Enter via Laundry serves innovative Indian at Melbourne’s most exclusive ‘restaurant’
You might be surprised to learn that Melbourne’s most exclusive ‘restaurant’ is in the suburbs. Seating just 10 people and open only two nights a week, here’s how to score an invite to the most delicious secret dinner party, writes Dan Stock.
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Attica? Vue de monde? Nah.
For Melbourne’s most exclusive – and elusive – reservation you need to look further afield.
Seating just 10 people and open two nights a week, when bookings are released they are snapped up in a flash – usually by return diners, or those who have heard about it from those who have and registered via email first.
You’ll BYO booze and be seated at the single dining table with friends you haven’t yet met but will likely leave hours later with a happy heart, a phone full of numbers and plans to return.
It’s called Enter via Laundry, because that’s what you do as you’re welcomed into a candlelit home on a quiet residential eastern suburbs street where the hubbub of a secret dinner party awaits.
Even though I’m here tonight as the guest of an ex MasterChef judge, Helly Raichura proves you don’t need to take part in a cooking competition to follow your dream.
Heck, you don’t even need a backstory.
But for what it’s worth here’s hers: HR consultant by day; keen cook by night. Born in Gujurat, India, and migrating to Australia in 2007, Helly used work experience stints in experimental fine diners Lume (South Melbourne) and Gaggan (Bangkok) for the base skills needed to transform dishes from her childhood into modern plates of today, which she’s been doing a couple of nights a week for the past 18 months.
But that other reality TV trope – cooking with passion? You’ll find that in abundance here.
Helped by a couple of Cordon Bleu students in the open kitchen, Helly serves a 10-course meal of traditional Indian dishes reinterpreted with Australian ingredients and yes, that could so easily be an on-trend train wreck but the procession of plates here are instead surprisingly poised, precise and so very, very pretty.
These self-taught hands could teach more than a few professionals what restraint means.
A selection of one-bite flavour bombs begin that are intricate, time and technique heavy and gone in a flash.
A pappadum flecked with wattle seeds topped with bunya nut, finger lime and crunchy-juicy pig face; a plantain chip dusted with sea lettuce powder and topped with bloodlime pickled with fennel; a Gujurati street snack known as kachori that’s here a fried doughball stuffed with fresh peas, broad and borlotti beans served on a thick corn sauce.
They are quickly followed by a terrific take on a kebab that instead uses young jackfruit to fill flaky, toasted bread. With pickled onion, radishes, chilli and hung yoghurt, it’s a pinky-up version of a late-night Aussie staple and the most delicious use of jackfruit as a meat substitute I’ve encountered.
For Helly and her kitchen might be vegetarian but this is cooking that relies not on faux meat to make its point but rather draws on an ingrained respect for vegetables and a thousand years of spicing them.
To wit: cream, sweet and purple potatoes marinated in a paste of coriander, ginger and garlic before being wrapped in paperbark and cooked over coals. These soft, smoky tubers are served with more of that vibrant green paste, Davidson plum chutney and onion jam that play the sweet off the herbal heat of the marinade to winning effect.
But it’s Helly’s take on another popular Gujarati snack, khandvi, that’s the undoubted star of the night.
Usually served as tightly rolled coils, Helly instead unfurls the velvety besan (chickpea flour) ribbons into pasta-like sheets that come swimming in spiced coconut milk dotted with chilli, lemongrass and bush tomato oils. Finished with garlic flowers from the garden, it’s artful, elegant and unbelievably good.
As refreshing as it’s alluring and innovative, chilled white asparagus is served as a bridging course between savoury and sweet. Cooked with sugar syrup and lemon myrtle, the spears are teamed with a scoop of rockmelon sorbet with beetroot prettily microplaned atop. It’s a lovely evocation of spring, as are the morels earlier served on aged basmati with a heady-rich roasted garlic raita alongside.
Of course it wouldn’t be an Indian meal without a selection of gold leaf-topped sweets to finish, and the delicate patty pans come filled with sandesh and chiroti, two traditional pastries here featuring strawberry gum and Geraldton wax, peach and riberries.
Tisanes of lemon aspen and river mint freshly picked from the garden finish the $127 a head menu, where the use of all those natives feels fresh, not forced.
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It’s a joyous experience. The palpable sense of discovery and, let’s face it, the air of secrecy and exclusivity combine to create one of Melbourne’s most memorable meals cooked by one of its rising stars.
ENTER VIA LAUNDRY
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