Omnia in South Yarra serves modern bistro with flare
Sirloin steak and chips, grilled fish with warm tartare sauce, apple pie and chocolate mousse — this is bistro comfort food at its best. If you’re craving timeless classics at the right price, this pop-up restaurant is a must, writes Dan Stock.
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Pssst. Fancy a drink in South Yarra but want to stay far from the madding Chapel St crowd?
Head to 25 Toorak Rd. Push open the door, sashay past the duos dining and families feasting and mosey on through to the bar out back.
It’s here you’ll find one of Melbourne’s hidden-in-plain-sight drinking gems, where backlit spirits beckon behind a bar where cocktails created by the world’s best (Orlando Marzo, ex Lume and reigning Diageo World Class champ) come shaken and stirred.
Cocktails flit from floral — a marigold Collins, perhaps — through spicy, with saffron giving a negroni a Middle Eastern twist, but for those who like to keep things traditional, your straight-up martini is offered in both regular and three-sip snack size.
It’s just one of many clever ideas you’ll come across at Omnia, a bistro and garden bar that’s taken over what was recently Dennis Hagger’s somewhat fusty paean to South Yarra of old and turned it into a pop-up restaurant that heralds the South Yarra of new.
For this is a “test-kitchen” for the huge Capitol Grand development just down the road that will feature a 100-seat day-through-night bistro as well as a fancy fine diner servicing the 50 storeys of wealthy apartment residents when it opens late spring.
Not that the team needs blooding.
Leading the charge is Stephen Nairn, most recently of Estelle by Scott Pickett, but who also counts Vue de monde and Eleven Madison Park in New York on his impressive CV. This over-achieving young Scot who’s called Melbourne home for the past six years has tapped formed Vue group chefs to join him, including sous chef Sam Homan and John Demetrios on the pastry section, while Tom Hunter (ex Oter, Coda) is looking after the floor.
Though ostensibly temporary the overhauled restaurant looks a million bucks; fantastically comfortable soft leather banquettes lining the walls with fluffy plump cushions, beautiful wood tables surrounded by a mix of black bentwood and soft padded forest green chairs, with David Bromley colour on the walls and loads of living greenery, it’s a lesson in elegant comfort. The napkins are linen, the cutlery elegant and the stemware refined, of course.
Nairn has hit the ground running, putting all those high-end smarts into creating a short carte of classics — steak tartare and duck parfait, steak frites and chocolate mousse — elevated with restrained, mature class.
His steak tartare, for instance, is a hand-chopped thing of beauty. Using smoked egg emulsion to bind the meat that has a good hit of peppery heat, lemony sorrel leaves add citric freshness while crisp thatched pommes gaufrettes add posh crunchy carbs to eat it from. It’s familiar yet completely unique ($21).
Attention to detail shines throughout the meal, whether it’s the warm ceramic bowl in which a generous serving of good crunchy baguette is served alongside terrific St David Dairy butter and is not, hallelujah, whisked away until after main course.
Or the fine dice of smoked trout lifted with lemon zest that’s wrapped in crisp brik pastry cigars ($7 each), or the handmade chocolates that come with the bill, you see high-end care at pop-up prices at every turn.
This winter’s superstar veg — Jerusalem artichoke — turns up here in a sublime velouté, the airy soup poured at the table around a quenelle of Chantilly cream that tops an orb of croutons and fermented green walnuts. There’s terrific depth to the dish thanks to those nuts that add an almost meaty character that then tempers the powerfully precise artichoke earthiness of one of this season’s winning bowls of comfort ($16).
Bigger plates include a fat fillet of rock ling served a touch undercooked but with a terrifically clever warm tartare sauce ($34) but for a knock out triumph of technique and smarts the stuffed quail is a must. A generous bird is de-boned, stuffed with a chicken and pine nut mousse, roasted, reassembled and served with two fat juicy pine mushrooms and more pureed mushrooms alongside. A sharp sauerkraut cuts through the lot to deliver a knockout dish ($36).
More simple pleasures — aged sirloin with sauce bordelaise; whole flounder with brown butter, lemon and capers — at sub $40 prices are sure to keep locals on repeat, while Hunter’s wine list is a worldly celebration of smaller producers that’s filled with interest.
Desserts are no slouch, either, whether a take on il flottante where a bright mandarin consommé surrounds a caramel-glazed meringue ($14) or a filo-topped, caramel-drizzled Gascony apple pie ($15).
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This is super clever but approachable and completely enjoyable at very keen prices. Little wonder, then, Omnia is jam-packed on a cold midweek night.
Lucky South Yarra, for the future looks Grand.
OMNIA
25 Toorak Rd, South Yarra
Ph: 8080 8080
omniabistro.com.au
Open: Tues-Wed from 5.30pm; Thurs-Sat from noon
Go-to dish: Stuffed quail
SCORE: 15/20
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