james test

June 3, 2017 A couple of friends alerted me to the opening of The Alley four months ago. Touted as a vegan burger spot, I imagined late Saturday nights on Brunswick St. Far from it! The Alley operates from a St Kilda Rd office block, primarily for lunch, and is closed on Sundays. Nevertheless, it's got the look - the bright yellows, millennial pinks, neon lights and line drawings remind me of Hobart's Veg Bar and just about any fro-yo bar you could name. The menu takes the healthified, superfood-infused approach. There are chia puddings and acai bowls for breakfast, macro and taco bowls for lunch; noodles are made from seaweed and spaghetti is made from squash. Fries are actually air baked and instead of shakes there are smoothies shot through with coconut water, almond milk, pea protein, macca and (they've hit me with a new one!) camu camu. Air-baked fries ($6.95) lack crispness but are beautifully fluffy on the inside. The almond parmesan and crispy kale crowning the pot...

January 31, 2017 We scheduled our February book club meeting at The Carlton Club, hoping to take advantage of its somewhat surprising switch to an all vegan menu. Sadly, between us picking the venue in late January and the date of our dinner they'd changed things up again and shifted back to an omni menu. Still, a good number of vegan options survived the menu change, so we persisted. We didn't venture up to the well known rooftop bar, instead settling into the dining room, which had an odd vibe - part opulent ballroom, part suburban RSL. If nothing else it provided a relatively quiet and spacious setting for our book-club to discuss  Swing Time . The new menu is pretty classic pub food - burgers and parmas make up the mains, with a selection of starters and salads to complement them. They've kept it about half vegetarian and there's a decent array of vegan stuff to choose from. We split a pile of vegan dishes three ways to give us the best chance to sample everything. ...

January 16, 2017 I had a bunch of family in town for the tennis in January and we were tasked with coming up with a 'Melbourne' dining experience. We've had good luck with Hellenic Republic in the past, so we decided to give one of George Calombaris' other places a shot - his casual Greek place in the city, Gazi. The fit-out is lovely - upside-down terracotta pots hang from the ceiling, big windows let light flood in and the open kitchen is buzzing with activity. We had an early booking, but so did everyone with tennis tickets, so Gazi was heaving with people. It's not the best place for a group catch-up: it's super loud, with music pumping and conversation echoing off the walls. We were struggling to even make ourselves heard by the staff. Luckily, we came up with the ordering option that required the least conversation - for $49 they'll put on a seven dish sharing menu, catering to whatever dietary requirements you have. So much easier than working your w...

December 3, 2016 Our mate Gill  recently tipped us off about Melbourne Wok, an uninspiringly named restaurant in the strip of Indian and Korean places on Bourke Street. In spite of its bold promise to provide 'Everything Asian', Melbourne Wok seems like a Malaysian-Indian place, offering banana leaf curries for lunch and a wider range of noodles etc at dinner time. We stopped by for a quick lunch on a Saturday, joining a decent crowd of other people keen for the banana leaf experience. At lunchtime your basic choice is vego ($10.90) or non-vego ($12.90) - you get rice, four curries, a raita and a pappadum all served up on a banana leaf. The traditional approach is to eat it all with your fingers - we watched some experts work their way through the meal dexterously, but decided that we'd wind up smearing pumpkin all over ourselves so we opted for cutlery. Cindy kicked things off with a fancy drink - a sirap (rose cordial, $3.40) - a strong and sweet accompaniment to the cur...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on November 16, 2016 Our Cheap Eats project has mostly been about revisiting places we blogged way back in the day, but we're also using it to visit some long-overlooked Melbourne stalwarts. When we needed a quick dinner up at the Parliament end of the city, it seemed like the perfect excuse to finally visit one of Melbourne's institutions: Pellegrini's. It's been trading on Bourke Street since 1954 and by all reports very little has changed in 62 years - there's a wooden board listing different pasta dishes, scrappily decorated walls and staff chatting away in Italian.  It's charming enough, but the bar seating is a little awkward in a group of four. The staff were reasonably helpful taking, us through the vego dishes - the choices are pretty simple: pick from one of a handful of pasta options and then choose either pesto or napoli. I ordered the ricotta ravioli with the napoli sauce (~$18). It was fine - very basic and quite old-fashi...

