Broadsheet restaurant turns reviews into reality – review
Bringing dishes and drinks from Melbourne’s top bars and restaurants under one roof is a canny move for Broadsheet, despite the hipster overtones.
The whole baked flathead is a creation from the Town Mouse. (Photograph: Brook James)
The comedian Frankie Boyle summed it up when he said: “Think about how confusing life is when you go to restaurants in abandoned swimming pools; nightclubs in shipping containers; have food served on miniature bookshelves and drinks poured from watering cans into jam jars.”
Our guide in these confusing times (well, since 2009) has been Broadsheet. Online and in print, it chronicles the new places to eat in Sydney and Melbourne – what’s worth queueing for, blogging about and Instagramming.
Therefore the Broadsheet restaurant is all a bit meta. After chronicling food and drink trends, it has now become the destination. It’s as if Vogue started its own clothing label or Conde Nast Traveller opened a resort.
Reviewing the restaurant for Three Thousands, Sam West wrote: “Broadsheet, I salute you. You’ve finally clocked it. You dreamed the pages of your publication into a physical reality – a living trophy room for the art, design and culinary experiences you deem to be in good, proper taste.”
So while Broadsheet operates as a restaurant, it’s also a platform for the chefs and restaurants involved, and for the Broadsheet brand.
Chefs at Broadsheet recreate lunch and dinner dishes from Melbourne favourites: Top Paddock, The Kettle Black, Auction Rooms, Tivoli Road Bakery, Five Points Deli, The Grain Store, Coda, Tonka, Añada, The Town Mouse, The Estelle Becomes Two, Huxtable, Pierre Roelofs, Philippa Sibley, Monsieur Truffe andPidapipo.
The Everleigh is helping with drinks (we had bottled negronis and martinis), Small Batch is doing coffee, and the wine has been selected by Sally Humble, ofLûmé. It’s all SO HOT RIGHT NOW that it’s surprising the fire brigade isn’t on stand-by. And that’s just the food ... Everything from the art on the walls to the chair you sit on, the indoor plants, the crockery, is “curated” and supplied by designers who Broadsheet says “represent the best of Melbourne”.
Ten years ago, Upper Gertrude Street in Fitzroy had little more than a garment warehouse, a creperie and a basic sandwich shop. But around 2008 other things started appearing: a couple of small bars, a craft shop that yarn-bombed the nearby trees, a furniture store that sold scrubbed-up old abacuses for hundreds of dollars. And then, in 2009, Cutler and Co.
Bang. It started a new way of eating: high-end food in a casual/industrial space, with waiters decked out in denim butcher’s aprons and Blundstone boots rather than white-tie.
The Fitzroy food chain now goes something like this: you have a few uneventful decades as something boring but utilitarian (say, a hardware store) before you become a pop-up restaurant (briefly) while the DA gets sorted to turn the space into high-end apartments.
Just down from The Everleigh (described by Time Out as “the home of the cocktail elite”) and Belle’s Hot Chicken (“Retro-chic diner plating up fried chicken and slaw in southern US style, plus music on vinyl”), Broadsheet’s restaurant at 166 Gertrude is at the pop-up stage of its life cycle. In August the restaurant will close and the space will morph into apartments.
What’s it like to eat there?
For a start, popular. We are four, and as we’re shown to our table the waiter says, “It’s really hard, having to tell people it’s a two-hour wait.”
The restaurant is a large, concretey space with the kind of exposed beams you might find in a ski chalet. There are all the usual tropes for self-consciously cool cafes: hanging plants, blond-wood furniture and Aesop products in the bathroom. On the back of the loo doors are posters advertising the residential development that the restaurant will soon become.
The nicest surprise is the welcome cocktails. They’re only $10 each, and delicious. Considering the price is half what you would pay in comparable bars and restaurants, we order several. The best includes the Frida Frizz, which is like a subtle margarita, made of coriander- and orange peel-infused tequila, with Aperol, pale ale and fresh lime. Also delicious is the Transatlantic Review, a bracing drink for those who want to stay up late: cold drip-infused coffee infused with Bulleit rye whisky, sweet vermouth and Campari.
Beside each dish on the menu is the name of the restaurant where it was created (chefs at Broadsheet learn how to cook the dish from its makers). From the Town Mouse we opted to share a whole baked flathead with clams, green olives and basil ($44), which fell off the bone and was juicy and tender although unevenly cooked in parts (and we did have problems locating any clams). The brussels sprouts with soured buttermilk, mint and parmesan ($11) were the best I’ve ever eaten – the crispy texture and lashings of sharp cheese making palatable a dish I’ve traditionally been wary of.
From Coda, the roasted yellow duck curry with jasmine rice ($32) was rich, but not too oily. The serving wasn’t huge but enough for the four of us to get a few mouthfuls each. Long after the duck was gone, the sauce was rich and tasty enough to drizzle on the rice and enjoy. My favourite dish was a subtle, tangy vegetable curry that used a variety of beautifully cooked ingredients, with contrasting textures. Tonka’s Golden Maharajah ($28) skilfully combines tandoori cauliflower, pumpkin and crispy egg.
The macaroni ($16) from Huxtable is a winner. It’s hard to lose on mac and cheese at the best of times but this smoky number, with sweetcorn, smoked mozzarella and chipotle is like sitting in front of a cosy fire while vaping.
Broadsheet restaurant is the culmination of everything that has defined Gertrude Street, and for that reason alone certain to be insanely popular during its short lifespan.
The fact the food is delicious and the drinks are great is great news. Otherwise this restaurant would collapse under its own good taste.
Source: The Guardian, Brigid Delaney, June 25th 2015
