The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival

Playing tunes on the parsnip butternut trumpet

Last weekend the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival began with a bunch of booths and activities along the Yarra River waterfront.  We met Tom and Leah by the Arts Center and worked our way along the River Graze.  Fresh orange mango juice and a sample of local camembert-like cheese while we listened to the odd strains of someone playing fresh vegetables as musical instruments.  Through the Prosecco tasting area for a slow-cooked lamb wrap and a trio of raw local oysters (it was just too early to taste Prosecco).  About six food trucks were offering international fare, but we were pretty full by then.  We stopped at a restaurant so Leah could get some guaranteed nut-free food, then past the Urban Dairy whose ice cream flavors were disappointingly few.  Across the river we made our way through a long narrow bar/restaurant perched at the edge of the river that was featuring seafood, but just admired and did not eat. 

Outside Emilia's Trattoria

On Monday night Jake and I went on a three restaurant Italian food crawl downtown.  We started at Merchant, a Venetian restaurant located next to the Intercontinental Hotel.  We were served a nice glass of Pinot Noir and eventually a bowl of porcini risotto.  We sat with a local couple whose kids had given them the tickets for their anniversary.  He works in the insurance industry (although he told Jake he was a gynecologist and Jake believed him – he also tried to sell us on the Australian hoop snake that chases cars down the road) and she is a recently retired surgery nurse.  They were fun to hang out with and since most other people were in groups of 4 or 6 we dined with them at each spot.  There were 38 people in the whole group.

From Merchant we walked several blocks to Rosa’s, specializing in Sicilian cuisine.  It seemed to be a relatively small restaurant hidden off the main street near the court building.  They offered a choice between a sparkling dry Lambrusco and a white wine to go with veal tonnato, thin slices of veal in a creamy tuna sauce.  After a half hour or so there we all trooped over to Emilia’s Trattoria, a relatively new restaurant and perhaps our favorite of the three.  They served red or white wine (sorry, by now I wasn’t keeping very good track of the wine) along with bread and a mortadella spread, followed by golden brown fried ricotta stuffed zucchini blossoms, and finally very fresh ricotta ravioli in a tomato sauce.  They very nicely made up a small salad for Jake since that was a lot of cheese in one meal!  We were kicked out around 8:30pm because another group of festival crawlers was on its way and they had to reset the tables.  Jake and I walked the short distance back to Swanston Street and caught a tram home.

Our final event was an interpretation of Babette’s Feast at DenmarkHouse in the central business district.  At 6:30 we gathered in the bar area of the 3^rd floor modern restaurant where we were served Australian Salinger brut sparkling wine and canapes.  The bubbly had a very nice, slightly honeyed ta.ste.  There were 3 or 4 canapes the best of which was cured trout mixed with a little cream cheese served on dark rye bread.  I think there were about 80 guests total and we were seated at two long tables in the main restaurant.  The restaurant style is I suppose Danish modern with clean lines in wood and glass. The table was set with many glasses of assorted sizes and white plates.  We introduced ourselves to the couples on either side of us and the head chef gave a little introduction.  The movie was projected silently with subtitles on a screen on side of the room.

Quail on puff pastry

Baba al rhum with fig

Our first course varied from the movie menu because apparently turtle is not readily available in Australia.  Instead the chef slow-cooked veal in a rich brown sauce and served it with cut up vegetables and a poached egg.  It was served with a dry amontillado sherry.  The second course were small blinis.  I’m not really sure what they were made of but they had a wonderfully silky texture and were served as small circles about a ½” thick on a bed of sour cream with a sprig of something green on top.  The accompanying champagne was Veuve Clicquot, just like in the movie!

Next up was the iconic stuffed quail in puff pastry.  In our case the little quails were stuffed with foie gras mixed with something and topped with a few shavings of black truffle.  They were nestled in a square box of puff pastry. Bowls of endive and frisee salad were placed along the table to share. This course was accompanied by red burgundy.  I’m not sure  how one is supposed to politely pick apart a quail, but I didn’t feel I needed to get every last bite off the bones given the overall quantity of food!

After a palate cleanser of Danish sparkling water (no, I could discern no difference between it and any other sparkling water), we moved to the dessert courses.  Almond babas with figs and rum syrup decorated with a few flower petals and big bowls of fruits.  Among the fruits was the ruby red dragon fruit, a new one for me.  It had a pleasant flavor and texture, not especially notable but very beautiful in a mixed bowl of fruit.  The babas came with a glass of Petit Guiraud Sauternes, a very distinctive, slightly sweet wine.  The wine aficionado to my right thought it might be corked, but the server gave him a new glass that he found much improved.  He sniffed Jake’s and thought it better and I couldn’t taste any difference between my glass and Jake’s. 

Finally, a board with 3 cheeses and a glass of cognac.  I was so stuffed at this point that I had very small samples of the brie, comte and blue cheese, but all were excellent.

So during this whole meal we were chatting with the couples on either side of us.  To my left was a couple from Sydney in Melbourne for his birthday.  They were both originally from Chile.  She had come over at age 12 with her parents who were looking for a better life.  He came over in his early 20s as a refugee escaping the Pinochet dictatorship.  He had studied acting and was fortunate to get into acting soon after arriving in Australia.  He teaches mostly now but had a successful career in theatre with some movie and tv roles as well.  They had met when she took an acting class he was either teaching or taking.  He also does woodworking and they are both well-traveled so it was fun chatting with them. 

To our right were 2 couples, upper class Melburnians who seemed to have known each other for a long time. The guy next to me works as a dentist and his wife teaches cooking classes.  She took my menu and wrote down a long list of expensive not to be missed restaurants in Melbourne.  The woman next to Jake invited us to her house for dinner on Wednesday, somewhat to her husband’s chagrin I think.  She was very chatty, poor Jake.  I got the impression they were all fairly liberal and one of their main concerns was the Chinese messing up the Australian real estate market making it too expensive for their kids to buy apartments in Melbourne.

On the way home we decided to walk the few blocks to Flinders Station, but the crowds were really heavy when we got to Swanston Street.  Then we noticed that the police had blocked off part of the street and were massing together.  Soon some of the crowd around us started running and the police took off after them wielding pepper spray and Jake pulled me back against the closest building.  When there was an opening we crossed the street to where people seemed calmer.  We couldn’t really tell what was going on so we got on the next tram home.  This morning we found out that two street gangs had planned to start a fight to purposely involve the police.  They had planned to do it earlier in the day but I guess couldn’t get enough momentum going.  There are a lot of people around because it is the Moomba festival, Melbourne’s Labor day weekend festival.