Everything and more: Melbourne restaurants and cafes’ new normal
As our restaurants and cafes cautiously reopen their doors to diners, food critics Dan Stock and Matt Preston take a look to see what this new vision of Melbourne’s eateries looks, feels and tastes like.
Eating Out
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“Welcome back.”
Two little words at the top of the menu, but they say so much.
A warm greeting. A big smile. The acknowledgment that a cafe is so much more than just coffee and that hospitality is nothing without people.
It’s been 77 days since I last dined out and for someone who has spent his adult life either working in or writing about restaurants, I’d have to go back three decades to find that amount of time spent in between a meal out.
While at first I didn’t mind being house bound, using the enforced nights in to work my way through a bookshelf of cook books (but no sourdough) it feels bloody good to be let back out in the world.
My first post-lockdown meal is at cafe-bistro Carter Lovett in Elsternwick and I feel almost first-day-of-school nervous on approach. What will this socially distant, hand sanitised new world feel like? Images of masks and force-field shields and top-to-toe PPE quickly gave way to the realisation that our new normal is same same, only slightly different.
After leaving my details at the door and a quick pump of the hand sanitiser, I’m inside which is warm and comfortably buzzy. It’s surprising how 20 people can make a cleverly spaced room seem full and busy.
It’s amazing how good coffee tastes out of a ceramic, not takeaway, cup.
And I now know my version of sardines on toast has nothing on the knockout dish that was lunch today. Perfectly grilled splayed beauties teamed with whipped fennel cream on sourdough with a salad bright with pickled onion and grapefruit and a poached egg – in one fell swoop it encapsulated the difference between the home and professional kitchen. I’ve missed it.
But while it’s great to have our cafes and restaurants back, let’s make sure they aren’t forced to close again.
It’s going to be a hard few months for many businesses as they adapt to running their restaurant, cafe or bar with socially distant capacity constraints so, as diners, we need to do what we can. Comply with directions, perhaps order an extra side or dish, add a dessert or splurge a bit more on that bottle of wine. And tip generously.
Because, if you want your favourite local to still be there for you in six months’ time, show whatever support you can today.
I for one can’t wait to duck a’ la orange at Midnight Starling and long (long) lunch at Lake House and gorge on terrific Turkish at Tulum and have a parma and pint at my local, but today’s first meal is made the most special because not only did it break the dine-out drought, but, as we live more than a daytrip apart, it’s the first time I’ve seen my parents in four months.
A great meal, spot-on coffee and company as happy making as it comes? Welcome back, indeed.
DI STASIO CITTA
Hello, old friend it’s been too long.
It’s been three long months since I sat in a restaurant for lunch or dinner. It has been more than a gap in my life, more like a yawning chasm.
I can measure how much I’ve missed eating out by the flurry of overexcited emails with my lunch date earlier in the morning.
What are we wearing? She thinks a ball gown. It’s a special occasion after all. I pull on shoes and a jacket for the first time in months.
What is the first thing we are going to drink? She likes a vodka martini. I like the signature “pinka drinka” at Di Stasio Citta with lime-infused gin blushing with a little Campari. This is a celebration of an end to one of the ugliest sides of isolation, a celebration of one of the best things about living in Melbourne.
We stride into the sharp minimalist concrete sheet box and no one underestimates the moment. It’s good to be back.
Restaurants and their staff are like old friends and this is a reunion of sorts. I’ve forgotten how good it is to be looked after by a great waiter. The food arrives glistening on silver-plated plinths — rosemary roasted potatoes and a barely dressed radicchio salad to counter the richness of veal and sage in a satin-butter-sauce.
I feel cosseted, cared for and joyously in the moment with the old friend on the other side of the table … for eating out is always as much about the eyes across the table than the food on it.
This is everything I remember and more; the only thing that is different is the sanitiser next to the salt, and the fact that every other seat in the place is empty.
Overall, it’s a wonderful shimmering couple of hours that reminds me why eating out is such a special part of being a Victorian.
I’ve eaten a great lunch of food that I didn’t have to cook; off plates that I don’t have to wash up; and all with someone I love who I haven’t seen for months.
This means these everyday frustrations of my old life hardly ripple the surface of this wonderful day, the day restaurants returned to Victoria.
- Matt Preston
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