JOIN USNot an Indian restaurant! We want to eat local,” we implored, walking down the graffiti-lined ACDC Lane, wondering just what we were doing in a dark Melbourne alley.
Despite our guide Tony Polletto’s reassurances about Tonka’s rave reviews, the backdoor entry didn’t do wonders to our confidence. But, by the time we finished with chef Adam D’Sylva’s ‘gourmet Indian restaurant with a twist’, we were eating more than our words.
Named after Honkytonk, an earlier establishment at the same place, Tonka’s food can be best described as... honky-tonk. The menu seemed like the handiwork of some mad scientist in a lab. Fremantle octopus, rasam, vermicelli upma, pickled papaya, Port Phillip Bay scallop, Jerusalem artichoke, Kashmiri chilli and chana-dal chutney, smoked corn-fed chicken betel leaf with garlic chutney, pomelo and sweet-papaya pickle, chicken liver parfait, honeycomb, spiced peanuts, and charred pav — and these were just the starters! It was daring our taste buds to go where they had never gone before.
On the go
Over the last few decades, Melbourne has emerged as an exciting and innovative food-and-drink destination. Be it street food, fine dining, a quick coffee, cool places to grab a drink after work, or a speciality dinner, there’s an astonishing variety in here. Hell, you could even have a three-course meal on the world’s first travelling tramcar restaurant. The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant, with its conspicuous burgundy boxcars moving about the city, is a great way to enjoy the sights and bites.
One big contributing factor for the city’s exciting cuisine is its ethnic diversity. The Greek Precinct, Little Italy, Chinatown and its own Little Vietnam — Melbourne has it all. The city’s multi-cultural mix started with the 1850s Victorian gold rush, attracting Chinese prospectors and immigrants in droves. Melbourne’s Chinatown, centered at Little Bourke Street, is the longest continuous Chinese settlement in the western world and the Southern Hemisphere. The neon-lit avenue has top restaurants like Dahu Peking Duck, Hutong Dumpling Restaurant and Flower Drum, hailed as the best Chinese restaurant in Australia.
The city also has the largest Greek population in the world outside of Greece, and much of the migration happened after World War II. The Greek Precinct, adjacent to Chinatown on Little Bourke Street, is abuzz with eateries like Tsindos, Kalamaki and Stalactites, one of the city’s oldest restaurants.
We headed to celebrity chef and MasterChef Australia judge George Calombaris’s restaurant, Gazi. Named after a food quarter in Athens, it offers ethnika vromika or ‘Hellenic dirty food’, hawker-style tastes in a plush setting. Greeted with ‘kalispera’, Greek for ‘good evening,’ we sat under a ceiling dominated by 3,000 inverted terracotta pots.
Opposite the kitchen, two open suitcases hung on the wall; the names and date are of George Calombaris’s grandfather and grandmother, and the year they migrated from Greece to Australia. Instead of the 10-course, $69 menu called ‘Doing It Greek Style’, we tried all the dips with our pita basket — tzatziki, melitzanosalata (eggplant), cauliflower and beetroot, besides the finest souvlaki in town. The royal blue plates bore a huge eye in the centre, and we learnt that the Turkish evil eye was actually a 6th-century BC Greek symbol called mati, which once appeared on drinking vessels.
Between the gold-mining boom and two world wars, many Italians moved to Australia. They brought with them the culture of coffee and cafés. The stretch of Lygon Street between the intersections of Elgin and Queensberry streets in the suburb of Carlton is known as Little Italy. The Lygon Street Festa, held every November, is one of Australia’s largest outdoor street festivals, and celebrates Melbourne’s vibrant Italian culture and cuisine. Toto’s Pizza House here was the first pizzeria established in Australia.
One of the earliest cafes in town, Pellegrini’s (on Bourke Street) began in 1912, and has been serving the same blend of Vittoria beans for the last 60 years. However, Melbourne’s café scene exploded only in the 50s, largely due to the piston-driven espresso machine invented by Achille Gaggia in 1945, and the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. We dropped by at the troika of Italian establishments on Bourke Street, run by Guy Grossi, which serves coffee, wine and antipasti. The Cellar Bar was a typical Italian bar, while Grossi and Florentino had the quintessential Italian fare.
Makeovers many
Besides reinterpreting cuisines from around the world, Melbourne’s uniqueness lies in transforming debased spaces into fashionable dining venues. The tiny switchboard room where the controls of the Manchester Unity Building were once housed was reinvented into the Switchboard Café. Center Place, once a seedy bylane between Majorca Building and Center House, where hawkers sold stamps and coins, is a European-style, lamp-lit alley with outdoor dining. When the General Post Office shut down, the Postal Lane for delivery trucks was converted into a clutch of restaurants, still bearing signs like ‘Beware of Motor Cars’.
Started in 1878 and spread over 17 acres, Melbourne’s much loved ‘Vic’ Market or Victoria Market is the oldest and largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere. On a two-hour Hunt & Gather Food Tour (for $49), our eager guide, Mandy Ho, started off from the oldest building, the Meat Hall, lined with butcher shops. At Seafood & Oyster Spot, the livewire fishmonger Yianni almost force-fed us fresh oysters. We tried peppered kangaroo at Art Deco Dairy Hall, kilishi (West African-style beef jerky) at Tribal Tastes, cheese at Curds & Whey, Rooftop honey and stuffed olives and dolmades (stuffed grape leaves) at Hellenic Deli.
Like alchemists, the Gewürzhaus mixes various herbs, spices, sugars and salts from around the world for its artisan spice blends. Drawn to the tantalising aroma of spices in the air, we took whiffs of the Australian Bush herbs and even the Black Lava salt from Cyprus. While flying back from Melbourne, instead of using the regular salt-pepper sachet, I pulled out the recently procured black truffle salt for my cheese and crackers. The flight attendant was curious. “Your own secret spice blend, sir?” “No,” I smiled back, “It’s a pinch of Australia.”