I'm on a bit of a food bender at the moment; both at home, and out at the glorious restaurants around Melbourne. I've already mentioned the "at home" aspect, mainly courtesy of Ready Steady Cook, now for the "going out" aspect...
We went to Libertine in North Melbourne on Friday night, for delicious French food and wine. The restaurant itself is rather small and quaint; we sat upstairs next to a fireplace (fortunately not working or we would have been the ones cooking). The food itself was delicious; it was the "spring menu", so the dishes were hearty without being too heavy. I started with pressed pork belly with apple and crackling for entree, followed by seared tuna in a hock consomme for main, and a callebaut dark chocolate and hazelnut pithivier for dessert. All the courses were worthy, but the dessert was something else entirely - quite thick, firm pastry in a "pie" type shape, filled with molten dark chocolate and hazelnut pieces. Wow. I also sampled a wide array of beverages... champagne, red and white wine, and even a sherry (with dessert) - all at the recommendation of our waiter, and all very well chosen (as I had hoped and expected - Libertine won best short wine list in The Age Good Food Guide awards this year). Highly recommended.
Looking ahead, I'm off in 2 weeks to The Press Club (in the Herald Sun building on the corner of Flinders and Exhibition Sts), which is the new endeavour of George Calombaris, who did Reserve at Fed Square (which I unfortunately never tried) and who also regularly appears on Ready Steady Cook. His creations always look and sound delicious, and somewhat creative, so I'm definitely looking forward to our meal at Press Club.
I'm also keen to try Gingerboy, which is the recently opened offshoot from Ezard.
Busy eating times ahead.
(Fortunately, in my line of work as an all-round lazy slacker, the post-eating exercise is optional... but probably recommended).
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4 comments:
That eidetic memory of yours will actually be really useful, both as a gourmet and a cook.
For a real memory workout, I recommend Interlude, which is on Brunswick St. not too far from you. Their small menu is 11 courses (and absolutely fantastic), but I found it kind of hard to remember everything I ate.
Libertine, Poor service, poor meal and very expensive.
Meals were slow, cold and not at all generous.
Also, no EFTPOS for payment.
I'll admit that our service at Libertine was a little slow (they'd just opened the upstairs room, perhaps they were learning to cope), but we weren't in a hurry so it didn't worry us too much.
As for cold and not generous - I guess it depends on what you chose and what your opinion of not generous is (if your meals were truly cold, did you send them back??). All our dishes were hot and we were certainly full by the end of the meal.
As for expensive? Well, yes it is, but didn't you check beforehand? Likewise re: EFTPOS. It isn't hard to read a menu or a review in the window or on the web and double-check before going.
I agree with Anonymous that service at Libertine was slack. We overheard other diners also complaining the service was too slow.
I recall the waitress at one point early on saying without any prompting from us, "this is what elegant dining is about". Well, when we were finally served, the waiting staff didn't have a clue from which side to serve; pretty basic stuff.
All a little pretentious I thought.
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