Peter Gunn’s Ides on Smith St, Collingwood, fails to fire
IT’S the achingly hip restaurant addition to hip Smith St in Collingwood, but does Ides live up to all its young-gun hype? Dan Stock says no.
Melbourne
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TWO telling things happen after a meal at Ides.
Along with the menu, delivered at the end of the night, you’ll be presented with a booklet of artfully shot dishes complete with centrefold portrait of the chefs.
And you’ll be emailed, as way of a thank you, a link to an equally artfully shot video of those chefs making and plating and serving those dishes during one of last year’s pop up dinners run by Peter Gunn.
That once-a-month Chef’s Own Adventure has now transformed into a permanent chapter of Ides, Gunn’s first restaurant, and if the onanistic procession of aproned chefs delivering each of the six courses you’ll be served over the course of dinner didn’t make the point, those two full stops do. We’re here at His Majesty’s pleasure.
But it’s one thing to be lauded for a lark on the side; quite another to create and run a restaurant.
Gunn is the latest in a growing line of bright 2ICs taking their first spins on the track as restaurateurs this year.
But Ides needs to go back into the workshop.
Granted, it had only been open three weeks on this visit, but this isn’t early days teething; Ides’ philosophy is fundamentally flawed as to what a dining experience should be, where diners are the unsecured creditors in the restaurant equation.
But posturing and folly could be forgiven if the food was great.
But of the six dishes - four savoury, two sweet – that make up the no-choice, $110 a head offering served this night, two were fine, two fairly forgettable and one practically inedible.
Hardly the celebration of cooking I need a souvenir for, other than a memento mori.
An opener of yieldingly supple late-season fig topped with curd daubed with herring roe for subtle sea was utterly overwhelmed by mandarin, hazelnuts doing little to salvage the aggressively assertive citrus.
With too many things going on, the dish was like a drying-out alcoholic playing pinball, the flavours pinging randomly never finding their mark.
But if the mandarin needed anger management therapy, then the next dish needed its own desal plant.
What should’ve been a delightful bowl, a classic combination of octopus with chick peas was destroyed by a broth – poured by a chef at table – so insanely salty it seared my lips, throat and brought tears.
Apparently it was slow-roasted carrots, though I couldn’t taste anything but salt; apparently no one in the kitchen bothered to taste it either. Zero for two.
DAN STOCK REVIEWS THE FLOWER DRUM
A slurry of tomatoes atop a piece of snapper added admirable bursts of acid, though the fish had spent too long in its poaching liquid, rendering it the texture of wet tissue, and the heavy handful of Nigella seeds atop too powerfully redolent of a Smith St kebab.
This new addition to ever-gentrifying Collingwood could be a parody of a hipster restaurant if it weren’t so earnest; from the deep fry basket and stove canvases that are the only adornments to the felt grey, dimly lit room, to Cyprus Hill and other knowingly ’90s hip hop on the stereo, it feels an exclusionary in-joke if you’re over 30 or not in the biz.
I don’t know whether opting for the list instead of sparkling water and a glass of champagne upon arrival got our wine guy off side, or that we ordered one of the cheapest bottles on the list – a $60 Rhone blend from Heathcote’s Wanted Man – but service, bar a delightful waitress, was unwelcoming at best.
From the perfunctory greeting at the start to the ill-disguised contempt for the amount tipped at the end, I can’t recall feeling more uncomfortable in a restaurant.
I don’t think it was just me.
There was no palpable joy in the room; no buzz that comes from a dining room filled with people looking at each other with delight over plates of delicious dishes in a new hotspot.
While I did like the lamb, rump served with a dressing of properly sharp mustard seeds and a slaw of arrestingly vinegared brussels sprouts to the side, the meat lacked the intensity of flavour I expect from a restaurant with ambitions.
Perfectly fine, if not memorable, unlike the insanely good house cultured peanut butter to spread on the warmed slices of Cobb Lane-baked sesame-crusted sour dough, an outsourced highlight of the meal.
DAN STOCK REVIEWS DINNER BY HESTON
There was no thread, no narrative to each plate, to the meal.
Just a list of ingredients and methods recited by chefs on a varying spectrum of engagement, and the seemingly deliberate lack of namechecking produce provenance only draws attention to the shortcomings of the dishes.
Emperor’s New Clothes? Perhaps Life of Brian. Either way, a pop up does not a restaurant make.
Ides needs less peacocking, more cooking.
Those boys should get back in the kitchen.
Result
Ides: Score 10/20
92 Smith St, Collingwood
Ph: 9939 9542
Open: Wed-Sun dinner
Originally published as Peter Gunn’s Ides on Smith St, Collingwood, fails to fire
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