Provenance (Beechworth) 01/2019

The entrance to this highly regarded regional restaurant, which has featured in the AGFG for almost a decade, and is currently rated 30th by Gourmet Magazine in Australia's top 100 restaurant, is through an impressive very large wooden door down the side of this former bank building.

Spread over a number of rooms it retains something of the grandeur of the original building with  a combination of wide square doorways,

20 ft ceilings, with rosettes 

and large arched windows.

 Table are bare with simple settings.
The chef offers á la carte or a tasting menu. $125 for six courses with some extras available. Matched wines add $75 or $125 for premium wines. They have an extensive wine list with a good range of sake which fits their Japanese influenced menu.
I was pleased to see a glossary of sake terms included in the wine menu.

The wine menu is extensive with some concentration on the region but I elected to have sake which was beautifully presented.

 A very much to my taste house made sourdough bread was served early with a cold smoked creamed butter. If you like that sort of thing this was out of this world. My mouth waters thinking of it.

 I skipped the optional starter of home made silken tofu dish with cucumber, ginger and kiriboshi but added a garfish with its grilled bones.

 Just a mouth full, full of taste and crunch.
First course was slow cooked carrots, lavender infused buttermilk, pumpkin seed crumble, pumpkin seed oil.

 The carrots were firm, the pumpkin seeds crunchy but it was hard to distinguish the lavender flavour.
Sashimi, ponzu, wasabi leaf pickle, cold pressed sunflower oil followed.

 The kingfish was as it always is with an interesting contrast with the citrus tasting sauce and the sweetish pickles.
Smoked wallaby tartar, Japanese fish sauce and egg yolk dressing, cured mullet roe

was a benign sort of dish, pleasant and inoffensive as long as you find raw meat to your taste. It was well balances so nothing dominated.
 Free range duck, beetroot, pickled cherry (which had then been dehydrated), umeboshi

was another very appealing dish however a small fly managed to get into the sauce. I moved it to the side of the plate and called the waiter. He quickly removed it and offered to replate the dish. I said it was Ok so he didn't do anything more. I believe that, in any quality establishment that would have been unacceptable and the dish would have been removed without allowing the customer to continue with it.
Tri Tip, silverbeet, Café de Tokyo butter, presumably the chef's joke, a variation on Café de Paris butter

 

was exceptionally tasty although it had quite a lot of gristle in the meat.

I skipped the optional cheese dish and went on to dessert.
Leaves from the garden, raspberries on a cream base behind sheets of meringue.

 A pleasant dessert.
This was another of those unique meals. I suppose in a way every meal is unique but some are more so. As such the are hard to compare to other unique meals. The dishes were very interesting. They were not over the top with a myriad of ingredients. The hero of each dish was made more interesting by its accompaniments, never dominated by them. I very much doubt, as good as it was, that it belongs in the top 100 restaurants in Australia but it certainly is a very good restaurant.

Score: 17.25 /20

Doot Doot Doot (Merricks North - Mornington Peninsula) 01/2018

 This contemporary Australian restaurant is part of the Jackalope hotel, described in it's blurb as a "delicate interplay between the ideal and the surreal, delivered through boldly curated installations and collaborations with some of the world's principal designers." It is something quite special which is why they can charge $650 + per night. That does include breakfast!

They have two restaurants, The Rare Hare, a wine bar shared plate venue and Doot Doot Doot which is upmarket dining. 

This continues the designer theme with a 10,000 globe chandelier which represents fermenting fluid,  you can almost feel the bubbles,

only upside down. 

It took a week to put the globes in and only a small proportion of them are alight at any one time. They brighten and dim to add to that bubbllng atmosphere. It's hard to capture this with a small camera but a look at their web site will show something of its magnificence

 It is a dark space otherwise with contemporary black furniture and some tables barely large enough for two plates.

The menu here changes so often, every few days they tell us, that it's not worth expanding too much on particular dishes. It's a six course set menu with extras, oysters, cheese plate, if you like. You can have matched wines, or juices.

We started with Port Douglas oysters ($5) which were as good as they get, exceptionally tasty.

Vegetables 3.0

Not much to see but they tasted good

They go in for unintelligible , or at least incomprehendible, descriptions of the wines with these dishes

A Tasmanian treasure blending three unlikely grapes.

