Melbourne
December 22, 2016 3:59 PM   Subscribe

The City That Knows How To Eat A short essay by a food critic reflecting on Melbourne, its food culture and life more generally.
posted by wilful (45 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
ahh, home :)
posted by jcm at 4:19 PM on December 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember Besha Rodell! She was a food columnist/critic in Atlanta for years! I always did like her writing,
posted by Kitteh at 4:32 PM on December 22, 2016


Being from Melbourne and working in the American food world is like constantly being told — with great gusto — that the sky is blue.

I like this writer. We were bred on the same bread.
posted by Thella at 4:33 PM on December 22, 2016


Has the Vietnamese pork roll made its way to American shores yet?
posted by solarion at 4:34 PM on December 22, 2016


Somehow, despite the very real racism faced by each of these groups as they arrived, their food has become integrated into the life of Melbourne in a way I’m only just beginning to see in big American cities.

This one-liner is pretty typical of contemporary Australian racism. "Their food"? "integrated"? "only just beginning to see in big American cities"? All in the past tense? The amount of insulation it takes to distill privilege and othering and telling other people's stories in public media.

…Those Greek and Middle Eastern and Asian influences have been folded into Melbourne’s cultural identity, and they reverberate through the kaleidoscopic

Yes, I hear that. What a beautiful kaleidoscope we've made for you, and eater.com.
posted by polymodus at 4:46 PM on December 22, 2016 [8 favorites]


I regret to report that the Waiter's Club has been renovated and now looks like a boring cheap contemporary restaurant, rather than a 1970's throwback. I've no idea why they did it.

Can you be clearer, polymodus? The writer doesn't mention her father's or her stepfather's heritage but to my ear she could easily be a second generation immigrant. My own story of upbringing would sound far more white anglo Australian than what she has written, despite spending longer than her here and instantly recognising all of her photos (that weren't of food...), but I'm from whiter than white country stock. She sounds like Italian or Greek background friends I have or at least someone with an old intimacy with that way of life, so I see her telling her story, not someone else's. Maybe I'm wrong though.
posted by deadwax at 5:22 PM on December 22, 2016


Those two paragraphs polymodus quotes from were definitely the weakest of the essay, glossing over a lot of complex historical and culinary detail for the sake of what reads as a cultural completism of sorts, and could definitely have been omitted. I still liked it for the insights on moving and the differences between America and Australia.
posted by Panthalassa at 5:28 PM on December 22, 2016


I agree. And despite kind of agreeing with her that we have it pretty good here I found myself wanting to live in the utopia she describes. It's a bit of a hagiography and no city ever really deserves that. "Venturing further" to Carlton North is both telling and laughable if we want to get particularly uncharitable about glossing over complexity as well.
posted by deadwax at 5:40 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm not sure whether it's the actual world or the filter she interprets the world through, but it seems like Brunswick St. has become a lot more bourgeois since I was there last (in mid-2012). I'm guessing that's the gentrification, emptying out the student squats and punk-rock sharehouses and replacing their scruffy inhabitants with well-to-do middle-aged professionals.
posted by acb at 6:01 PM on December 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Sooo... in the article she describes how her step-father haggled at Victoria Markets. Is that still a done thing? Can you still haggle over the price of produce or meat?
posted by jadepearl at 6:10 PM on December 22, 2016


Hell yes, acb. I was drinking there 20 years ago and work in Fitzroy at the moment. To say that it's not what it used to be would be an understatement. There are little pockets, some of the pubs still feel like themselves (and some don't), some of the shops have at least the same name, but I miss the old Fitzroy, and it's prices.
posted by deadwax at 6:12 PM on December 22, 2016


Can you still haggle over the price of produce or meat?

Oh yes. Maybe not at the more modern stalls with cash registers, but perhaps even there. Certainly if you're buying a whole bunch of something.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:22 PM on December 22, 2016


I was born in the Philippines, grew up in Vancouver, have family in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and New York. I grew up with a panoply of cuisines that were available to me, but the city I've loved most for food was Melbourne. I had the luck to work at a place with an Australian client that required me to visit the city three times for a total of roughly five weeks, and I was just taken with it all. Cocktails at the Everleigh. Victoria Market. Grand Central Market. Curries on Chin Chin overlooking Flinders, seafood at Claypots, amazing coffee everywhere. My second breakfast there was a spring onion roti with braised pork cheek, fried egg and breakfast tomato, and it was just this perfect example of how Melbourne just got cultural integration in a way that neither Vancouver nor San Francisco ever did. It wasn't the sort of separate but equal mosaic of Canada or the assimilationist reformatting of America, but more of a genuine fusion of multiple influences combining into a new whole.

