhat incredibly, one of the most joyful, accomplished and polished holistic dining experiences of recent memory.
Details: Doot, Doot, Doot
166 Balnarring Rd, Merricks North
Ph: 5931 2500
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Ezard
Score: 16 out of 20
In a city obsessed with dumplings, Ezard could rightfully claim the crown of the best in town.
Eighteen years on, one of the CBD’s trailblazing fine diners is still forging a new path.
This old dog has a few new tricks, thanks to young gun head chef Jarrod di Blasi, who over the past three years has been quietly adding a refined Japanese focus to the bold South East Asian flavours that saw Teage Ezard’s eponymous basement restaurant hailed as one of the city’s best through the “aughties” and beyond.
Given its longevity many will have dined here before, but, in keeping with 2017 being the Year of the Restaurant Makeover, the now discretely refreshed, sleek and sparsely lit dining room is perhaps reason enough to return.
Details: Ezard
187 Flinders Lane, city
Ph: 9639 6811
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Pt Leo
Score: 16 out of 20
This is a winery restaurant the likes of which we haven’t seen.
Yes there’s an extensive cellar door from which you can taste the range of estate wines that come from the expanse of vines you see beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.
And yes, there’s an extensive food offering — whether oysters Kilpatrick and wallaby pies on the terrace, or a full three-course meal in the 110-seat restaurant.
And there’s also art. For Laura and Luke are sculptures — the latter, an arresting geometric evocation in bronze of man by English artist Tony Cragg; the former, a monumental work by Catalonian artist Juame Plensa — that are highlights in a 50-strong sculpture park.
There’s nothing ordinary about this $50 million, decades-long realisation of a world-class art and dining destination.
Details: PT LEO ESTATE
3649 Frankston-Flinders Rd, Merricks
Phone: 5989 9011
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Long Chim
Score: 15.5 out of 20
There is nothing like Long Chim in Melbourne. Book a hot date.
David Thompson is the Bangkok-based, Sydney expat universally regarded as the world’s leading proponent of Thai cooking. He’s brought his rollickingly goodtime and unapologetically authentic take on street food home after wowing the world, first with his high-end Nahm in London and Bangkok (which is currently #37 on the World’s 50 Best list), and then with Long Chim, of which this is the fourth in a family that already includes Singapore, Perth and Sydney.
While there’s a bold love of chilli and spice throughout the menu, this is not dumb dare food, the Scoville scale dialled up just for Jackass giggles. And there are many dishes on the menu for the chilli adverse.
Details: Long Chim
Crown Riverwalk, Southbank
Ph: 8582 3083
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Camus
Score: 15.5 out of 20
Downstairs, a gleaming, black-tiled open kitchen anchors the 50-seat dining room, while upstairs seats another 40-odd in blindingly stark white surrounds. Berber symbols for life and death signpost each room in neon.
Smoky glass pendant lighting complements the exposed brick walls and highlights the white-tiled bar downstairs, where Camus’s quotes are stencilled around artful paint splatters.
It’s one of the most thoughtful, stylish restaurant fit-outs of recent memory. It’s clever minus pretension, referential without turning twee. Elegant stemware, cutlery and grey linen napkins complement a procession of colourful Glenn Tebble ceramics and highlight the keen eye of a chef who’s spent his life in restaurants.
Though that doesn’t translate as inaccessible; rather, this is refined, sublime cooking without any fuss. Technique tempered with a generous heart, Khojda’s signature North African spicing dances in deft layers across a short carte where sharing makes sense.
Details: CAMUS
61 High St, Northcote
9486 3063
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Kisume
Score: 15.5 out of 20
NOT everyone is going to like Kisume, restaurateur Chris Lucas’ latest offering.
There will be those taken aback by the defiantly – even wilfully – provocative art adorning the walls, those outraged at a $55 glass of wine and many who will suffer, perhaps terminally, from bill shock.
But I do. A lot. Kisume is a Japanese restaurant that’s unmistakably Melbourne but with added New York sass. It’s three levels of Flinders Lane restaurant into which Lucas has artfully distilled decades of experience, and shows that while he’s been busy redefining what casual dining means in our city with Chin Chin, Hawker Hall, et al, these past years, he’s kept an eye on the long game of reclaiming the pointy end of the market, too.
Details: Kisume
175 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Ph: 9671 4444
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Wilson & Market
Score: 15.5 out of 20
The British chef’s passionate and delicious obsession with the foods of the Americas south of Dallas over the past half dozen years has given way to his true calling: Euro-influenced, precisely executed bistro fare.
It’s a return to fine form for the chef who made The Bot Melbourne’s hottest table in the mid-aughties.
His multi-part, multi-year Prahran Market project has finally come to fruition, with the “luxe brasserie” the final piece in the puzzle that started with a coffee window peddling custom-roasted coffee and single origin chocolate cake, followed with the “lifestyle cafe” where sprouted toast with guacamole and smashed pumpkin sits happily next to a proper English fry up for two.
And, along with a bar stocked with local white spirits that come with bespoke condiments plundered from the market’s fruit and veg stalls, comes the hero of the lot.
Details: Wilson & Market
163 Commercial Rd, South Yarra
Ph: 9804 7530
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Saint Crispin
Score: 15.5 out of 20
A new focus, with the restaurant now under Scott Pickett’s sole direction (Estelle, ESP, Pickett’s Deli) has come with a new look.
And the made-over space is a stunner.
Moody, sleek and flatteringly lit, the bright white walls painted deep dark, a backlit mirror running the length adding space and interest to the room. Gorgeous dark-stained vintage chairs upholstered in moss green velour surround simply set tables.
It’s sharp and current yet comfortable, and still speaks eloquently with the historic bones of a building that once was a horse stables and then a cobbler’s workshop.
Yep, they’ve brought the sexy back.
Details: Saint Crispin
300 Smith St, Collingwood
Ph: 9419 2202
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Saxe
Score: 15.5 out of 20
This is Joe Grbac’s first time as sole master of his own domain, having spent the past decade working for or with others including at The Press Club and, most recently, Collingwood’s Saint Crispin.
It’s there he honed the technical-yet-approachable signature that defines the menu at Saxe today.
And that experience shows through a restaurant that’s considered and mature at every turn, though it’s not even two months old.
It’s precise cooking with big, powerful flavours served across an entree-main format that will be embraced by the lawyers lawyering over lunch, yet at the same time is welcoming and flexible enough to warrant more casual visits.
Especially in the downstairs bar, where an all-day drop-in bar menu augments the upstairs a la carte offering that also comes in five- and seven-course degustation form.
Details: Saxe
211 Queen St, city
Ph: 9089 6699
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