On Friday night I headed to the beautiful Royal Exhibition Building for the annual 'Taste of Melbourne' event. I have been meaning to go every year and a special deal on tickets meant that 2011 was the year.
So it is set up like any typical food and wine festival or conference or exhibition where there is a whole raft of stalls with goodies to sample. The currency of the day is a 'crown' and you pre-purchase crowns which you then exchange for food or drink...
Our strategy, amongst our group of four, was to each buy a dish using crowns and we should share. The rest would be used to buy drinks or whatever.... After stopping at the NZ wine stall, we headed off to make our decision.
First stop, St Katherines which is the latest restaurant venture for The Press Club's George Colambaris and Shane Delia. The two dishes we sampled were the 'KFC - St Katherines fried Lilydale chicken with BBQ sauce' and the Turkish lamb dumplings with garlic yoghurt, sumac and dried fruit. While the dumplings were yummy (a tad overpowered in terms of meat to dumpling ratio) the KFC was exceptional!
Next stop was Tobie Puttock's The Kitchen Cat (Tobie worked with Jamie Oliver at Melbourne's Fifteen restaurant) to sample some Pasta Frolla with mozzarella, black olives, oregano, salami and olive oil. Expecting a pasta dish, we were all surprised when this came out looking more like the top layer of a lasagne, or a pizza even.
By this point the crowds were maddening and it was becoming more and more difficult to move around the stalls. We pushed through to sample delicious cheeses from Yarra Valley Dairy, some exceptional olive oils and balsamic vinegars, and some AMAZING mozzarella from La Latteria (a mozzarella laboratory on Elgin Street) before deciding it was time to head out and have our 'real dinner'! For that we headed to Ladro on Gertrude Street and it was exactly what we felt like. A warm, quiet courtyard to aid good conversation together with some yummy pizzas and great Tasmanian sauvignon blanc. Belissimo!
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| The view from the Gallery (first floor) |
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