Pascale at QT Melbourne has hotel dining you won’t be ashamed of

Brassy, coquettish ­Pas­cale, Melbourne, radiates the slightly Frenchish glow of an urbane city brasserie.

Pascale Bar & Grill at QT Melbourne.

For the traveller with a certain kind of hotel brand loyalty, Pascale, in the newish Melbourne QT, may be a case of same same but different. There’s a design DNA, a kind of anti-multinational way of doing things from room set-up to staff uniforms, that you’ll see across the QT fleet, whether you’re in Surfers, Bondi, Sydney, Canberra or, now, Melbourne. The same ­applies to the restaurants (not surprising when you consider the same culinary director works across all four QT restaurants, Robert Mar­chetti). The similarities get stronger. Anyone familiar with Gowings, QT Sydney’s rollicking bar/bistro on level two of the historic retail site, might pick up on chef Paul Easson presiding over the Pascale kitchen and maitre d’ and French expat Marie Gallien running the floor.

The pitch: Hotel dining you won’t be ashamed of. Let’s face it, if you are staying in Melbourne’s CBD, there are fairly excellent restaurants within spitting distance. But none of them comes with a room.

The reality: Brassy, coquettish ­Pas­cale radiates the slightly Frenchish glow of an urbane city brasserie. There’s nothing subtle about its quirky decor, a quality we salute. And, like Gowings, bar and dining room guests breathe the same air. If you’re after a quiet space, this may not be your best choice. But with its vast open kit­chen, customised crockery and solid cut-crystal tumblers, Pascale exhibits the kind of designed-from-the-ground-up consistency you’d expect of a proper hotel restaurant. Confident, not tentative.

The cuisine: The menu has been on a significant diet since opening late last year. The emphasis on tweaked inter­national classics ­remains, however. Whole flounder; beef (and veal) tartare; roast chicken with mash and gravy; grilled prawns; crab cakes, plenty of oysters. There’s no question the menu takes its cues from classic American hotel dining: lots of wood grilling and roasting with a strong beef selection. Dare we say masculine?

Highlights: Quality produce with a sustainable thread is Pascale’s leitmotif, and some dishes make it easy to join the dots: the spit roast chicken, for example, with “giblet and shallot gravy” and Paris mash. Outstanding. And the chopped blue eye tuna with kimchi, a kind of Korean tartare with a seaweed tapioca crisp and pickled carrot. A favourite every visit. And if you’re a sucker for profiteroles … a French-trained pastry chef has the patisserie thing nailed.

Midlights: Those crab cakes with avocado mousse and lime need to come crisper and faster. And you need to know in advance that their sirloin steak au poivre is a firm, tasty new wave steak au poivre, with a sticky red beefy jus and pink green peppercorns, no cream or brandy. I quite like the old version. I like the new version too, but you’ll need to order fries, chips or mash.

Lowlights: Service is still not as consistently good, fun and focused as it could be. While there’s no doubting good intentions, there is a noticeable difference between waiters, ­exemplified by the maitre d’, who is one of the restaurant scene’s great, born-to-the-job hosts.

Will I need a food dictionary: No, the language is friendly, the vocab familiar but the capitalisation needs to be curbed.

The damage: Unsurprising. That is to say neither cheap nor expensive.

Pascale: 133 Russell Street, Melbourne | Contact: [phone], qthotelsandresorts.com | Hours: lunch Mon-Fri.; dinner daily | Score: 3.5 out of 5

*Correction: The score in this article was incorrectly listed as 2.5 out of 5 in print and online. This has been amended to 3.5.