Our Kitchenette, Hawthorn East by Benny

Would you like to meet lots of friendly people in a welcoming, sociable atmosphere? Then get a dog and head down to the local off-leash park. Bilby Blue and I are there most days, and over the last few months have been following the trials and tribulations of starting your own café. Our friend Jenna is a professional chef and her latest venture is a brekky/lunch/dinner café in Hawthorn. We have been intending to visit since the new year, but haven’t quite made it until now.

This particular Saturday finds us frantically running errands all over Melbourne, from Carlton to Werribee to Hawthorn. We are hot, tired, and breakfast was a long time ago. Lunch beckons, but it is well after 2pm – a time when most lunch places in the suburbs are closed or closing and dinner places haven’t yet opened. Our options seem to be restricted to fast-food chains (but we have standards!) or coffee places, where if we are lucky we might score a savoury muffin or pre-made sandwich that has been quietly desiccating for the last four or five hours.

Then we remember Jenna …

Strawberry and mint lemonade

Our Kitchenette is in the small shopping precinct centred on the corner of Auburn and Riversdale Roads in Hawthorn. It’s a bit hard to spot amongst the other shops – look for the white picket fence around a small pop-up alfresco dining area on the footpath. Inside there is room for no more than a dozen or so diners at tables for two that can be pushed together for larger parties. Our Kitchenette is quite small.

The Stables of Como, South Yarra by Bureaucrat

Sometimes you've gotta mix things up.  Feeling somewhat masochistic, I decided one sunny weekend that we should join the fashionable brunching crowd and line up for a table.  Where else to do this than at The Stables of Como in South Yarra - a suburb that I don't often traipse into.  Even better, it'd be a toofer - we'd get food and we could wander around the grounds of the once grand Como estate.

For once I wasn't dying of hunger so I was able to wait 30 minutes for a table (remarkably I didn't get into a rant about having to wait that long... personal growth is important!).  In that time we had a little wander around the grounds, with the scent of frying bacon wafting in the air.  True to her word, at 30 minutes the waitress showed us our table.  We got to sit inside the cafe and it was gorgeous - think lots of fresh flowers, sunlight streaming through and a wonderful chatty, leisurely ambiance.

I had a delicious organic lamb meatball, pinenut, spinach and tomato sugo piadina ($14).  This was gorgeous.  Crisp piadina bread and the piping hot innards was meltingly tender and oozy.  So good! This was reminiscent of the meatball and sugo piadinas I used to have at Mr Tulk but heaps better.

Little Oscar, Brunswick (by invitation) by Bureaucrat

Around Melbourne, there's no shortage of American style burger joints.  Equally, Korean cuisine is well represented in the dining stakes.  The guys at Little Oscar in Brunswick East have melded these two seemingly disparate cuisines into one: Korean-American fusion.  On top of that, add in an unpretentious serve of live jazz and DJs from local musicians, and a cocktails menu, and you've got a great place to hang out.


Last week we headed on over to try out a couple of the dishes at Little Oscar.  The menu is geared towards sharing.  So for a light lunch, the Lawyer and I picked two main dishes (or rather, larger plates) and a side dish to share.

Trattoria Emilia, Melbourne CBD by Benny

A Christmas disaster! Bilby Blue’s reindeer-shaped pastry cutter has fractured from age and overuse, and for Benny’s extended family, homemade gingerbread reindeer have become an essential part of Christmas. What to do? Frustratingly, while Christmas-themed pastry cutters are widely available in the January sales, reindeer, especially in the large size prized by the in-laws, are conspicuously absent. Cake Deco in Port Phillip Arcade is the place to go, but it requires a special trip into the Melbourne CBD.

Mission completed, lunch beckons, but where? We pass a cheerily rustic sign tempting us down a dingy dead-end alley to Trattoria Emilia, a chalked greeting wishing us “Happy New Year” and assuring us that “We are back”. Melbourne is rightly famous for its laneways, so it seems only natural to investigate further.

Trattoria Emilia presents as a traditional Italian family restaurant: wooden tables, bentwood chairs, and wood-panelled walls, within a mid-20th century industrial atmosphere that betrays the building’s history as a former garage. The large kitchen is easily visible through a wall of steel framed windows lining one entire side of the dining area. The front of house staff are welcoming and professional, and the menu enticing. Fortunately we have arrived early in the lunchtime because there were only three unreserved tables.


We decide to share an entrée: a selection of six antipasti. Visually attractive, the Antipasti Misti is every bit as tasty as it looks. A golf-ball sized arancini was a wonderful layered globe of hidden treasure – a tiny flavourful meatball encased by perfectly cooked rice suffused with lovely gravy, encased in a crispy shell; a zucchini flower provided a similarly brittle wrapping for a smooth and tasty fish mousse; and the bianchetti was the best whitebait fritter I have tasted for years. These were complemented by a simple caprese salad (tomatoes, olives, mozzarella, croutons), some pepperonata (salad of marinated capsicum and olive), and a small cube of spinach and ricotta erbazzone (quiche).

50 Acres, Richmond by Bureaucrat

The interior of 50 Acres reminds me of Charlie Foxtrot - somehow the expansive use of cold, grey concrete appears warm and inviting - it's industrial chic with heart.