Of course, it isn't perfect and there's still a bunch of latent racism in Australian society, and the city is sports-crazy in a way that I found a bit discomforting, but if I had to imagine a more perfect future, it would demographically and culinarily look a lot more like Melbourne than any other city that I know.
posted by bl1nk at 7:27 PM on December 22, 2016 [8 favorites]


Fuck me this isn't about racism.
posted by wilful at 7:39 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]


I just took my visiting sister and my two girls to dumplings at Shanghai House, on Tattersalls lane. Four dishes and a beer, $40 australian (about $30 US). Next week we'll do Cantonese style BBQ. I love Melbourne's food and its people about as much as I miss Madrid's.
posted by kandinski at 7:58 PM on December 22, 2016


I know, that was such an odd reaction.

One refugee couple I know knew everything would be alright when they saw an Aussie eating a meat pie on their first day here. It must have been a 4+20. They're Vietnamese and their family has been baking pastry for generations, since French colonial times when they learnt the art.

So they saw this rather sad mass produced pie and knew they had a future in Australia. They were right to be optimistic. They had nothing when they got here, but they knew they could make a better pie than that.

That's in my own personal experience, I went to school with their son. But this story must have been repeated many times because I can think of a dozen or so Vietnamese bakeries here in Brisbane.
posted by adept256 at 8:14 PM on December 22, 2016 [8 favorites]


I enjoyed this as a piece of writing and it definitely made me feel homesick as a Melburnian living in the US. But, I also felt it was written with rose-tinted glasses and reflected the very narrow experience a person who grew up middle-class in the latte leftie inner suburbs.

I mean, I also grew up white and middle-class in the latte leftie inner suburbs — we shopped at the Vic Market, and had coffee at Pellegrini's and Mario's, and ate at Jim's (although at 14, my friends and I did not obsess over new restaurants or throw elaborate dinner parties. Can that possibly have been true of any 14-year-old? Even the coolest kids at Princes Hill or wherever cool kids go these days?) — but I don't think this is many Melburnians' experience. The kids I went to school with in the deep suburbs, their families shopped at Coles and drank instant coffee and ate at local take-away joints.

it seems like Brunswick St. has become a lot more bourgeois since I was there last (in mid-2012). I'm guessing that's the gentrification, emptying out the student squats and punk-rock sharehouses and replacing their scruffy inhabitants with well-to-do middle-aged professionals.

I think Brunswick St. has become more bourgie over the past, say, six years, but the neighborhood's punk and squat days were largely over decades ago. Once that happened, Brunswick Street went from hip to crummy, with lots of bad dated cafes and outlet stores (and a few exceptions, of course). When I lived in crappy student sharehouses in Collingwood around 2005 (almost all of Fitzroy was well-to-do middle-aged professionals by then), we usually only went to Brunswick St for late-night souvlaki. To my mind, more good eateries and bars started coming 2010ish, but it has all been much more yuppie and expensive than the street's boho days.
posted by retrograde at 9:05 PM on December 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


Good timing. I'm sitting in Brisbane airport waiting for my flight to Melbourne. I'm spending the Christmas break there with my husband's family.
posted by poxandplague at 9:47 PM on December 22, 2016


Interesting. Makes me wonder if the food culture reflected in Please Like Me makes it a quintessentially Melbourne show. Not just the episode titles but the constant cooking!
posted by Coaticass at 11:51 PM on December 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also the author sounds really quite homesick and I think she needs a hug. Or some vegemite.
posted by Coaticass at 11:53 PM on December 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Once that happened, Brunswick Street went from hip to crummy, with lots of bad dated cafes and outlet stores I

I dunno man, I feel like this can easily turn into an ourobourus of authenticity: "oh it was real when I ate there /lived there/was young."

Goodness Brunswick St was speedily gentrifying in the late nineties - and someone there ten years before that would have had a different experience, then again ten years before, as you allude to.

I bridle a little at this idea that neighborhoods lose authenticity. I feel like it reduces neighborhoods to trends, to be ignored once the "hot spot" has moved on.

Cities respire, they change and grow and shrink, areas get richer or poorer, etc. It doesn't mean the suburb has nothing to offer, more that the offerings change.

Regarding local takeaway joints in the burbs, springvale, Mt waverly, oakleigh and I'm sure a dozen others offer/ed a plethora of delicious international cuisine for local takeaway.

There's definitely some romanticising going on, but by the same token, denizens of the outer suburbs aren't stuck with luke warm chiko rolls and some international roast for repast
posted by smoke at 12:36 AM on December 23, 2016 [7 favorites]


True, smoke.

