THE MELBOURNE REPORT: WHY SATURDAY LUNCH IS THE NEW FRIDAY NIGHT.

Herewith good places to eat in and around Melbourne right now, and what they tell us about how dining out is shaping and shifting its time-honoured rituals.

On Substack, the very clever platform I employ to bring you this newsletter, you have to put your best pic up first, because it’s the one that appears on all media.  So here’s a soulful study of salumi captured in natural light in the milliseconds before it disappeared. We’ll get to that later.

But first, why is everyone dining out in Melbourne for lunch on Saturday?

It’s as if everyone got the memo, and immediately dressed up and went out to order cocktails and red wine and high-ticket steaks and gigantic serves of tiramisu. At lunch On a Saturday. Let me tell you, this does not happen in Sydney.

Walking through the Melbourne CBD on a Saturday is a buzz, even in the bitter cold; the big, old, leafless trees etched against the bluestone sky like varicose veins; the people in coats, scarves, Richmond beanies. And boy, is the Melbourne restaurant scene ready for them. They actually take your coat (in Sydney, you often have to keep it with you, or sit on it or have it fall off the back your chair, etc). Then they bring the sort of food that makes you want to order more, so that you don’t have to leave.

The entire shape of the week has changed for hospitality, with restaurateurs telling me Mondays are dead, but Tuesday nights are getting quite racy. Thursday nights are going off ( also the new Friday night), and one confided that his drinks spend for a Friday lunch is greater than that of Friday night, which is a total turnaround.

My theory is that Melbourne did the last couple of years harder, and they’re coming back harder. The way the city is planned also makes it easy to mix up shopping, theatre, musicals, art galleries and dining, whereas Sydney’s CBD is so spread out, you need a real strategy to get from one to another. My other theory is that Melburnians are going out for weekend lunches so they can stay home on Saturday night and do their own thing. It makes for a full-on day for staff, but the ones I spoke with love it and embrace it.

So here’s a handful of good places to eat in Melbourne, whether it’s Saturday lunch or not.

GRILL AMERICANO 

You can’t get much buzzier than Grill Americano in Flinders Lane, new to the Lucas Restaurants (Society, Chin Chin, Kisume, etc) group. Think simple, classic New York Italian grill. Carbone in NYC with a dash of Cipriani, a spoonful of The Wolseley, and songlines that go back to Florentino, The (original) Society,, The Latin, the old Tsindos in Bourke Street, Fasoli’s in Lonsdale Street.

Hosts greet you at the door and thread you through tightly packed tables and a bar lined with bodies; past the wood-fired oven radiating heat. It’s deliberately challenging. They want you to twist and weave, tuck your tummy in to pass that bloke, go on your tippy toes to raise your bum height over the chair on your left. They want you to immerse yourself in the crowd, be one of the people, all in it together.

There are lots of family groups, celebrations, birthdays.  Everyone is serious about wine, and the list delivers. Start with the foccacia di patate, shown here, and add anchovies, woo hoo. Then add salumi, then burrata, then pasta, because the waiter will hand-churn the parmigiano from a rotary grater, and because the cheesy threads are longer than you would get from a Microplane, and take that little longer to melt. Nice touch.

GIMLET

Immediately you are enveloped in a ‘proper’ restaurant, one with codes and good manners. It’s a restaurant that works hard, but works with you; it’s gracious and welcoming. Softer.

Gimlet is the flagship restaurant of Andrew McConnell’s Trader Group, and it’s a big, warm blast of old-world glamour in the beautifully realised interior of Cavendish House.  After two or three aborted attempts to dine here, I know exactly what I want.

A gimlet, of course, beautifully judged. Trottole pasta with currants and prawns, richly oily with a Sicilian vibe. Salade Lyonnaise, crunchy with crumbed pig’s tail, rich slabs of pork belly, and soft egg. Southern rock lobster halved and cooked on the wood-fired grill then served – genius – on a bed of saffron rice studded with cherry tomatoes and a bisque sauce. (Plus fries, because lobster and fries was my favourite order at London’s The Ivy, and this feels very Ivy). And cheese. What a glorious place.

Big shout-out to the incomparable manager, Shane Lazzo. For anyone heading to London, here’s Shane’s very useful guide to eating out. Which, of course, includes the River Café, which he calls ‘life-affirming’. Which gives me my segue. 

FROM RIVER CAFÉ TO FRESHWATER CREEK

What a find. La Cantina sits halfway between Geelong and Torquay at the Common Ground site, and the restaurant – casual, farmhouse/woolshed vibe - has been taken over by chef Glenn Laurie and his French-born partner Lolo Hanser. It’s Saturday lunch and the place is packed.

