Gasometer

As you will have noticed from my previous post, if one thing is guaranteed when film festival time rolls around, it is that Melbourne eateries will receive my heavily increased patronage. While my tendency to eat out is ordinarily at a reasonably high level, during this time it skyrockets, due to increased time spent in the city sitting in cinemas for hours on end, combined with my extreme laziness in actually attempting to make my own lunches and dinners to sustain me through screenings.

And if these pre- or post-film eating sessions include fine company, well, that’s all to the better! After an afternoon session of Werner Herzog’s latest doco Cave of Forgotten Dreams at MIFF, Muffin and I could be found strolling down Smith Street gleefully recalling some of the more ridiculous lines of Herzog’s narration (“Are we just albino crocodiles overwhelmed in a river of history?” Oh, Werner).

The only way that we were feeling like crocodiles was in that we were starving, and required a good solid meal so that we could spend the evening floating bloated in a river somewhere, as I am led to believe crocodiles are wont to do. Little were we to expect that the dinner we ended up ordering at Gasometer would leave us as stuffed and satisfied as a plump antelope must do for a Nile crocodile (this post is turning into a National Geographic special).

Gasometer serves fabulous pub grub with a difference – it is extremely vegie and vegan friendly, and the kitchen goes to a real effort to make their v-dishes exciting and varied. This isn’t your standard we’re-going-to-slap-you-with-a-standard-vegie-burger pub meal. This is v-junk food in its finest incarnation.

After much dithering and being quite overwhelmed by the choice on offer, I ended up going with the southern fried “chicken” burger with chips, and a side of vegan mac and cheese. The burger is probably the closest vegies are ever going to get to experiencing KFC again, and it tastes a hell of a lot better than KFC ever did! The protein patty is deliciously seasoned, nice and crispy without and juicy within, and complimented with tomato, lettuce and a kicky sauce filled with spice.

The chips deserve a paragraph all to themselves, as they are, without a doubt, the best chips in Melbourne. You heard me. Think of a light yet intensely crispy chip with a fluffy interior and then multiply its deliciousness ten-fold. Muffin and I descended into a fierce discussion attempting to figure out their cooking method to achieve such potato finery… perhaps an adaptation of the Blumenthal method? We are continuing our research.

The vegan mac and cheese I was most curious about. How would you recreate such a rich dish without any cheese? Would it go chalky, like some cheese-replacements I’ve sampled have had a tendency to do? I shouldn’t have worried, I was clearly in safe hands. It was the richest mac and cheese, let alone ‘cheeze’, that I’ve probably ever had, and definitely one of the nicest. A more satisfying bowl of rich, stodgy goo you will never find!

Muffin bucked the vegan-trending menu by ordering the item with probably the most meat in it, the Reuben sandwich. A mountain of pastrami wedged between some mighty fine-looking slices of dark rye bread, the sandwich was accompanied by two sides, a bowl of sauerkraut and a carrot and beetroot salad. I snuck in quite a few tastes of the sauerkraut (I think Muffin and I are both quietly developing twin sauerkraut dependency syndromes) and it was gorgeously sweet and tart, a very nice kraut indeed. Muffin very wisely finished with the carrot and beetroot salad, which was a light way to finish while I struggled through the remains of my mac and cheese (so cheezy!).

The fact that we had mown through meals ample enough for a family of crocodiles was not going to stop us from ordering dessert! We’d been eying off the pumpkin pie since arriving, and after giving ourselves a moment to rest, it arrived at our table with an accompanying globe of gingerbread ice cream.

The waitress had told us that the gingerbread ice cream was the greatest thing ever, and she wasn’t wrong. I want to know how they make this, too! It’s light ginger yet biscuity touch was a perfect foil for the dense, creamy pie, which was everything I’d hoped it would be. God, I love pie.

Gasometer is highly impressive. The fact that I am desperately searching for ways to replicate both the chips and the gingerbread ice cream at home should go some way to proving how affecting I found their food to be. So make like an albino crocodile, and ponder the meanings of history, art and the human soul over a gut-busting meal of vegan decadence at Gasometer. Although I can’t imagine that Herzog would approve, considering how much he’d probably prefer you to help him in his quest to rid the world of chickens.

