Saint Crispin, Melbourne
Following the revamping of Gertrude Street from industrial no-go zone to one of Melbourne’s most talked-about retail and restaurant precincts, its neighbour Smith Street has been the latest to receive the fancifying treatment. Ten years ago, when I was first in Melbourne, this was a distinctly “edgy” street, among whose principle claim to fame was as home of a notorious supermarket you would simply never go into (and not because the stock was second-rate). Nowadays, Smith Street is home to those most recognisable signifiers of prosperous urban Melbourne: numerous restaurants and bars and, perhaps most tellingly, a boutique ice cream store whose queues go round the block.
Also up here is Saint Crispin, a collaborative effort between two Melbourne chefs who trained under Phil Howard at The Square in London, and which opened in 2013, bringing Mod Oz to the top end of Smith Street.
The menu is concise and straightforward. You can choose a two- or three-course prix fixe menu, each well-priced (this is a wealthy city, and prices for mid to high end restaurants have been skyrocketing for years), or a chef’s tasting menu. There are four options for each course. You might start with heirloom tomatoes and burrata in a dribble of green olive gazpacho, or a highly detailed dish of wagyu bresaola with hay ash, shallots and egg yolk (and, lurking beneath the layer of cured beef, so my server tells me, “a cheeky spoonful of tartare”). Among the choices for mains are a perfectly cooked fillet of barramundi with quinoa, eggplant “caviar”, and a sea urchin sauce – something I’d never seen done before, and which added a healthy fishiness to the barramundi, a blandish white fish which takes well to stronger flavours – and a dish of sliced pork belly with root vegetables, noticeably Chinese-influenced.
All are groovy (Melbourne does Elegant Older Ladies Who Lunch like no other city), and all are noticeably dressed up – except for me. I turn up wearing a t-shirt and wished I’d thought to bring a change of clothes
Portions are sizeable; the three-course option is perhaps better suited to dinner than the lunch I had (it came with exciting amuses-bouches too: chickpea cubes with lime cream, and a hibiscus marshmallow with a dusting of chocolate, which tasted like nothing so much as chocolate milk). My companion and I, unwilling to admit total defeat, shared a dessert of white chocolate panna cotta, local Yarra Valley berries, cubes and pearls of fruit jelly, and foam of scorched hay. Hay appears a couple of times on this menu; I’ve had dishes presented to me in a nest of the stuff before (and I’ve witnessed a luckless waiter at Pierre Gagnaire in Paris scrabble to pick stray strands of the stuff off a carpet using only two spoons), but I’m not sure I’ve ever consumed it; on its own this foam has a distinctive, subtle and somewhat odd flavour – it tastes, unsurprisingly, rather like sun-dried straw smells, that is, not quite like food – but mixed in with the chocolate and the fruits it’s lost entirely. The effect of mixing all this together is that it tastes and has the mouthfeel of an exceptionally luxuriant trifle – to my mind, a Very Good Thing.
As with the better-known restaurants in Gertrude Street, the diners here fall roughly 60-40 between an older, well-heeled crowd, and some twenty-something folk trying out the New Big Thing. All are groovy (Melbourne does Elegant Older Ladies Who Lunch like no other city), and all are noticeably dressed up – except for me. I turn up wearing a t-shirt and wished I’d thought to bring a change of clothes. The décor is all raw walls and swirled, artfully is-it-finished plaster; in addition to tables along one long wall, there is a bar with high stools to sit at, adjacent to the open kitchen, and, in the “bay” windows either side of the front door, two little areas that can accommodate larger parties.
It remains to be seen whether Melbourne is reaching saturation point when it comes to restaurants like this: the presentation of the food is outstanding, the flavours are great, the room is pleasing, the service exceptional, and the open kitchen operates seemingly on unwavering bonhomie (this always makes me picture a below-decks where the less personable of the brigade can cuss and bang pots around). But several times during my most recent visit, I was told that eateries now outnumber retail businesses here – and you worry that the extremely high standards on show at great numbers of these places aren’t, nonetheless, going to stop there being some surprising and disappointing closures when, inevitably, the powerhouse Australian economy starts to shrink.
One very minor gripe: while the food prices are extremely reasonable, I baulked when I saw that a medium-sized bottle of mineral water had cost $9. In fairness, we were asked at the outset whether we’d prefer mineral or tap – but after racking my brain, I think this remains the most expensive water I’ve ever bought. C
Saint Crispin, 300 Smith Street, Collingwood, Melbourne
+61 3 9419 2202; saintcrispin.com.au
Neil Stewart is the Arts Editor of Civilian and the author of The Glasgow Coma Scale, published by Corsair, summer 2014