Mixed Business IV

Update 04/01/2023: Mixed Business is now permanently closed.

May 12, 2012

   

Our friend Mike seems to have a minor obsession with Mixed Business - we've breakfasted there with him many more times than without him. On our most recent visit we arrived early, around 7:30, and had no problems grabbing a table inside.

   

After a large and rich dinner the night before, Michael thought it wise to order porridge ($9) - this one comes topped with baked rhubarb, cinnamon pear, honey yoghurt and toasted almonds. While Michael liked it and knew it to be a good choice, he was feeling order envy for Jo's potato rosti. He really is a savoury breakfast lover at heart.

   

I was all set for a similarly subdued order, the house muesli, until I spied a quince and pear crumble on the specials board ($12.50). It was just perfect, with thick fruit segments under a golden crunchy crust and generous scoop of tart yoghurt. It was a teensy bit sugary, of course, but no more so than many granolas. It staved off any desire for their gingerbread waffles.

I can't really complain that Mike keeps insisting we return to Mixed Business - they cater well to our variable breakfast needs.

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You can read about some of our previous visits to Mixed Business here, here and here. Since our last post it's been loved and blogged at TOT: HOT OR NOT, I want the world to stop, imakecake eats Melbourne, Apples Under My Bed, Pramsandwich, EAT AND BE MERRY, FOR TOMORROW WE DIE(T), Let Me Feed You Melbourne, I'm so hungree, loved by frances, Simple Palates, Seriously and Munch & Muse. While I didn't miss the waffles on the day, I'm feeling a pang of envy now as I write up the post and view photo after photo of them!

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Mixed Business
486 Queens Parade, Clifton Hill
9486 1606
veg breakfasts $5-$15

Accessibility: Tables out front are roomy and under cover. The entrance, although flat, has a door that's a bit of a hassle to open (still, people seem to get prams in there!). Tables inside and out back are a bit crowded, though there's a wide path through the middle. Orders are taken at the table and paid for at a low-ish counter. The toilet is unisex and located waaay out back via an uneven and narrow-ish path; it's moderately sized and has a step up on entry.

Attica II

May 11, 2012

   

When I submitted my PhD a couple of months back, Cindy and I had a slightly disappointing celebratory lunch at Seamstress. So when I got my marks back this week (minor changes!), Cindy made sure that our celebrations would really hit the mark. Spotting some last minute Attica cancellations on Twitter, she pounced and booked us in for a Friday night degustation spectacular. In case you can't be bothered reading the long post ahead, just know this: this was probably the best meal we've ever had!  Book a table at once.

Attica is degustation only on Friday and Saturday night and have an 8-course vego menu as a standard option (the word on the street is that they'll do a vegan version if they're given a heads up). The fit-out is simple, stylish and pretty small - given its status as Melbourne's best restaurant (winner of The Age Good Food Guide gong, plus ranked the 63rd best restaurant globally), it's a bit of a surprise that the Attica crew haven't expanded to cater to demand. But I'm glad they haven't - the space is pleasant and not too crowded and the service is slick and efficient. Things get started with some freshly baked sourdough rye infused with wattleseed and served with the most ridiculously delicious emulsified olive oil and black salt spread (see above). I embarrassed myself slathering this stuff onto my bread to the point that Cindy tried to get photographic evidence of my greediness - luckily I was eating it too fast for our camera to catch me.

   

Then came our amuse-bouche - pureed walnut, grated pine mushrooms and tiny little cabbage flowers served neatly in walnut shells. A nice combination of earthy flavours to start things off.

Another little appetiser came out before the courses proper began: crumbed, seared oyster mushrooms decorated with buckwheat flowers.

   

After biting into one of these, I was ready to call a halt to proceedings and just ask for a giant bucket full of them. Perfectly fried with a light and crispy crumbing around a squidgily delicious oyster mushroom - these were even better than the fried seafood snacks they brought to mind.

I don't really understand why there were three whole dishes before the menu proper began, but I wasn't going to send anything back - our final pre-meal treat was a fairly simple shiitake broth scattered with unidentifiable leaves (our note-taking gets increasingly unreliable as the matching wines start to pile up!).

   

The broth was basically the distilled flavour of shiitakes - I enjoyed it, but it was probably the only thing brought to the table that didn't blow my mind. Simple and effective, but the least memorable dish of the night.