Gasometer

484 Smith Street, Collingwood

Ph: 9417 5538

Wabi Sabi Salon

Pity my poor boy for a moment, it is not easy going out with such an unapologetic movie buff as myself. Every time he suggests a date we nearly always inevitably end up staying at home while I subject him to my continuing attempts to widen his film knowledge. Not that he doesn’t end up enjoying  himself, it’s just that occasionally he likes to be reassured that there is indeed an outdoors, and also daylight.

So sometimes he will come up with a whole day or evening’s entertainment that is designed to lure me away from my beloved moving pictures. A booking for dinner at Wabi Sabi Salon lured me well and good – I’d been keen to try this particular Japanese restaurant for quite a while.

They’ve gone to a lot of trouble at Wabi Sabi to make you feel as if you’ve just stepped into Japan as soon as you enter the restaurant. It’s gorgeous in the front room where we sat, and apparently there’s another room out the back that overlooks a Japanese-style garden. The staff are all very cheery, although their attention did wain a bit once we’d given our initial order, but it was a full house the night we went so I’m happy to wave that off as the result of extreme busyness.

After a refreshing cup of miso soup each, we decided to order two entrees and two mains, figuring that that would be enough to fill us up. The entrees we chose were the vegetable tempura and an eggplant dish whose exact title has escaped me (and the website menu isn’t helping AT ALL, so we’ll all have to remain in ignorance), and for the mains we went with the seaweed salad and the tofu steaks served on a sizzling plate.

The tempura came first and was easily the best dish of the night, and probably one of the best tempuras I’d ever had. Crispy lotus root (I’d been hoping that as an authentic Japanese place that there would be lotus root, and I wasn’t disappointed), blocks of sizzling tofu, and perfectly round balls of potato all had this amazing crispness to them, the batter was in no way soggy or oily, just perfect, and the result transformed my mouth into a hive of exclamation marks. An absolute highlight.

Like Phoebe and her issues with eggs, I have issues with eggplant. I generally find that when eggplant is prepared and cooked well, it’s a truly wonderous vegetable, yet when it is cooked badly it is utterly,  revoltingly horrid. And I have had enough awful eggplant to put me off ordering it when out nearly completely. However, The Boy was determined to have eggplant, and insisted that his good-eggplant intuition was bleeping. He was right: the cubes of fried eggplant, which were served in a hollowed out eggplant (an aubergine bowl!), were melty in the mouth, not too chewy, and even the sauce they sat in warranted  a few spoonfuls once the eggplant cubes had disappeared. There were probably only five or so eggplant chunks overall, however, which I felt made the serving a bit small (unless we were expected to eat the bowl too!).

Onto the mains. The seaweed salad was a variety of seaweeds mingled with a standard mix of salad greens, with a light sesame dressing. It was so fresh and green that you could feel the nutrients seeping into you as you ate it. The seaweeds were varied, including one that I absolutely loved, it was bright pink and sprang about my mouth as I chewed in an intriguingly textural way. My one big gripe, however, is that the seaweed/salad leaves ratio was heavily stacked in favour of the salad leaves, and for $17 I found that to be a bit disappointing.

The tofu steaks saw our meal take a swift, deep plunge from pleasant with some quibbles, to downright lackluster. The tofu steaks themselves, despite obviously being threaded through with Japanese mountain vegetables and sitting in sauce and sliced vegies, were bland, bland, bland. Completely tasteless. And while omnivores might snipe that tofu is inherently tasteless, it is so EASY to do wonderful things with tofu that make it a taste sensation, that to be served a dish as uninspiring as this (in a Japanese restaurant, no less, the Japanese are KINGS of tofu!) really affected my experience in a negative way. That’s not even getting into the sauce that the tofu steaks were swimming in, which had a thick, gelatinous quality that I tend to associate with suburban Chinese take-away. Which is awesome when you’re actually ordering Chinese take-away, but in this setting just seemed to cheapen the dish.

