West Footscray beer garden pop-up Zymurgy is how to taste Navi chef Julian Hills’ clever cooking
Two western suburb favourites meet for a delicious, beer garden pop-up, serving the best value, clever cooking you’ll see in yonks.
Food
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At 10am on the first of every month, Julian Hills opens reservations for his acclaimed Yarraville restaurant, Navi, for two months hence.
And by roughly 10.05am on the first of every month, the restaurant is fully booked.
Sure, Navi only seats about 25 people so that goes some way to explaining how quick a trigger finger you’ll need to snare one of those coveted tables, but that’s not the whole story.
Since opening in 2018, Hills’ ever-changing celebration of Australia on the (Hills’ own ceramic) plate has been devoured with relish by locals and interlopers alike.
As a stopgap while density limits affect Navi, Hills teamed up with Footscray brewers Hop Nation to open a pop-up West Footscray beer garden in time for summer.
Meaning the study or practice of fermentation, Zymurgy is not only a cracking way to dominate Scrabble but is now the all-through-the-week way to get a taste of Hills’ cooking that doesn’t require diaries at dawn.
It started as, and remains at heart, a beer garden where toasted ruebens and chips fly fast to feed a crowd that’s a snapshot of the evolution of the inner west — prams and puppies and those in the playground as at home as the young, hip and kid-carefree — but has recently added a dining room where Hills’ fare is served in slightly more elevated fashion across an evolving multi-course tasting menu.
Of course out back, that’s no ordinary reuben — it’s piled high with ox tongue and housemade kraut ($17) — and the triple cooked chips come with miso-spiked mayo ($11). There’s also black garlic-basted chook from the rotisserie turning over coals ($25), and grilled pretzels to slather with smoked wagyu butter ($8).
This is no ordinary beer garden fare, but when the sun is shining, and with a pint of Hop Nation’s quenching organic lager in hand ($11), it’s a brilliant way to COVID-safe the day away.
For a snapshot of the kitchen’s smarts that covers most bases, however, the $60 set menu is the way to go, if only for the puckeringly sharp delight of a single pickled plum sprinkled with salt, the sublime softness of wagyu draped over puffed beef tendon and drizzled with earthy mushroom oil, and the wild smokiness of eel sandwiched between thyme-sprinkled crackers.
These three-bite snacks are one part Navi, four parts more please. It’s a hit parade.
An extraordinary Skull Island prawn comes coal-kissed and splayed to reveal its sweet, juicy flesh to pick from the shell, head and all.
It’s surrounded by a fiery fermented ’Nduja emulsion and comes on a sticky pond of butter hollandaise. Charred bread is on wipe-the-plate-clean duty. Wow.
Creamy burrata crowns a bowl that sings of the last of summer with tomatoes in smoked, fermented and fresh form, with slivers of onion and fresh garlic for bite and croutons for crunch. A perfectly flaky fillet of whiting is topped with beach herbs adding salty, juicy crunch, while rich black garlic sweetness gives personality rather than looks to a bed of soft quinoa below.
But the standout dish both inside and out is the pork, the loin smoked, a blackened crust a mix of activated charcoal, onion and garlic powder lip-tinglingly good.
Pickled elderberries with five-spice fragrance and grilled broccoli leaf deliver Hills’ no-waste ethos in delicious form.
A terrific lemon parfait and curd with dessert lime in candied and jelly form sprinkled with torched shards of lemon myrtle meringue is a bright send-off that a square of salted caramel finishes with class.
The full range of Hop Nation beers are on tap, including a barrel-aged sour and double NEIPA for hop heads, while the short list of wines features the brewery’s fresh and juicy range of SITE wines from around Victoria (co-founder Sam Harbour’s also a winemaker).
Staff are great.
This is some of the best value, clever cooking of top-notch ingredients on offer anywhere around town.
ZYMURGY
561 Barkly St, West Footscray
Open: Wed-Fri from 3pm; Sat-Sun from noon
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