Spanner  Crab, Potato, Furikake, 

I got no instructions about eating the rather hardy leaf so I didn't try but the rest of it was a go to dish.

Bottatarga - Japanese grapes? A treat from high up in the mountains.

Evidently they have been growing grapes in Japan for centuries, and making wine. Duck, Strawberry, Rye

Cloudy rose wine from the border of Hungary and Austria

The last wine this legend made, his son is carrying on the family business.

The menu gave us a choice.

Beef XO

Barramundi, Pickles, Vermouthor

Sandra chose the fish - I should have too.

A serve of cheese.

Followed by a surprise, sweet as sugar black plum with an almond  (amoretto) filling.

And then dessert. 

Chocolate Cherries

And a classic Mclaren Vale Aussie blend.

A 10 year old Madeira which I enjoyed, but Sandra did not so they kindly gave her a Vouvray.

They do have an extremely interesting wine menu, prettily presented,

and it is not excessively marked up compared to some of their neighbours. They are also generous with the matched wines giving about 120 ml for each serve.

Comments A very sophisticated meal in a very sophisticated setting. Zalto glassware, the best you can get, and Leon cutlery all add to the total experience.

Score:17.5/20

Point Leo Restaurant, (Point Leo Estate - Merricks) 01/2018

When someone spends $50 million on a sculpture park, an winery and an architect designed modern restaurant and then engages a bevy of chefs with pedigrees that include Rockpool in Sydney, Attica in Melbourne and other excellent restaurants you must expect something pretty special. That is what John Gandel, of shopping centre fame, has done at Point Leo Estate, some 85 Km out of Melbourne.
From the outside the place is gorgeous with a stunning entrance leading into an attractive 110 seat restaurant. 
After passing reception, and an impressive sculpture, (This pic is from their website), 

seating is arranged around a curved venue with floor to ceiling glass walls looking out over a sculpture garden featuring over 50 works by modern Australian and International artists.

The room itself is attractive 

although the bare wood tables do not suggest fine dining. At present it is also very popular so it's always crowded and noisy. 
We started with a Goat cheese tart ($19). The menu is set out as "To Start" basically small dishes from $5 to $9.5, "Entrees"  $19 "Pasta" (only one) $26 Mains" $36 to $49 and "Sides" $9 to $15.
This was very mild and  rather characterless.

We followed this sharing the pasta dish.

 This looked a bit meagre. Three small smoked Flinders mussels for each of us on a bed of hand cut al dente linguini. There was so little sauce that the spoon provided proved totally unnecessary. There was a lemony tasting succulent in the dish which did not appeal to me but Sandra loved the whole dish. She felt the thick sauce enriched the dish.
Our next course, Tempura whiting with eggplant, smoked fennel and cashews. ($36)

was a very good size serve. The batter was excellent though it still had a lot of fat in it. The smoked fennel was a nice addition though the smoke was not obvious to me. What made it really good was the combination of the fish with the eggplant which almost melted in the mouth and cut down the fat in the batter.
The side of shoe string chips ($9) 

came with no mayo, aioli or tomato sauce. When requested it took so long to come it was barely needed.
Our last course, pork belly with glace citrus and nettle gremolata, ($37)

was another extremely good dish, imaginative and technically excellent. The small squares of glace citrus was brilliant - looked good, tasted good and blended well with the pork. A great advance on apple sauce. Although I got little taste from the nettles the gremolata garnish it did help keep the dish more moist and palatable.
A glass of 2016 Point Leo Shiraz was extravagantly expensive at $18. Twelve dollars would have been reasonable.
We were too full for cheese or desserts.
On the negative side it's noisy +, it's expensive and the service is slow and the tables reminiscent of a cafeteria. On the positive side the cutlery and glassware are excellent, the food is very interesting, locally sourced, super fresh, cooked with imagination, in unusual combinations and nicely presented combined. Lastly, service was very friendly.
Score: 15/20
For more information about the sculptures go to the Pt. Leo Sculpture app.