The two met while working at The River Café, and there is that same clarity of flavour and rigorous respect for Italian food craft and traditions here. Note that salumi platter with the ’nduja toast, and the darkly mossy green, hand-rolled strozzapreti. Note also calamari croquettes, although I can’t tell you what they taste like, as my two dining companions eat the third one as well. Lolo then brings little scoops of mandarin gelato that capture the essence of the fruit.

Mark this down as a destination, or an ‘on the way to Lorne’ stop, or the venue for a big book-out-the-place celebration. And hospo folk, it’s even open for Monday lunch. (Yes, Monday lunch is the new Sunday lunch -  okay, I’ll give up now, it’s getting annoying).

SUNDAY LUNCH AT CAFÉ DI STASIO

It’s always a Buona Domenica at Di Stasio’s relatively new Pizzeria in Carlton, tucked in behind King & Godfree in Faraday Street.

The walls are plastered with art, the loos are incandescent with colour-coded lighting and recordings of Italian everyday scenes, the terrace garden is a Roman villa garden complete with swan-shaped stone pots and an old fountain, and everywhere, everywhere, the very particular Rinaldo Di Stasio and Mallory Wall brand of Melbourne Italian hospitality makes its presence felt.

A puffy ‘cloud pizza’ iced with tomato sugo, is brought for the three year old. An order for two Baladin beers from Piemonte is translated as ‘we’ll pour one of them between two, then keep the second one cold’, because as we all know, the first half of a glass of beer is the best and then it loses its chill.

A little green coupe glass, as if straight from the bomboniere shops that used to line the streets of Carlton, holds a handful of extra basil for the Margherita pizza. AND IS REPLACED WITH ANOTHER ONE, when young Mr D delicately wraps each spoonful of mozzarella in a basil leaf.  Anchovies – to add to said pizza - are draped over an upturned lemon half. The fior di latte mozza is made in-house by chef Federico Congiu, because mozza should always be eaten fresh, on the day it is made. Sticks of fried trippa, dry and crunchy. Spaghetti al pomodoro divvied up between the table so that everyone has a taste.

Sunday roast chicken is whole poussin, boned and stuffed and given a waistcoat of pancetta and roasted and sliced into rounds with a puddle of gravy. A flat slab of crostata that is actually a proper crostata, jammy fruit beneath a latticework of fine pastry; austere, Byzantine. And the soft-serve fior di latte ice-cream that looks like Mr Curly’s hat. And that magical terrace in which to goof off.

It feels so good to get into that groove of the Italian family Sunday lunch, the one the real Italian families go to after church, when the streets of the town are deserted and the restaurants hum with life, and kids run about, and grandpas get tipsy and all is right with the world because Monday is another planet away. Love.

ALSO NOTED, MELBOURNE:

• The very special sense of community that binds together disparate elements – natty wines, inside/outside, communal dining, short menu ( pasta, sugarloaf cabbage with stracciatella, all the good things) – at Hope Street Radio in Collingwood.

• The kind faces of the long-serving staff at the been-here-forever Jim’s Greek Tavern in Collingwood. They’ve seen it all, and they still forgive us. And the dips, the house-made bread, the lamb spiked with white onion, the BYO only, the elbow-to-elbow tables that are even closer than Grill Americano.

• Seeing fellow diners embrace the idea of brunch for breakfast and order Bloody Mary and other cocktails at 10am at Cumulus Inc. Such a civilised, generous space, any time of the day (and now open from 8am on Sunday). And clever enough to keep on the big brekky special with the Lorne pudding and eggs and slab bacon. (And excellent toasted Baker Bleu fruit bread).

• The old codgers ( sorry, fellas!) hoovering up pasta in the front bar at Jimmy Watsons in Carlton, with their cheeky grins.

• The joy of sitting up at a little bench in Marion wine bar with a platter of saucisson and glass of Pinot Noir while unpacking the day. (Yes, I generally average three McConnell sites in one trip; because they’re just so darn good.)

• Checking out the new Next hotel at 80 Collins Street for a potential stay – wow. Huge cocktail bar, La Madonna restaurant, great staff, cute Ingresso cafe. Hard to go past the creaky old ship of a hotel that is The Windsor in Spring Street, but this could be my Next hotel.

• Above all, the warmth. The colder and windier it got outside, the warmer and more welcoming it got inside. Thanks, Melbourne.

Substack doesn’t say anything about saving your worst shot until last, but here’s Terry’s plate at the end of the mains at Gimlet – pure mayhem of cracked lobster legs and salad leaves and hate to think what else; the sight of which makes me very happy.

Thanks for reading! And special thanks to my right-hand man, Terry Durack, for sharing all of the above. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and waters upon which I work, live, cook and play; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I fully support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to be enshrined in Australia’s Constitution. It’s about time, folks.