Right: onto the listed dishes. First up was the textured cauliflower with horseradish.

   

This is the vego version of a snow crab dish that's become a bit of an Attica signature. It's meant to look like Mount Taranaki in New Zealand (Ben Shewry is clearly proud of his NZ heritage, this isn't the only dish explicitly inspired by it). Little pieces of cooked cauliflower are teamed up with puffed rice, verjuice granita, witlof, freeze-dried coconut and barberries and dusted in a white horseradish powder. The dish is a wacky combination of flavours, textures and temperatures (there's a little verjuice iciness hidden inside the mountain!). 

   

It's smart and fun, and works pretty well - Cindy's was a bit heavy on the horseradish, but mine was well balanced. The horseradish powder is a bit on the dry side, but if you make sure to combine it with the rest of the dish you'll have no problems. It all probably teeters on the edge of being too clever for its own good, but I was won over by it.

Next up: leek, lovage and mustard oil.

   

The leek was beautifully cooked - tender while maintaining a bit of texture - and the surrounding bits and pieces were wonderful. In particular, the buffalo mozarella was easily the best I've ever tasted, its saltiness was offset nicely by the slightly tart lovage paste and the sweetness of the leeks. Stunning.

After a couple of light dishes, things got a bit more serious with our next course: "a simple dish of potato cooked in the earth it was grown".

   

The potato is cooked for 12 hours in a rigged up version of a hāngi (using the actual soil that the spuds were grown in), resulting in a soft and waxy texture. The potato itself tasted like a good potato - it's a pretty simple flavour - but it was turned into something amazing by its accompaniments. It sits on a little puddle of goats curd speckled with coffee and coconut husk ash and then layered with crisply fried saltbush leaves. The coffee and coconut ash added an indescribable depth of flavour to the goats curd, and the saltbush gave a bit of crunch to an otherwise smooth dish. Another winner.

We'd spotted the next dish on its way to other tables all night long - turns out it's the first dish in the regular degustation. It had a slightly foreboding name for an anti-tomato activist like myself: Tomato, smoked sesame, 11 basils.

   

This was a compressed slice of capsicum topped with smoked black sesame seeds, spiced hazelnuts, sheep's milk yoghurt, a couple of skinned black Russian cherry tomatoes, the inside goop from some other tomatoes and 11 kinds of basil leaves (all plucked from the Attica garden). This had a very Italian feel, with the tomato/basil/cheese combo, but the introduction of the smoked sesame seeds and spiced nuts took things a step away from a straight out reinvention of a caprese salad. I must say that the 11 kinds of basil were not particularly distinctive - again an idea a bit more about being clever than really adding specific flavours - but the whole dish worked really nicely together. Maybe if tomatoes want me to eat them in future, they should make sure they always get prepared by a 3-hatted chef.

We still had two savoury courses left, and next up was the richest of the bunch: kumara, almond, Pyengana.

   

Pyengana turns out to be a cheddar cheese, which is turned into an astonishlingy good creamy sauce and poured over the rest of the dish at the table. The base of the dish is a sprinkling of almond pieces slow roasted in butter and garlic, there's a big wodge of nicely cooked kumara (sweet potato) on top of a shallot puree, a slow cooked egg yolk, broccolini buds and buckwheat leaves. Wowsers. This is a rich dish, but it works perfectly - the textures and flavours are all strong, but they don't overpower each other and you're left with a really wonderful melange. I think this probably won out as my favourite dish of the night (olive oil emulsion aside).

Onto our final savoury of the night: mushrooms, mulled wine and pearl onions.

   

The centrepiece of this dish was a couple of pieces of slippery jack mushroom, cooked in a vanilla mulled  wine and covered in herbs and freeze-dried black currants. There were a couple of half-bulbs of pearl onions and some compressed onion stalks, served along with a parsnip puree. The mushrooms were fantastic - some sweetness and acidity after the heavy richness of the previous dish, but the onions were a bit more trouble than they were worth. We both had trouble chasing them around the plate and, while they were soft and tasty, they didn't really wow either of us.

Onto dessert! First, native fruits of Australia.

   

Another parochial dish, made up of a range of native Australian goodies including lemon aspen, quandong, candied rosella, native limes, native currants and some others that we didn't get down. The fruits were served on a sheeps milk custard with a bush currant ice on top. Another very clever dish - it was great to have the chance to taste such a wide range of native goodies. Not all of them were amazing, but the freshness and bite of them all was a refreshing palate cleanser after the savoury courses.