Vue de Monde Another View (Melbourne CBD) 11/2017

Of course I'm biased but so is everyone else. That gastronomic bible of culinary standards, The Age Good Food Guide, demoted VdM from three to two hats in their latest (2018) edition. How the mighty have fallen, or have they. 
As readers would know, in the past, I have had almost endless admiration for what Shannon has done for restaurant cooking in Australia. See http://1001dinners.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/vue-de-monde-melbourne-cbd-052015.html
https://1001dinners.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/vue-de-monde-melbourne-cbd-nye-2014.html and
http://1001dinners.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/vue-de-monde-melbourne-1109.html and many reviews between all these.
Through his restaurants, but particularly VdM he has been at the forefront of modern trends in cooking. Furthermore he has done it with style. He has trained chefs who, working with and for him, have continued to innovate in the tradition of local, fresh, organic foods. He is environmentally conscious - the water bottles 

and glasses

are made from used wine, and other bottles.

The glassware for wine is superb and enhances the pleasure of its contents. Has it all slipped down hill while competitors have improved so much that he has been left behind? We had to come back to see for ourselves.
The venue is superb. Wait staff are abundant, and unfailingly courteous and helpful and service is well paced. We were fortunate to have the Chef's table, with a clear view of the team plating dishes, 

and as usual, chose the Chef's Tasting Menu.
It began with an eggplant with eucalyptus, wattle seed pollen dip 

and emu jerky. 

The girls preferred not to eat emu and were offered salt and vinegar chips.
The presentation was attractive for this gentle start to the meal.
Raw Flinders Island lamb with spring peas, finger lime and lemon myrtle came next.

For whatever reason one doesn't think of serving up raw lamb. This was totally delicious.
Paperback smoked green asparagus from Jonella farm with seaweed and

Rusty wire oyster and salted riberries 

was a great way to enjoy oysters.
Port Philip Bay scallops with blue lip mussels, spring shoots and flowers showed these mussels at their very best.

Full of taste with none of the toughness I normally associate with them, in  a taste of the sea soupy sauce, and who doesn't love scallops.
Schultz dairy milk curd with broad beans, rosella flowers and lilly (sic) pilies.

This was a rather plain vegetarian dish, beautifully presented but, for me, without much character.
Mudcrab with pickled kohlrabi, marigold and squid ink and tarragon emulsion.

This comes in the form of a sea food sausage on a BBQ so you can make your own sea food hot dog. Back on track. I'm impressed with what Chef Justin James has done with kohlrabi, including his kohlrabi fettucini.
Damper but not damper.

Bread is dangerous. It's so moorish that I have to be careful not to eat too much of it so as to be able to enjoy the meal. This flat bread and a slightly sweet bread wrapped around a stick, presented on a bed of coals, reminiscent of a boy scout campfire,  was an innovative change and not too filling.
Kingfish with smoked koji, sea herbs and dessert lime.

One of my favourite fish, raw or cooked it did not disappoint.
One of VdM's signature palate rejuvenators followed. Davidson plum sorbet with celery and apple which was frozen with liquid nitrogen at the table and crushed with a wooden pestle before the sorbet was added.
 Leatherwood honey aged duck with cabbage and muntari beans

was absolutely superb.
David Blackmore's grade nine ribeye with buttermilk, horseradish and fermented truffles

was another superlative dish although I didn't feel the truffles added much to it.
As always they have a great trolley of cheese.

before the sweet dishes.
Two flavours of marshmellows roasted at the table was a bit of fun 

before their invariably perfect chocolate souffle.

Mango with ginger sorbet and finger lime.

looked good but was disappointing because the mango was not quite ripe.
I was offered a replacement but had really had enough to eat by now.
The final offering was Lamingtons/Gumnuts/Watermelon and Four Pillars Gin.

This was far from an alcohol free meal.
Someone mentioned that it was our anniversary 

and we were given a very nice bottle of champagne at the start of the meal.

After that we enjoyed a 2015 Bindi VdM (Pinot Noir) Macedon Ranges,
a 2012 Ngeringa Atlas (Voignier), Adelaide Hills,
a 2016 Massolino (Moscato), Moscto d'Asti and a 
1999 Chateau Suduirant 1er Cru (Semillon/Sauvignon Blanc) Sauterne.
My nephew 

and his wife 

took us to this meal and they thoroughly enjoyed it too.
This was not the best meal I have eaten, even some of our meals here have been distinctly superior, as some of the references above to reviews going back to 2009 show, soon after we started this blog, but it was an extremely good meal in a great venue with excellent service, certainly in the top rank of Melbourne restaurants. Does it deserve to be demoted by The Age Good Food Guide?  I don't think so.
Sometimes you can be too successful.
Score: 17.25/20