Lagoon Dining brings Asian fare to the heart of Little Italy
In the heart of Lygon St, new Asian restaurant Lagoon Dining is making a splash by swimming against the tide and serving a knockout noodle dish that puts gnocchi to shame.
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They’re called the 36 streets (never mind there’s more than 70).
Evolving out of the artisan guilds that supplied the city in silver, gold, soap and spices for thousands of years, in Hanoi’s Old Quarter you’ll find streets tightly packed with traders specialising in the one product.
There’s lantern street, where a hundred shops sell the same gold-tasselled orbs in various hues. There’s kitchen pot street and decorated candlestick street; aquarium street for exotic fish, Fake Addidas street for shoes and Girl With A Diamond Earring street for art reproductions of quality ranging from Fake or Fortune? to botched Jesus fresco.
It’s a sight common to markets across Asia – stall after stall selling the same products, whether mobile phone cases, plastic slippers, frying pans or religious trinkets.
In 1950s Melbourne and for decades thereafter, there was only one street where people went to eat spaghetti and sip spumante, a hundred gingham tablecloths and wax-dripped Matteus bottles all vying for diners with Mambo Italiano on their mind.
While today there remain tourist traps for young players along Lygon Street, it’s also still, perhaps surprisingly, bustling and vibrant with the Cinema Nova end fizzing with the type of energy Fitzroy St would kill for this balmy midweek night.
And just as I reckon the family selling bathrobes on bamboo street would do well for its point of difference so, too, would the restaurant selling something other than marinara and ersatz dolce vita along this strip.
It seems Chris Lerch, Ned Trumble and Keat Lee agree.
The trio has taken over what was, for almost seven decades, the Lygon Food Store and transformed it into Lagoon Dining, where it’s out with the parmesan and prosciutto and in with the fish sauce and lap yuk.
This is the first venture for the three who met while working together at Ezard in 2013 – Lerch out the front; Trumble and Keat finishing their apprenticeships in the kitchen – and that DNA shows through the mod Asian-with-a-twist menu here.
The long skinny grocery store has been artfully reimagined as a restaurant, the room cleverly repurposed by way of whitewashed brick and tiled walls, banquette and bar seating and an open kitchen that adds colour and movement. But not sound.
This kitchen team is oh so quiet, communicating seemingly by telepathy and cooking for the broad church of diners with calm efficiency. There’s no angst, no raised voices – nothing that takes focus away from your conversation or dinner. It’s a lesson to every bolshie bell-banger out there.
The menu takes much of its influence from China, but travels throughout the East. Interestingly, the area’s heritage hasn’t been completely erased, with Italian ingredients interposed with more overtly Asian elements, and while fusion can often send shivers, when Keats and Trumble break rules they do it with impeccable manners.
The beef tartare, for instance, comes seasoned with Sichuan pepper, its signature hot and numbing fire cooled by crème fraiche underneath. Pickled shallots and finely sliced green chilli add fragrant heat and puckering crunch, Chinese doughnuts whacked on the grill the vehicle for ferrying from the plate. It’s an interesting, deftly reinterpreted version of this modern Melbourne menu staple ($22).
The octopus dish is another Marco Polo amalgam where charry, satisfyingly chewy tentacles come with ‘nduja (spicy Calbrian sausage) and black beans; Japanese ponzu sauce adding citric zing that fresh fennel counters with aniseedy crunch. It’s a terrific dish ($22).
Hot and sour shredded potato is altogether alluring to snack alongside a fresh and fruity Moon Dog tropical lager ($9 schooner), the ribbons of wok-tossed noodle-like potato just-firm and seasoned with more Sichuan, chinkiang (black) vinegar and pickled enoki mushrooms ($8). Even better, school prawns in a salted duck egg batter that give the little crustaceans more chew than shatter and are wildly addictive. More please ($13).
Little cubes of pancetta add satisfying depth and mouthfeel to a bowl of crunchy snake beans, the addition of shiitake delivering meaty chew to slices of tofu and dried prawns. With crisp fried shallots sprinkled atop, it’s at once complex and fresh and go-back-for-another serve more-ish ($17).
The wine list is a succinct selection of hits that travels around the globe, leapfrogging from small producer to small producer, whether a salty and savoury Georgian rkatsiteli or bright and juicy Beechworth pinot. While most of the list heads quickly north of $15 a glass/$70 a bottle, the Mona Mina white on tap is not only well-pitched to the food - its mix of chardonnay, viognier and sauv blanc bright and fragrant and suited to tempering the heat - but deliciously drinkable at $10 a glass, $28 a 500ml carafe.
Well briefed, well drilled and well thrilled to have a busy hit on their hands, the team, led by Lurch, keeps the room ticking over with casual class, the table accoutrements suitably refined for an audience that seems equal parts cardigan and cool Carlton.
It’s a restaurant “the kids” can bring a date or their folks and both would feel equally comfortable, especially when such simple, yet impressive, dishes as a whole flounder hit ($45). Tender and sweet fleshed, the fish is dressed in white soy and garlic oil, a dusting of pork scratchings adding salty texture. Team with crunchy cabbage coated in chilli butter and topped with tiny crisp white bait for a delicious double act ($14).
But do not miss the rolled rice noodles. Like bouncy, satisfyingly toothsome gnocchi, these pan-fried nuggets come in a terrific XO bolstered by hits of lap yuk (Chinese cured pork belly), beanshoots and spring onions for bursts of fresh crunch. What it might lack in looks it more than makes up for in smarts. Yet another cracking dish ($17).
All killer, no filler, Lagoon Dining might be an outlier in a sea of Napoli, but is streets ahead. No wonder it’s packed.
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LAGOON DINING
263 Lygon St, Carlton
lagoondining.com
Open: Mon, Wed, Thur, Sat from 5pm; Fri, Sun from noon
Go-to dish: Rolled rice noodles
Score: 15 / 20