The final listed dessert was the Plight of the Bees.

   

The top of this was a thin layer of dehydrated pumpkin covered in freeze-dried apple. Underneath was a while-thyme honey, thyme-infused cream enriched with egg yolk, meringue chunks, mandarin segments - there was fennel in there somewhere as well. Another wonderful combo of flavours and textures - the thyme came through in patches as did the fennel, adding some complexity to an otherwise pretty sweet dish. The pumpkin layer reminded me a bit of a roll-up, and the meringue was perfectly crispy.

We were a bit sad that neither dessert had featured chocolate, so when they offered us a bonus dessert inspired by Afghan Biscuits that included chocolate, cornflakes and walnuts we were sold ($15).

   

This was another dish that played with textures and temperatures - there was a big blog of deliciously rich ganache underneath the pile somewhere, along with a chocolate custard, freeze-dried cocoa mass, cocoa nibs, some sort of sorbet, chocolate pastry bits, sweet crumbled house-made cornflakes and grated walnuts. This was probably my favourite dessert - the combination of innovative techniques and varied temperatures added to some wonderfully rich chocolatey goodness. Seriously - every degustation needs a chocolate-based dessert at the end.

To end the night, we're presented with a pukeko nest with two speckled eggs sitting in it. Being a nerd, I checked the eggs against those in my iphone field guide (a pukeko is the New-Zealand name for the purple swamp-hen - see the eggs here) and was impressed by their ornithological accuracy. Kudos.

   

More importantly, they were wonderful - the inside filled with gooey, salty caramel. The pukeko nest is meant to represent Ben Shewry's approach to cooking - taking bits and pieces from other places and making his own beautiful concoctions. The metaphor seemed a bit stretched to me, but these were a lovely finish to possibly the most satisfying meal of our lives.

Our wait-staff were friendly and helpful (even stopping to explain what the crazy chemistry-lab-looking machine in the kitchen did), my matching wines were fantastic (even if I do remain largely uncultured - for all the sommelier's talk of 'minerality', I find myself with few decent adjectives to describe wine) and the setting was relaxed and simple. We quite liked Attica the first time we went, but things have clearly gone to another level since then - it's a wonderful restaurant doing food with a uniquely local inspiration (especially if you count NZ as local!). I can't recommend it enough - book in and try it for yourself.

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Unsurprisingly, Attica has been well-reviewed since our first visit, although not by the vegetarian set - we only found this rave from Now and Rome.

The non-veg bloggers have mostly raved, with positive reviews from Melbourne RiffRaff, melbourne gastronome (twice and thrice), Kostlich, foodwithfrank(twice), Hold the Peas, Laws of the Kitchen, Just Degusting, Absolutely Famished (including a veg review), Food Chee, 1001 Dinners, 1001 Nights, omnomnomnom & more, food sponge, A table for two, A Food Story, The Chronicles of Ms I-Hua, The Melbourne Social Guide, Mel: Hot or Not, Eating Melbourne, ENJOY EAT WATCH, Melbies and Foodies, Tomatom, Popcorn & Toast, Plate Licker, Gastonomical ramblings, Let's Get Fat Together, Barley Blog, Foodie About Town, Miss Melbourne, eat, drink, stagger, EatThis, Shay's Blog and Melbourne Dining Experiences.

On the other hand, Food Lovers Society, Double Dutch Oven, Melbourne Culinary Journal and One Mouthful were a bit underwhelmed by the Attica experience.

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Attica

74 Glen Eira Road, Ripponlea

9530 0111

8 course veg degustation $175, matching wines $115,
   bonus dessert $15

http://www.attica.com.au/

Accessibility: Attica has a couple of steps on entry. It's not too cramped inside given its overall size. The toilets are up another couple of small steps, although once you get there they're pretty spacious and easy to manoeuvre in. Lighting is low without being ridiculous. Ordering and payment are all at the table.

Watercress & chickpea soup with rosewater & ras el hanout

May 10, 2012

   

We've been eating out a ridiculous amount lately, so we had two problems: 1) our veggie box produce was starting to turn, and 2) we needed to eat something healthy. Typically Ottolenghi had the answer to both our problems: a watercress and chickpea soup that was about as healthy as you can imagine.

