YORK
Café Wine Bar
Cnr York & Cecil Sts
Sth Melbourne
03 9690 3262

It was an innocent question –despite the ever-present but stupid internecine rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. Which city started pub dining?

Not the counter lunch of roast lamb and vegies or pork sausages and mash. That started in Sydney in the early 1960s. Then they tried to go a bit up market with Chicken in a Basket and Chicken Maryland or a fried seafood basket of fish and prawn cutlets. Then came the pub bistro.

But which city started the real restaurant in a pub culture? Melbourne surely started the quality restaurant-in-an-old-mansion dining. Places like Stephanie’s in Hawthorn, Gowing’s in East Melbourne, Jacques Raymond in Windsor and Willows on St. Kilda Road.

And I’d give Melbourne the gong for turning old pubs into great restaurants –starting with O’Connell’s in South Melbourne in the late 1980s. Now there are some great ones like the Station Hotel in Footscray.

A new one has joined the scene – again in South Melbourne. The York, next to the South Melbourne market, calls itself a café wine bar but that’s under-selling it. Maybe that was the original concept but although the bar is an imposing one the real drinking area is outside under the umbrellas and soon that is to be glassed in.

Inside there’s a warm ‘antiquey’ feeling. Classy, innovative, food and top service.  The chef, Luke Morris, produces some top of the range dishes and not at top of the range prices. Which is increasingly important as the global financial crisis laps at our shores.

Generous entrées are around fifteen bucks. Pasta dishes at $20 and mains around thirty. These are pub prices for silver service dishes.

You won’t get a better veloute, as a between course taster, than the creamy cauliflower or asparagus version they serve up here.

They stumped me with one dish – a seafood offering I had never heard of. Duckfish. What the hell is duckfish?

I found out there is an Australian duckfish -- not to be confused with the American version which is found only in the Mississippi River. That one is named after a Robert Duckman who first discovered it in 1849. It is known as the fishermen’s curse because ‘it’s the first to eat your bait and always thrown back because of its terrible taste’.

The Aussie version (real name pentaceropsis recurvirostris) is only found for a few months off the Victorian coast. It’s a pearly white delicate fish and I loved it.

Still in a seafood mood (as always, it seems these days) I couldn’t start without half a dozen Coffin Bay oysters and a salmon ceviche with pickled cucumber, fresh dill and avocado.

Mrs. Nosebag has a current love affair with beetroot –a vastly underrated, old-fashioned vegie. It’s popping up increasingly on good restaurant menus. At the York roasted beetroot is served with pancetta, rocket lettuce, goat’s cheese and balsamic vinegar. Good combination.

Her pater (speaking of old-fashioned) is a carnivore. Plenty to choose from on this menu: char-grilled Angus rump, porterhouse or Scotch fillet with various sauces like mushroom, red wine, green peppercorns or French butter.

He always goes for the ‘red wine braised ox cheek, baked suet dumplings and winter greens’.  First time he had it, he declared it ‘the best meal I’ve had in Melbourne in a year’ which is a pretty big call when you consider he dines out twice a week.

They have a good, and generous, selection of cheeses with quince paste, walnuts and dried fruit. And if you are really, really lucky, and know the secret sign, you might just enveigle the chef to part with home-made chocolate balls dusted in cocoa. 

As my Dad would say: The York is corker.

December 6, 2008