Still feeling hungry, and starting to feel somewhat desperate in our desire for Wabi Sabi to regain the esteem we’d first felt on trying the tempura, The Boy and I decided to order dessert. The green tea cheesecake was interesting texturally, yet the green tea flavour wasn’t really present at all. The trio of ice creams also featured an under-flavoured green tea scoop, although the black sesame scoop was alright, and ended up contrasting well with pieces of the cheesecake. The red bean flavoured ice cream was the clear winner, I’d never had that flavour before, and it was delightful. More red bean ice cream!

Food-wise, Wabi Sabi Salon was a mixed bag, including one of the most impressive dishes I’ve sampled this year, to one so terribly uninspired I felt deeply depressed having to pay for it. I honestly haven’t had a meal before that started out so great and ended with my dining partner and myself staring across the table at each other in a disappointed funk. Despite the wonders of their tempura, I think it will be a long while before I venture back to Wabi Sabi.

Wabi Sabi Salon

94 Smith Street, Collingwood

Ph: 9417 6119

www.wabisabi.net.au

Wood Spoon Kitchen

No sooner had I waved Jess off to LA then I had to say cheerio to another of my friends who was heading overseas. It’s clearly the time to travel! And I am jealous as all hell! (Hayley, you got to go to Sweden last January, don’t get greedy)

Anyway, the delightful Miss Brinkman was most keen to see me before jetting off to London, and suggested that we do so by having dinner at Wood Spoon Kitchen, which she had discovered earlier in the week and became so enamoured with that she made several repeat visits in that week alone. I was excited as I had heard across the blogospheres that they do ongiri very well, so heck yes I was down for this plan.

We firstly ordered edemame, which is to be expected, you all know I can’t pass it up. And they were good, as expected (I seriously have never had bad edemame anywhere. Maybe you know different, though, are there places I should edemame-avoid?). We also got ourselves some agedashi tofu, which was vegan. Hoorah! In fact there’s a lot of vegan goodness at Wood Spoon, and all clearly marked on the menu. I was intrigued by this dish as instead of a traditional dashi-style broth it came out sitting in a puddle of soy sauce dressing. It was still delicious, the soy all soaked up into the crispy outside of the tofu resulting in that seductive contrast of saucy yet crisp outside with the melty tofu-gasm within that makes me write love letters to agedashi tofu pretty much every day.

On to the ongiri set, of which you can choose three from a rather extensive list; we ended up going with seaweed, teriyaki beef and sansai (Japanese mountain vegetables, and including bamboo shoots and mushrooms). The ongiri were served with yet  more edemame (never a bad thing) and tart pickled vegies.The seaweed one had standard seaweed salad threaded through it and was nice, and Miss Brinkman heartily tucked into the teriyaki beef, but my heart belonged to the sansai, oh my, it was wonderful. There’s something about sansai vegetables that I find so unusual and refreshing, I can’t get enough of them. The ongiri themselves held their shapes well as you bit into them, yet were not gluggy or gluey at all, very well done.

For her main Miss Brinkman went with the miso soup with ramen, sweet potato, pumpkin, vegies, tofu and chicken breast, which is her favourite dish. Needless to say, she liked it, she liked it a lot! For my main I had the vegie goma udon with sansai, egg, lotus and beancurd in homemade sesame dressing. This was the only dish that I wasn’t overly fond of, and actually left only half eaten, but I think this was more due to a misunderstanding by myself as to what the menu description actually meant. I figured that ‘sesame dressing’ meant a very light sauce, and was definitely not expecting a dish that was covered in a very thick dressing the texture and consistency of satay sauce. I am extremely un-fond of satay sauce, and found after I’d extracted the vegetables that I didn’t feel up to eating noodles covered in something so reminiscent of that sauce most unpleasant to my palate, so decided instead to focus on gobbling up the remaining edemame. I’m sure, however, people more in love with thick sauces than me would have enjoyed the dish.

I think I am starting to subsist near purely on plum wine. I may have an addiction. I have it every time I go out for Japanese, and as you may have noticed I go out for Japanese quite a bit. Maybe it’s all part of a greater Japanese food addiction. Miss Brinkman will not help me here, she is a Japanese food-eating facilitator! And once she returns to Melbourne’s fair shores expect more of our Japanese cuisine adventures.

Wood Spoon Kitchen

88 Smith Street, Collingwood

Ph: 9416 0588

http://www.woodspoonkitchen.com/