I haven't RTA but the thread has made me homesick for the Fitzroy I left at the end of the '80s. Cheap rent and good times, except for the day I left my umbrella behind at the Black Cat, after a leisurely bagel and coffee brunch. Truly the most beautiful umbrella I ever owned, a parting gift from a faithless lover. It was a rich blue, in ombre shades, dark to light. I still mourn.

I recently spent a few days with some friends in Windsor. Chapel St. has certainly lost some of its former gloss. Had good Yum Cha at a modest establishment, didn't note the name. And a fine breakfast at the Yellow Bird, well lunch really, but it was poached eggs. To perfection.
posted by valetta at 1:31 AM on December 23, 2016


I thought it was a great article and quite thoughtful.

My experience of Melbourne is very similar, minus the childhood experiences (I grew up in Adelaide). I'm glad the writer went to a few newer places - Pellegrini's coffee really isn't that great, but the lasagne and friendly service most definitely still is. Waiter's Restaurant - well you wouldn't ever go there just for the food (which is fine) but for the friendly welcoming atmosphere, the big glasses of wine, the ice cold butter, the backpacker-of-the-month service.

But yeah - more people just regard banh mi, yum cha, espresso, souvlakia as a part of their daily life and not some kind of exotic thing. That's a good thing. And it keeps changing - the current influx of mainland Chinese & Koreans is changing the city's eating habits quite significantly.
posted by awfurby at 1:33 AM on December 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh yeah - smoke's point is really good - this is not confined to the inner suburbs. Clayton, Springvale, Glen Waverley, Dandenong, Vermont South - there is great stuff happening everywhere.

And to the author's note about Ben Shewry - I've been to Attica and it was EXCELLENT.
posted by awfurby at 1:36 AM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Goodness Brunswick St was speedily gentrifying in the late nineties - and someone there ten years before that would have had a different experience, then again ten years before, as you allude to.

Apparently it was Paul Keating's “Recession We Had To Have” that saved it from turning into South Yarra North in the 1990s.

Now, my sources tell me, Footscray is where it's at. Is the air there still a toxic soup of pollution?
posted by acb at 1:44 AM on December 23, 2016


I dunno man, I feel like this can easily turn into an ourobourus of authenticity: "oh it was real when I ate there /lived there/was young."

Oh I'm not saying it was more or less authentic when I was there — just that there wasn't much interesting going on there in that period (food or otherwise). Anyway, my point was just that the yuppies moved into Fitzroy decades before Brunswick Street's most recent bourgie period so I'm not sure you can attribute those changes to their arrival and students' exodus.

Regarding local takeaway joints in the burbs, springvale, Mt waverly, oakleigh and I'm sure a dozen others offer/ed a plethora of delicious international cuisine for local takeaway.

Certainly (depending on the suburb; there wasn't a lot going on in the north-eastern burbs when I was a teen), my point was more that this vision of Melbourne as this place where haggling for bananas at open air markets and spending long afternoons over handmade pasta and flat whites at quirky cafes and teenagers throwing dinner parties is the norm is reflective of a certain place and privilege.
posted by retrograde at 1:45 AM on December 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


Vermont South - there is great stuff happening everywhere.

They shoot the exteriors of Neighbours there, for example. Coachloads of British backpackers go every day to see the house.
posted by acb at 1:46 AM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Apparently it was Paul Keating's “Recession We Had To Have” that saved it from turning into South Yarra North in the 1990s.

Now, my sources tell me, Footscray is where it's at. Is the air there still a toxic soup of pollution?


I lived in Fitzroy through the 90s and Footscray through the 00s, and yeah, Fitzroy was grungy with the pubs etc then ($70 a room in a share house), but Footscray is absolutely far more "authentic" with cheap Viet and ethiopian etc, and still quite grimy and polluted with the trains.
posted by wilful at 2:10 AM on December 23, 2016


Footscray is absolutely far more "authentic" with cheap Viet and ethiopian etc, and still quite grimy and polluted with the trains.

My abiding memory of the area is being sick on a train somewhere near West Footscray on a school excursion; I think the soupy air had something to do with it.
posted by acb at 2:29 AM on December 23, 2016


Sure, so Fitzroy has gentrified a lot but so have I, so I can't really complain :-) There's still some live music around, admittedly not quite as many sticky carpet rock pubs as there were back in my day but always something going on and maybe I just don't know where to look any more.

The immigration = restaurants thing is umm, well, okay so you can look at it one way and it is kind of crypto-racist integrationism, but on the other hand it's hard to be *actually* racist with a full belly so overall I think it's been a force for good.