October 4, 2016 Almost every time Cindy and I eat in the CBD we wind up heading to Shandong Mama or Shanghai Street , so we were delighted when Hayley suggested a pre-movie meal at Grand Trailer Park Taverna. Melbourne's obsession with dude-food is getting a bit tiresome, but even the most committed dumpling-heads need a change sometimes. Grand Trailer Park Taverna exploded onto Melbourne's burger scene a few years back, with queues out the door and inordinate amounts of buzz (see the blog round-up below). Things appear to have mellowed slightly, and we had no trouble getting a table early on a Tuesday night. It's a beautiful setup, with tables nestled inside wooden caravan cut-outs and little cabins, chandeliers on the ceiling and a bright, cheerful vibe. The menu is a glorious paean to junk food, featuring ridiculous boozy milkshakes, a selection of burgers, loads of fried sides and mad dessert dishes like an ice-cream donut sandwich or the menacingly titled 'chocop...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on August 2, 2016 Between Michael's and my travels, we've let our Cheap Eats 2006 project lapse for a few months. We're reviving it with this visit to Gopal's in the city. When we first moved to Melbourne I was just barely done being a student and Brisbane's Hare Krishna restaurants, with their cheap and filling vegetarian meals, were a favourite hang-out. Gopal's had the same relaxed atmosphere and we notched up two short reviews in our first months here. We later checked in for a marathon cooking class , and we've failed to mention this dependable eatery on our blog for a good five years since. While we were originally a bit put out by the cost of the chef's special, it has aged well! $12 in 2006, the equivalent feast plate is still just $12.95. This entitles you to a tray heaped with food - soup, rice and your two chosen curries, two chosen salads, a drink and a dessert. It's hearty, bulk cooking based on affordable ve...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on March 29, 2016 Fo Guang Yuan Art Gallery is one of the two biggest oversights highlighted in our Cheap Eats project spreadsheet - it's a vegetarian eatery that's been open the entire decade we've lived in Melbourne, yet we've never visited and blogged it until now. I put this down to the dining hall's opening hours, which are restricted to weekday lunch times and therefore quite inaccessible to us non-city workers. My workplace issued me with an Easter Tuesday off this year, and I used it to sneak in and give the gallery tea house a go at long last. It was quiet, almost hushed, and I had no trouble getting a four-seated table to myself. The menu is much longer than I'd expect for such an unassuming operation. The appetisers alone run to twenty mostly deep-fried options, and then there are several dozen more stir-fries, tossed noodles, noodles and noddle soups. Most dishes involve mock meat, with a few centred around tofu or mushroom...

March 9 & 10, 2016 I barely pay attention to Broadsheet these days, drowning under the weight of newly opened bars and cafes that we'll eventually visit some time in 2018. Somehow though, my eye caught on the words 'Lebanese Diner' and 'Code Black Coffee' in a write-up of Tahini, a new place just around the corner for my office. We've had pretty good experiences at both Code Blacks and I've been craving a good lunchtime felafel for a while, so this shot straight to the top of my list for days when our packed-lunch game was weak. I wound up visiting back-to-back quite soon after they opened, giving me a chance to have a proper shot at their menu. On my first visit I got a bit confused by the system - it turns out you only go up to the counter if you're getting takeaway, not if you want to eat in. I panicked a haloumi wrap ($10) without really taking in my full range of options.  They really are designed as a speedy takeaway lunch - a better option...

October 5 and 29, 2015 Since our office move a couple of months back I've been continuing to explore the food options around the neighbourhood (while missing Sonido and Smith & Deli of course). I had a tip-off from a mate that Kitchen Inn had a surprisingly decent range of vegetarian options, so I dropped by to check it out. It's a short menu section with just five dishes, featuring Kitchen Inn's house-made noodles, rice, vegetables and - in all five dishes - vegetarian BBQ pork. Each dish is super affordable - just $8.90, for plates so big you'll struggle to finish them. Vegans will be well served by most of the options (the egg noodle dish is a no-go, obviously), but will need to let the staff know to exclude the egg that comes standard in dishes like the fried kueh teow and fried rice (I failed in the noodle dish on the left below, but excluded the egg successfully from the fried rice on the right). The fried kueh teow was fantastic - excellent noodles, wok-fri...

September 11, 2015 We've been meaning to visit Wonderbao for years - we're resolutely pro-bun , and the enthusiastic reviews that pop up regularly on vego blogs (see below) have kept it on our radar. My job has recently shifted from Gertrude Street to the city and, although I miss my old favourites , one of the upsides has been the opportunity to scope out some city lunches. Wonderbao is hidden away down an arcade off A'Beckett street and it's easy to miss it if you're not paying attention ( Sarah Cooks has a helpful map on her blog post ). The menu is pretty minimal, especially for vegos - there's a tofu gua bao ($4.90) and a mushroom bao ($2.70), plus a couple of sweet bao options ($2.50 each). I didn't have a good sense of how much I should order, so I was relieved to see that they've got a conveniently arranged veggie pack - for $9.50 you get the tofu gua bao and mushroom bao for lunch and the taro bao for dessert. The tofu is the clear stand-out -...