Half Acre in South Melbourne delivers style over substance

FABULOUSLY good-looking new South Melbourne eatery and events space Half Acre delivers style over substance. And unfortunately, it didn’t get better upon a second-chance visit, writes Dan Stock.

GOSH, it’s a beautiful space.

From the street, the arched brick doorway gives little away. Enter and you’ll leave South Melbourne’s industrial back blocks behind and be transported into a bucolic glasshouse of greenery with the whispered promise of baked goods in the air.

A large dining room is filled with elegantly spaced, timber-or stone-topped tables surrounded by an artful mix of wicker-backed and shiny black bentwood chairs.

A banquette runs the length of the whitewashed brick wall, on which cushions – all the way from Paris, apparently – are stylishly placed. Rough-hewn, exposed floorboards hark to the room’s blue-collar past as a working mill that now has an atrium fernery one end, a full open farmhouse kitchen book-ending the other.

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Half Acre is part all-day eatery, part bar, part events space. Picture: Nicki Connolly

With a market’s worth of produce on magazine-shoot display along the counter, pots bubbling over coals and flames tickling slow-roasting meats and a wood oven glowing away, the influences of, and comparisons to, Fred’s in Sydney are unmissable.

But be careful lifting the lietmotif of one of Australia’s best restaurants, for there’s a long way to fall from those heights.

Named after the size of the block it occupies, Half Acre is part all-day eatery, part bar, part events space, with Adam Wright-Smith, who’s spent the past few years in NYC, teaming up with Leigh Worcester and Asaf Smoli from food&desire, the catering company behind function spaces around Melbourne including Carousel on Albert Park Lake.

Here to try out the eatery part of the equation, it appears there’s some way for Half Acre to go before it shakes its function DNA and become a properly functioning restaurant.

A handful of pepitas and segments of sweet-sharp blood orange, on roasted pumpkin. Picture: Nicki Connolly

An odd welcome for my lunch guest, who was left in the doorway while a staff member fussed about the computer for interminable minutes, was doubled down with the strange decision to seat a heavily-pregnant woman on a hard-backed chair in the centre of the room and not, say, offering the pillow-strewn banquette (that then remained empty).

Not a huge deal, but it’s just one example of a lack of intuition and class to a lunch in which neither the kitchen nor floor staff handled a half-full room.

After a 40-minute wait for one of those wood-fired pizzas, it was clear the wheels had fallen off.

Grinding to a painful halt like a diet in need of Metamucil, the kitchen couldn’t cope, sending out overcooked, substandard food while more staff progressively arrived to wander about sweetly, if pointlesslessly, for there was little food coming out of the kitchen, and even less you’d want to eat.

Three small, mushy prawns came on a huge mound of tzatziki that only highlighted the meagre crustaceans that came with a significant $22 price tag.

The farmhouse chic open kitchen at Half Acre. Pictures: Nicki Connolly

Served with a handful of pepitas and segments of sweet-sharp blood orange, the roasted wodge of pumpkin was a great idea let down by being cooked into a pulpy mash ($14).

The pizza, one of a half dozen offered, was pretty good, with a nice chewy, chariness to the base that came topped with pungent taleggio and smoky potato ($21).

There are other moments of clarity. The stand out dish is the cabbage, its grill-blackened edges giving way to a supple, soft inner that’s dressed in punchy chimichurri with nuggets of charry goat’s cheese adding smoky creaminess. It’s excellent ($12).

Tired, dry chicken lost in a pond of brown mushroom juices, however, is not ($30).

Our waitress, admirable in adversity, held the room together until the last, when our plates were scraped and stacked on the table, like a backyard barbie. This air of amateurism is at odds with such surrounds, while gorgeous glassware and water decanters only highlight such own-goals as paper napkins.

Stand out dish: the grilled cabbage with torched goat’s cheese

But new places can have bad days. So I went back to see what it was like at night.

The room is equally fetching in the dusk, and steadily filled with a crowd of 20-something newly graduate professionals, as well as smoke from the kitchen giving a cataract haze to the space.

There’s also too much smoke in the butter that’s served with two flat bread discs ($7), and there’s much too much “saltbush salt” across the fried potatoes ($8) and my poor barramundi had spent way too long on the grill.

Topped with a pulpy mess of chopped herbs and green olives that looked as muddy as the mushy fish tasted, this poor thing had been butchered ($32). Improperly-cored roasted pineapple to finish as sloppy as the yoghurt ice cream it was served with ($12).

In time, Half Acre might bed its systems, training and kitchen down and deliver a polished, keenly priced offering.

For now, it really is a lovely looking room.

HALF ACRE

Rating: 11/20

Address: 112 Munroe St, South Melbourne

Website: halfacre.com.au

Phone: [phone]

Open: Tue-Wed, from 4pm; Thur-Fri from noon; Sat-Sun from 11am

Go-to dish: Grilled cabbage, torched goat’s cheese