The North-East suburbs ... sigh ... well, "the future is here it's just not evenly distributed".
posted by nickzoic at 3:52 AM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


The North-East suburbs ... sigh ... well, "the future is here it's just not evenly distributed".

Bell St. in Coburg is sometimes referred to as the Hipster-Proof Fence.

Chances are it'll fall and the fence will be pushed northward, much as the virtual Yarra that divided the designer-label materialistic south from the “authentic”, grungy north* is now somewhere in Northcote/Brunswick.

* The Lucksmiths' “Transpontine” is perhaps the definitive take on the north/south-of-the-Yarra dichotomy, at least in pop-song form.
posted by acb at 4:35 AM on December 23, 2016


I saw a bearded guy ride a fixie across Bell St the other day, so it is crumbling already.

ReservOR is slowly transforming into ReservWAH and before we know it you'll be able to get a decent Flat White anywhere from Coburg to Diamond Creek ...
posted by nickzoic at 5:06 AM on December 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


One of my closest friends has moved to Melbourne and tells me all the time about the wonderful food available there. I keep waiting for the fortnights when I haven't spent all my money on groceries and power bills so I can save up for a plane ticket to go to Melbourne and see her and her husband. Of course, I also have to save up to pay my share for all the amazing food that I want to eat there. Of course this article comes from a place of privilege. Of course there's ridiculous amounts of racism in Australia. Nevertheless, there's something so alluring about a place that seems dedicated to food as life, food from everywhere.

I romanticize everything. I come from Ipswich, of course this seems wonderful to me.
posted by h00py at 7:28 AM on December 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


and it was just this perfect example of how Melbourne just got cultural integration in a way that neither Vancouver nor San Francisco ever did.

It's funny how Vancouver has all of this great cuisine, but the dominant white/Anglo population doesn't ever realize it. Sure, you can buy $5 vegan donuts at Cartems, and the bearded, plaid-wearing waiters at Pourhouse try to dissuade you from the complementary water as you peruse the menu ("Would you like some tapwater? We also have bottled water available for purchase), but the food is bland, and the West Coast salmon is likely farmed. When I had an expense account, most people preferred to go to CinCin, essentially an upscale spaghetti restaurant.

Go over the Arthur Laing Bridge, and it's a different world. I'm not even sure if there is a Milestone's or a Keg Steakhouse in Richmond. But the food is fantastic. "But people can't drive in Richmond" is the number-one thing you'll hear about that Asian town.
posted by My Dad at 7:38 AM on December 23, 2016


The immigration = restaurants thing is umm, well, okay so you can look at it one way and it is kind of crypto-racist integrationism

Yeah, it seems very fashionable at the moment to call people out on this. The point is that diverse migrant communities aren't just here to make you nice food; there is inherent value in people beyond their yummy cooking. But people who get all holier-than-thou and call people crypto-racists because they happen to mention that their city has great Ethiopian food, well, maybe they're just intolerable bores who no one wants to sit down and share a meal with. No one is being silenced, here. No one is being oppressed. It's not cultural appropriation when someone starts a restaurant and sells their own food.

But yes, Melbourne is a joy.
posted by Jimbob at 12:02 PM on December 23, 2016 [9 favorites]


I come from Ipswich

If you can romanticise Ipswich, I doff my hat to you!
posted by smoke at 3:02 PM on December 23, 2016


Denmark Hill in Ipswich is lovely. Now you're making me want to defend the place, it's not all Hanson central you know! (Okay, a lot of it is). Up until the last 5 years or so there was nowhere decent to eat here but there's been a food renaissance happening which is great but just makes me yearn for Melbourne all the more.
posted by h00py at 3:20 PM on December 23, 2016


Has the Vietnamese pork roll made its way to American shores yet?

I can attest that banh mi have made it to Boston, at least.

It wasn't quite Marrickville, but still good.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:31 PM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Favourited that comment so hard Jimbob.
posted by wilful at 4:03 PM on December 23, 2016


I'll tell you what I miss from Melbourne, a parma and a pint of Draught.
posted by Joe Chip at 7:21 PM on December 23, 2016


First, I have to say that Australia is racist. I was born and raised here, and it is incredibly racist. Even in Melbourne. Especially towards Muslims and people from African descent. (In Melbourne, the racism towards Indigenous Australians seems to be a little less solely because there aren't many Indigenous people here).