It's a pretty simple recipe, maybe half an hour of fiddling about. The soup itself isn't ridiculously flavourful - it's basically blended up greens with a bit of stock and a dash of sweetness peaking through from rosewater and sugar. The whole package is made by the topping though - roasted spiced carrot and chickpeas. We had just enough ras el hanout lying around (from five years ago!) to make this and I'm glad we did. It's a fantastic combination of sweetness and spice and really made the soup pop. I just wanted to eat bowlfuls of the carrot and chickpea mix. So good - we now need to find a new batch of ras el hanout so we can put this into our regular winter rotation.

Watercress & chickpea soup with rosewater & ras el hanout
(based on this recipe from Ottolegnhi's Guardian column)

1 large carrot, diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon ras el hanout
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 x 410g can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained
2 small onions, sliced finely
600ml Massel 'chicken' stock
1 thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled and sliced finely
220g watercress, stems trimmed off
100g baby spinach leaves
2 teaspoons caster sugar
1 teaspoon rosewater
salt

Heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Stir together the carrot pieces with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil, the ras el hanout, the cinnamon and a generous sprinkle of salt. Spread them on a lined baking tray and pop them in the oven. Bake for 15 minutes and then add half of the chickpeas, stirring to get them a bit coated in the spicy oil. Pop the tray back in the oven for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, get a large saucepan (or frying pan) on low heat with the rest of the olive oil and sauté the onion and ginger for 10 minutes or so, until everything is nice and soft. Add the greens, leftover chickpeas, stock, sugar and a pinch of salt and bring the mix to the boil. 

Kill the heat after a minute or two and let it cool a bit before whizzing it all up in a blender or with a stick blender. Add in the rosewater, taste for seasoning and add salt if required. Serve the soup up with a few spoonfuls of the insanely delicious chickpea/carrot mix on top. Enjoy!

St Jude's Cellars

May 8, 2012

Edit 09/07/2012: Brian reports on Fitzroyalty that St Jude's has now closed.

   

For a few months now, St Jude's Cellars have been running a vegetarian set menu on Tuesdays, with meaty supplements available at extra cost. In fact, the current menu boldly claims to be "entirely gluten free and vegan".

   

It was a little odd, then, to receive bread and butter as a precursor to the meal proper (even if they were very tasty).

   

The menu began with roast celeriac and Japanese pumpkin soup served in espresso cups, garnished with truffle oil and celery cress - though they probably supplied the most volume, the root veges were mere supports to the pungent oil.

   

As an entrée, we ate crunchy black quinoa, Spanish mushrooms, marinated enoki mushrooms and basil. They're a trusty combination for vegos, and I particularly enjoyed the few mouthfuls that had an extra jolt of salt.

   

The pearl barley risotto main was a gluten-free fail. Greens, walnuts and pomegranate work well together but the stock was weak and I found myself adding lots of extra salt at the table.

   

The optional side of nashi pear, radishes and red onion was lovely, and would have contrasted nicely with a richer risotto.

   

Props to the St Jude's team for bypassing the vegan dessert stereotype of fruit sorbet and giving dairy-free cheesecake a go! Unfortunately it was way too soy heavy for me, and the fruit-and-nut base lacked crunch. (Psst - Choc Ripple biscuits are vegan.) The garnishing mandarin compote and quince puree were the stuff of a high end dessert, though.

   

I really liked St Jude's fit-out - roomy and stylish with casual details like visible storage and paste-up art. Unfortunately the high ceilings and smooth surfaces meant that it was loud and echo-y, even when only half full. The service seemed half-hearted to match.

It's really great to see mainstream contemporary venues like St Jude's celebrating vegetarianism, and loudly - these vegetarian Tuesdays have been trumpeted in at least four Age articles. I'm not convinced that they're delivering on all they promise, though. The produce was nice, but the preparation was inconsistent and the protein was sparse. I doubt it'd convert any carnivores. And while I finished full enough, I know a few vegans who'd be sneaking a few doors down to Lord of the Fries afterwards for a top up.

That they didn't keep their vegan/gluten-free promises is also irksome. The staff did check up on special dietary requirements at the table and admit their error with the risotto before the meal began. There seems a good chance that they'd correctly address issues, but assess the risks according to your needs.

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We haven't yet seen any other blog reviews of St Jude's vegetarian Tuesdays! In fact the only veg review we've spotted at all is a positive one from The Chronicles of a Dirty Flamingo in the Kitchen back in 2008.

