Café La
Hotel Sofitel
25 Collins Street
Melbourne, VIC
03 9653 0000

This is going to sound harsh and uncouth but you never eat in your hotel restaurant unless it is pissing with rain or you can’t be stuffed going anywhere else.

There have been famous exceptions in the past. Back in the 1970s and 80s the San Francisco Grill at the Sydney Hilton was a great eatery with red leather banquettes and silver service. The Clivedon Room at the Hilton in Melbourne was also in that class.

But hotel bosses themselves will admit how hard it is to keep dinner customers in-house.

In recent times I have found some new exceptions in Melbourne and Hong Kong. The Hong Kong ones will be reviewed in later dispatches.

The big surprise was Café La on the 35th Floor of the Sofitel. To be honest I was put off by the name. I had great memories of classy lunches at a favourite window table with the MCG as a backdrop when the place was known as Le Restaurant.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go from a big Le to a little, more casual, La. I was wrong. Café La still has a bit of the spare ambience of a café but the food and the service and the view certainly don’t.

They claim they offer ‘a variety of Australia’s highest quality produce, cooked simply with an accent on flavour and freshness’. And they certainly achieve that.

And the prices for the quality you get are not high compared with similar nosheries in Melbourne and miles below the rip-off world of Sydney.

For example I had half a dozen Smokey Bay oysters – among the best in the world – for $19. The newly-opened Nobu at Crown made headlines with caviar-decorated oysters at $10 each and in Hong Kong they’re between $6 and $10 each.

Speaking of caviar, Mrs. Nosebag had a ricotta, rocket and pine nut tortellini on cumin eggplant ‘caviar’. Eggplant caviar? A cheap vegetarian version of Beluga?  No such luck. It was eggplant chopped small that ‘sort of looks like caviar’. Tasted good though with a delicious sauce.

We couldn’t have got better main course fish dishes if we’d ventured out of the hotel and tried twenty seafood places. It was Jack Nicholson territory: As Good As It Gets.

I had a piece of blue eye cod crusted with sesame and poppy seeds. Perfectly crisp and crunchy on the skin side and moist and tasty underneath. The oriental overtones included sauté Choy Sum greens, shiitake mushrooms and a morish miso and mustard sauce. ($32).

Mrs. Nosebag had equal success with steamed Tasmanian salmon served with a spinach linguine, saffron sauce and mussels.($31).

All of the sides were $7.50.

If you’re a big red meat eater there’s a beef fillet or a caveman special for two. A 500g rib of Australian Black Angus dry hung for 28 days and served with a shiraz jus and caramelized baby onions. That’s the dearest thing on the menu at $45 each.

There’s an interesting selection of cheeses with three for $28. We had a soft, milky brie called Rouzaire Coulommiers named after the Brie region village it came from. Plus a semi-soft goat’s cheese called Woodside Edith’s which was over-powered by our third choice: the Papillon Black Label Roquefort.

Mrs. NB is a huge fan of blue vein cheese but the power of this even stopped her. I loved it. There must have been enough furry blue mould in one slice to treat half of France with penicillin.

There’s an extensive wine list with some expensive stuff but heaps of good reds and whites between $40 and $60.

And I haven’t even mentioned the fairyland view and the lights. Did somebody say something about an energy crisis? Melbourne being so flat the twinkling carpet goes on and on and on from the CBD towers to the Arts Centre spire and up St.Kilda Road.

On Sundays (minus the lights) you can go to La Café for a leisurely lunch and listen to some live jazz. As a guest you’d be a mug to venture outside this hotel complex.