The food is fantastic. The food doesn't negate any of the racism. I don't live in any of the food hotspots but I can still be guaranteed of eating well.
posted by daybeforetheday at 8:09 PM on December 23, 2016


Australia's food culture is way beyond Melbourne... just drove up the pacific highway and had some excellent coffee in some very small towns, and a delicious and completely inauthentic take on the burrito for dinner last night (halloumi, zucchini and eggplant - is that getting made anywhere else but Australia?)

I love going to Melbourne but there's a lot of creativity and flavour to be found in our smaller cities and towns as well.
posted by chiquitita at 8:27 PM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Now that I've had time to rtfa, and as an American transplant to Sydney who has done a few weekend getaways in Melbourne, where food experiences rate highly, I can say that Melbourne really does have something special (although the hipsterism may now be approaching Williamsburg-like farce). What stands out for me is that Melbourne has so many wonderful markets! In quantity and quality that Sydney oddly lacks. In quantity and quality that most American cities also lack.

When we first moved to Sydney, my then-boss described Australian cuisine as "Mediter-Asian", and that is a perfectly apt description of the wonderful blending of food styles that we discovered. We even kept a food blog for our first couple of years in Australia, just to capture all our new taste adventures for the folks back home.

I have high admiration for food integration in mainstream Australian culture. Having said that, this article does smack of nostalgia for the writer's idealised past and the writer is only just beginning to "see" the emergence of certain immigrant foods in the US. I think she just hasn't been in the right places, or living in the right neighbourhoods, or living in the right mindset of discovery. What you get in the US is a lot more regional difference, and many communities where certain "ethnic" influences have been more dominant or historical than others, say Mexican in the Southwest or Polish in Pittsburgh, or Scandinavian in Minneapolis. And of course, corporate food culture in the US tends to overshadow everything else in a way that doesn't exist in Australia.

I think this piece gives short shrift to the foodways of many American cities by insisting that the "food revolution" is something that is only as recent as the last decade. Perhaps the popular culture regard of "ethnic" foods has grown in this time, but I'd argue that it's been there for much longer than that. Growing up in Milwaukee in the 70's and Tampa in the 80's, I can attest that there was never a shortage in these mid-sized cities of a wide array of immigrant foods and influences that were enthusiastically absorbed into the local culture. Our school lunches included lots of Cuban recipes, for example, as well as grits and collards. The difference might be that immigrants were cooking for their own communities more than for acceptance by a wider general public.

I once read an article, in the context of Chinese cuisine, about a concept called Meiguorende kouwei — food cooked “to American taste", as opposed to Zhongguorende kouwei, food cooked “to Chinese taste." What I think is interesting is the cultural blending that takes place in cities is the different ways of integrating immigrant with local cuisine. In the Australian capital cities, this has been done particularly well, and tends to respect more of the zhonggorende kouwei approach. (But perhaps this had a lot to do with the fact the the food culture that preceded it—British influenced meat and potatoes—was crying out for change.) I'd argue that due to immigration, the US spent a good part of the 19th century absorbing various European food norms—to the extent that they now just pass for "American". What's been exciting since the 70's is more incorporation of non-European foods.

Solarion asked upthread if the Vietnamese pork roll had made it to the US yet. Americans call it a banh mi, and it has indeed been available in the US for as long as Australians have had their pork roll. In fact, I think I prefer the US version, which tends to have a generous squirt of hoisin and sriracha. But the real thing that makes or breaks the roll is the bread, and examples from both countries frequently fail on this count. But I digress.

I'm glad to see Melbourne get some press and recognition for what it does well. But this writer's accolades might be a bit overly-sentimental and overly-reliant on setting her thesis up as a polarity. However, I am fascinated with the relationship between migration patterns and food cultures. That would be a very interesting series of articles to write.
posted by amusebuche at 11:33 AM on December 25, 2016


the different ways of integrating immigrant with local cuisine

Speaking of which, there was a cute period in the history of Zhongguo vs Aodaliya ren de kouwei, when Chinese restaurants of the old school variety in country towns and suburbs were considered rather exotic, with their sweet-n-sour pork, mongolian lamb or beef-in-black-bean, so the menus would typically have "Chinese food" on one side, and "Australian food" on the other.

The "Australian food" was like:
- steak with fried egg and chips
- lamb chops with fried egg and chips
- sausages with fried egg and chips
- liver with fried egg and chips

Served with white sliced bread, margarine and weak tea of course.
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:12 PM on December 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ha ha, Ubu. I'm visiting my folks in the US now, and saw a listing for a local Taiwanese restaurant that has both a Taiwanese menu and a pizza and salad menu. It is possible to order a "General Tso's pizza". I'm slightly tempted.
posted by amusebuche at 12:27 PM on December 25, 2016


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