Otherwise there've been many positive reviews, see Sharking for chips and drinks..., BarAmigo, This Food Guy, Sarah Cooks (sponsored), I Eat Therefore I Am (sponsored), MEL: HOT OR NOT (sponsored), The Very Very Hungry Caterpillar, The moving beast, Eat Almost Anything, Mr Sparrow, The Jess Ho, "... it pleases us", Ronnie's Spots, Cooked and Bottled in Brunswick, Fitzroyalty, Fill Up On Bread and melbourne gastronome. Accounts are more mixed (though often generally positive) on Mouth to Mouth, Petit Miamx, Kit's Cucina Culinaria, kate eats melbourne, 1001 Dinners 1001 Nights, I'm so hungree, I Eat Therefore I Am, Sarah Cooks and Tomato. Diners were not at all impressed on food.loves.my.mouth, tabeats, Mighty Sword and Absolutely Famished.

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St Jude's Cellars

389 Brunswick St, Fitzroy

9419 7411

3 veg courses $35, 4 veg courses $42, supplementary side $6

http://www.stjudescellars.com.au/

Accessibility: St Jude's has a flat entry and a fair amount of space around its tables, some of which are standard height and others of which are bar height with stools. There's full table service. Toilets are gendered and look moderately accessible.

Brisbane, briefly

May 5-6, 2012

   

We made a flying visit to Brisbane on the weekend to celebrate the wedding of two dear friends, and we did our level best to squeeze more food and friends into our 28-hour stay. On our arrival, the Academic and the Dilettante immediately whisked us off to the Buddha Birth Day Festival at Southbank.

   

Our visits to the festival in Melbourne told us that there'd be mock meat and lots of it. Indeed there was, though the snacks available were quite repetitive and not of the highest standard.

   

Mattheworbit's festival food favourite soon became ours too - Langos! Eating deep-fried Hungarian bread might not be the most traditional way to honour Buddha's birthday, but it worked for us. It certainly supplied us with the same gluten-glued stomachs that a full mock meat meal would have provided.

   

On Sunday morning we dragged our hungover bodies to West End for breakfast. The Burrow has recently opened in a space we knew as a Turkish restaurant and it's lovely in daylight hours! It's airy, yet cool and shady, with a couple of small tables visible upstairs.

   

Ordering our coffees and meals at the counter felt a bit awkward but we were well looked after. Michael's flat white almost beat him back to the table and we didn't have to wait much longer for food. The beer baked beans, served with toast and topped with guacamole ($12), were a highlight.

   

(Update, 31/12/2014: The Green Edge has moved from Enoggera to Windsor - see their website for details.)

We took a circuitous suburban route back to the airport, meeting Terry and my mum at The Green Edge in Enoggera. The strip mall-on-a-clearway setting might not be encouraging but inside there's a gorgeous communal table (fully occupied when we entered at noon!), a modest cafe kitchen and more vegan groceries than I imagined were stocked in all of Brisbane.

   

Either the Academic or the Dilettante had called ahead to let them know we were visiting, and we were well looked after. (I've got a hunch that these folks are generally helpful and charming regardless!) We battled massive, messy and tasty burgers (satay tofu for Michael, veggie for Mum and mushroom for me, each ~$12), I downed a super-sugary vegan cookies'n'cream milkshake (~$7) and deeply regretted our lack of time and appetite for one of their vegan sundaes. They were kind enough to pack us off with walnut-crusted brownies for the flight home.

It's easy to feel nostalgic for Brisbane's blue skies and 25 degree autumn days. On this visit I was unexpectedly  impressed by the city's newer veg*n venues and options too.

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The Burrow

37 Mollison St, West End

(07) 3846 0030

veg breakfast $5-12

http://theburrowwestend.com.au/

Accessibility: The Burrow has a sizable step up on entry and a reasonably spacious interior. Orders are placed and paid for at the counter. We didn't visit the toilets.

The Green Edge

191 Wardell St, Enoggera (new address: Cnr Lutwych Rd and Le Geyt St, Windsor)

(07) 3855 5755

veg burgers ~$12

http://www.greenedgeonline.com.au/

Accessiblity: The Green Edge has a flat entry (from memory) from the street but steps from the gravel car park out back. It's quite narrow inside; orders are made and paid for at the counter.