My first visit to 50 Acres was solo.  And it was an opportunity to pick something that was wickedly good.  I could have picked a proper lunch dish but when I saw the pumpkin pancakes with candied walnuts and orange compote on the menu, I thought, YOLO.  And in my defense, the pumpkin is full of beta-carotene, oranges are packed with vitamin C, and the walnuts are a healthy non-animal source of protein.  I loved the generous stack of gorgeous, fluffy pancakes.  I also loved the orange compote.  The candied walnuts were nice but way too sweet for me.

Kitchen Garden Project - Celebration Lunch (by invitation)

The Green at St Columbs is more than a great cafe.  It's a social enterprise that helps unemployed people acquire new marketable skills and fosters community involvement too.  Run by the Jesuit Social Services, the Kitchen Garden Project is centered on providing hands-on hospitality training and also gardening skills to boot.

Earlier this week, Mother Hen and I were very honoured to be invited to help celebrate the graduation of six of the 47 Kitchen Garden Project participants.  The celebration lunch was also a valuable opportunity for the graduates to further bolster their hospitality credentials on their resumes.


It wouldn't be a Kitchen Garden Project celebration lunch if it didn't feature the fruits of the graduates' labour (literally!).  Ninety-nine percent of all the fruit, veg, eggs, seeds and edible flowers that featured on the celebration lunch menu came from the Kitchen Garden.  To kick things off, we had these crispy salt-roasted sunflower seeds as pre-lunch nibbles.

Merchant Lane, Mornington by Benny

Melbourne … Summer … Beach … Sand too hot for bare feet. These are my childhood memories, and they are constant through the generations. In 50 years’ time, today’s children will have the same fond recollections.

But change is inevitable. On the plus side of the ledger: the food is so much better: more imaginative, better prepared, better presented, inspired by the cuisines of the world and even reaching seaside towns miles distant from the foodie havens of Melbourne. While the traditional beachside feast of fish and chips is vastly improved and still very welcome, searching for the delightfully unexpected can be well rewarded.


Soft shell crab 

Thi Thi, Springvale by Obelix

I get ever so excited when I rediscover a ol' favourite and it turns out to be more wonderful than my memory of it.  Case in point, Thi Thi.  P used to go there as an impoverished uni student for his "number 21" which so happens to be pork chop with broken rice.  Thi Thi apparently served the cheapest broken rice down the Springvale strip, according to P's research way back when.  In fact, he never took any note of the name of this establishment, always referring to it as "Number 21" after his usual order.  So fast forward 20 years and a middle-aged P dragged me and Kiddo back down memory lane.

We found the place and I dimly recall him taking me there many moons ago.  This time, we made note of the name of the place.  We sat down on the Formica tables and were greeted by very friendly service.


Kiddo ordered this amazing looking seafood pho.  It came with a homemade looking prawn cracker embedded with a wee prawn.  I was so thrilled by it that the waiter came back with a small bowl full of the prawn crackers just for me!  I felt special!

Nipa Hut, Mitcham by Bureaucrat

For a late Sunday lunch on Mitcham shopping strip means that sometimes you gotta make do with what's available to you.  Faced with a choice of a plastic sandwich roll from how-on-Earth-can-this-be-called-bread Subway and Nipa Hut, a Thai/Filipino eatery, the decision was easy.  A cheerful mom and pop shop, Nipa Hut has more than its fair share of local fans getting takeaway and dining in.


With less than 30 minutes to have lunch, Beaker and I opted for takeaway, which we wolfed down standing in the street, while waiting for our ride from friends.  Beaker ordered the vegetarian pad Thai ($12.90) which was loaded with lots of crisp vegs, tofu and egg.

Malacca Straits on Broadway, Ultimo (NSW) by Benny

A business trip to the University of Technology, Sydney takes us to a suburb of Sydney that is largely unfamiliar – Chippendale. Turns out we are not too far from Sydney’s Chinatown, but in the best Eat and Be Merry tradition, we have high hopes of finding lesser known gems. Bilby Blue has been busy online and finds a likely prospect – Malacca Straits on Broadway.

We find Malacca Straits just inside a short arcade off Broadway leading to a modern open courtyard in the Quadrant Building. The restaurant is decorated with a hodge-podge of items seemingly gathered from antique/junk shops, maybe attempting to evoke the old-world charm of the Malaysian trading port of Malacca. It is not entirely successful.

More promising is the menu. Bilby has visited Malaysia many times and loves authentic Malaysian food. After a quick discussion we choose three dishes (Bilby is hungry): fish head curry (a traditional Malaysian favourite); Ayam Percik Keletan, (grilled chicken with salad); and a side dish of Kangkung Belacan (water spinach), accompanied by steamed rice.

First to arrive is the kangkung: a larger than expected plate, stir fried with still-crunchy stems and a good amount of belachan spice and chilli. 

Gourmet Cinema at Caulfield Racecourse 2-6 March 2016

Forget ordering popcorn and choc tops at the cinema.  This March, five of Melbourne's best restaurants will roll up at Caulfield Racecourse to bring to you gourmet goodies as you watch movies under the stars.

Epocha, Le Bon Ton, Baby, Mamasita (see our review) and The European will have popup stalls at the racecourse, offering some of their most popular menu items to hungry movie-goers.

Elotes callejeros (chargrilled corn on the cob with grated sheep’s cheese, chipotle, mayonnaise and lime) at Mamasita

Each night, one restaurant will present a special menu to match the evening’s movie.