CHOCOLATE BUDDHA
FEDERATION SQUARE
MELBOURNE

I know it looks like a tinfoil tantrum.

I know it cost about 250 million dollars more than it should have.

I know Nigel Milan pulled a great con to get his SBS logo plastered all over it.

But I love Federation Square.

It leaves the Sydney Opera House for dead. I am no architectural genius but the sweeping ochre-coloured bricks remind me of the 0utback. The textures make me want to reach out and touch things.

This seemingly mish-mash of forms and colours and galleries and restaurants shows a living, breathing, exciting city at its best.

I can’t even pronounce the name of the “ birrarung marr” park behind this edifice. But I love it.

Suddenly, this eclectic city of Melboune has a frontispiece. Suddenly, this metropolis has a heart. After all the years – and all the millions of dollars expended on a piece of crap called the City Square -- somebody got it right.

Federation Square has given a town a heart.

And it is much-vaunted multi –culturalism at its best.

I dined recently at the ubiquitous Chocolate Buddha.

It is a clever, trendy, Japanese restaurant overlooking the main area at Federation Square and Flinders Street Station.

It is very, very good.

You can dine indoors at long, monkish, communal wooden tables or you can have a romantic dinner outside.

Chocolate Buddha gives you old-fashioned Japanese soup dishes in newfangled surroundings.

I loved the warning note on the menu:

“Individual meals are started as soon as the order is transmitted into our kitchen. This means that meals are delivered as soon as they are cooked often some minutes apart. Therefore we request that you start your meal as soon as it arrives. This is the acceptable way of the ramen and donburi bars worldwide.”

Yep. Good call. Except with all their computer notebooks and whizbangery they stuffed up our order.

Still, the food we did get was awesome. The sort of dinner you could eat seven nights a week.

Ramon and soba and udon noodles as good as you will get anywhere.

Teriyaki marinated free-range chicken or organic beef slices or pork with spinach.

I had the Nobeyaki-Udon. It consisted of chicken slices with a couple of prawns and some shitake mushrooms and an egg and some fish and a miso broth.

Fish or squid or tofu or tempura battered vegetables. The Chocolate Buddha will accommodate you. It’s the best Japanese soup selection I have seen since Café Too at the Island Shangri-La in Hong Kong.

But, as the Demtel man used to say, there is more. The donburi hot rice dishes include a teriyaki eel fillet or marinated crumbed salmon with roe and shiso leaves. Or lightly curried prawns with mushrooms and fresh peppers.

But I have one complaint. The print on some parts of the menu is so small Helen Keller would have as much chance as me of reading it.

Hinch’s Hunch: Chocolate Buddha, and other nosheries at Federation Square, will federate the foodies in this town in no time.

Monday 17 March