Sunday, April 15, 2007

Vin Cellar

The last time I ‘dined’ at Vin, I decided not to eat… We arrived to our reservation, ordered a drink and whilst chatting glanced over the menu, it featured strange fusion dishes; dishes that I can’t even remember to describe here but I knew it was ‘wrong’ and we would be disappointed. We fibbed, paid for our drinks and left.
Cut forward to recently, I had read that a chef that I know, Damian Jones was now head chef at Vin, hope was revived.
Vin is a ten minute walk from my house, therefore I have a vested interest in Vin being good. It is a moody bistro space with bottle lined walls, leather couches and candle light. It has an erratic wine list that is an editors nightmare (read: full of strange bolding, typos and weird formatting), yet is full of the kind of things I want to drink. Interesting wine, at great bottle shop prices, plus $5 if you want to ‘dine in’ as opposed to ‘takeaway’. The service staff the night I dined this week where fantastic, old school skills, well executed and the menu, well it’s kind of hard to explain, but reading it filled me with confidence, not fear.

Damien’s food reflects his background, modern Australian food and technique with a very heavy influence of the type of Thai food you would eat in the fanciest Thai restaurant you could find in Bangkok (he worked with Sydneys modern Thai guru, David Thompson, at his London restaurant Nahm). The menu reads confidence; ‘clear broth of chicken, crab, young coconut and thai basil’; an elegant Thai scented chicken consommé, poured at the table over a centred salad of flaked chicken and crab meat. The broth is tonic like, slightly sweet from the young coconut, herbal and delicate. A gorgeous dish.
We loved the ‘chicken liver parfait with figs, salted biscuit and sweet wine jelly’, a crumbly broken salty biscuit, smeared with a generous dollop of rich chicken liver parfait, a little pile of sweet, winey jelly and fig quarters. I would have liked some more biscuit, but maybe I was just being greedy.

Oysters are one of my key indicators of restaurant quality. A restaurant that shucks to order (and not ‘just before service’ and then squirt on some oyster liquor to serve; but as they are ordered, to the hell if the customer waits an extra few minutes), perhaps leaves the foot attached and doesn’t rinse the oyster under water, is the place I want to eat at.
I usually prefer Sydney Rock Oysters as they are smaller than the usual Pacific oyster and the unusual Angassi or native oyster. Knowing from nasty experience, not to order oysters in the hot summer months (the best places will take them off the menu), I was still mildly cautious since it is still quite warm, but was tempted by Damien’s Thai dressing. I was particularly interested in being told that they were ‘triploid’ pacific oysters. When I inquired what this means I was, told that they were breed not to spawn! I later made the necessary googles to discover that they have 3 chromosomes and are sterile (a seedless watermelon is also a triploid), the advantages are many, but the main benefit to the eater is that they do not get all creamy and unpalatable at Christmas just when you want to eat them. Enough with the biology lesion, the oysters served were as I would hope, in perfect condition (the foot had been cut from the shell though), and the dressing was the strategic balance of hot, sour, sweet and salty with crisp shallots and spicy coriander shoots on top.

Another marvel of the food this evening was my permanent dining companions caramelised salmon dish. For a mere $23.50 a generous serve of salmon was topped with a combination of shaved ‘sour fruits’, essentially an amazingly fresh salad of Asian leaves, apple eggplants, so many ingredients I’m not entirely sure. The salmon had crust of salty sweet caramel around the edges. There is some very sophisticated technique in this dish, it was outstanding.

Vins bottle shop priced cellar/winelist is available to ‘drink in’ at an additional $5 a bottle, it makes it hard not to get carried away when you feel like you are getting such a bargain. The bottles of tap water are cute feature of Vin. They use empty champagne bottles, of which I’m sure the waiters get more than a good run of jokes with, as they pour it out to the initially flabbergasted guests tumblers.

My fear of dining at Vin has obviously evaporated, it’s encouraging the difference a great chef can make to an experience, the level of trust has been restored and a good night can be enjoyed. No fibs required….

Vin Cellar
212 High St Prahran, Victoria
Ph: 9529 8299
http://www.vincellar.com.au/

Jack

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