The Very Very Hungry Caterpillar: Foodie Adventures In Melbourne And Beyond

Roundhouse Roti
220 Gertrude St
Fitzroy VIC 3065
+61 3 9417 4285
http://www.roundhouseroti.com.au/

Both Adam and I are huge fans of roti, the famous unleavened pan-fried flat bread that’s popular in Malaysia. Thus, it is hardly surprising that when we found out that Roundhouse Roti was just a back kick away from his work, we knew we had to make a visit. Having both finished work at the same time one Friday afternoon, we decided to visit this place that sells roti and ONLY ROTI.

The eatery’s shopfront may be nondescript but once you step inside, you can’t help but gasp at the ornate furnishings. From the sleek tabletops to the somewhat extravagrant ventilator hanging above the work open kitchen, this place was a far cry from the mamak stalls that can be found in Malaysian cities.

In keeping with my promise to eat more vegies and less meat (thanks, Michael Pollan), I decided to go for the roti dahl ($8.50). A generous-sized piece of plain roti was accompanied by a sambar lentil dahl, a mildly spicy tamarind-based stew with cooked lentils and chunks of vegetables including sweet corn. While the dahl was beautiful, I could not say the same about the roti which was not particularly nor tasty. In fact, it was probably one of the blandest roti’s I’ve ever tasted. While it was good that Roundhouse Roti aimed to cater to the Fitzroy-dweller’s penchant for healthy eating, there was no way I can consider a roti to be really good if it didn’t have ghee in it. Fail.

Adam’s ‘king of kings’ ($13.50) wasn’t exactly much better. Okay, so the chicken curry dipping sauce was relishing but the murtabak (which is basically a roti filled with spiced minced beef and egg) was not only soggy but almost tasteless. A far cry from the beautifully crispy-skinned versions a good street-seller in Jakarta could make with his eyes closed.

For a place that specialises in roti, we expected something special … or well above-average at the very least. Sadly, we both felt that Roundhouse Roti failed to deliver. While both of the condiments that came with our respective roti’s were lovely, the bread in both our meals just spoilt it for us. At the end of the day, I would have been happier munching on roti served at Chatterbox at Tivoli Arcade. I can only imagine that Chuck Norris will not approve if he were to come here for a meal.

Jen’s been telling me of a supposedly fantastic cafe on Smith Street that serves excellent breakfast and lunches, Cafe Beelzebub. While that description could apply to any random cafe on Smith Street, Jen’s insistence that this particular cafe served THE best coffee on Smith Street was what sold me into going there on Saturday for a late lunch with Adam.

Despite the fact that we arrived at 2:30pm, pretty much all the tables were full – a good sign. After numerous unsuccessul attempts at flagging down the lone waitress for the menu, we gave up and collected them ourselves from the large pile on the bar. The menu itself was divided up into breakfast items (served all day, and nothing that the other cafes on this street couldn’t do) and lunch items, which consisted primarily of burger and focaccias. The lunch menu, in particular, seemed to draw inspiration from South American and Spanish cuisines as every second item had a Hispanic-sounding name  and items such as guacamole, mayonesa and chorizos were dominant.

I started off with a cafe latte ($3) which took 10 minutes to make, way too long a wait. Luckily for them, the coffee was beautifully silky with sweet vanilla notes in every mouthful. Best coffee on Smith St? I may have only been to a few coffee-serving eateries on Smith St so I can’t really give a definitive answer but for now the answer is ‘yes.’

Adam’s fabes burger ($15) was pretty much a burger with the lot. The buger was not too different from a typical Grill’d burger – freshly toasted white bread bun with a healthy slab of beef pattie, tomatoes, lettuce, egg, cheese, bacon and onions. On the side was a mountain of shoestring fries and tomato sauce. Adam loved it but I thought it was pretty average.

My completo ($12), a traditional Chilean hot dog, sounded pretty interesting on paper. Unfortunately, I was a little underwhelmed with my meal. The salad (with a balsamic dressing) was nothing out of the ordinary but I was expecting a little more from the completo. They were a tad stingy with the chorizo and diced tomatoes but very liberal with the mashed avocado, which not only made my bun soggy but also bogged down the flavours of the other ingredients. Even with what little chorizo I had, less avocado would have made my completo more enjoyable to eat.

It could have been the food we ordered, it could be because I may have held such high expectations, it could have been an off day for the staff (after all, it was the day after New Year’s Day) – whatever it was, it made me wish that I had spent the afternoon at the nearby Cafe Bebida. Beelzebub’s food was nothing special and their service was slow (our food took about 30 minutes to arrive) – those reasons alone were enough to make me not want to return… but damn, they did make a good coffee.

Jen‘s been waxing lyrical about Cafe Beelzebub which apparently serves not only the best coffee on Smith Street, Fitzroy but awesome food to boot. So when Adam told me that he finished work at 10am today, I decided to drag him along Smith St for a bit of a walk towards the factory outlet end to try out this place. Having checked on the net to see if they were open (yes, at 8:00am on most days according to google), we figured that a 10:30am brunch would be an ideal time to get some food into my stomach after running around Monash with nothing in my stomach. Unfortunately, Cafe Beelzebub was closed when we arrived, showing no signs of life apart from one guy mopping the floors. He saw us peering into the window before mouthing to us that he wasn’t opening for another hour or something like that. Booo. Sif not open for brunch at 10:30am. Yeah effing right!

Feeling slightly dejected, we walked back to where we came from before deciding to eat at a funky-looking cafe not too far from Beelzebub, Bebida. Now, I’ve seen the place being mentioned in Cheap Eats so I figured that this was a good alternative.

Grabbing a copy of The Age (what else?! I mean, we are in Fitzroy after all), we settled at a table right by the open window so that we could grab some sunshine while we ate. Bebida offers a tapas menu for both lunch and dinner, along with a reasonable drinks list. They also offer a separate breakfast menu, though, for the early starters. For some reason, Adam decided that he wanted the pasta dish on the specials menu. Yeah, pasta. At 10:40am. Surprisingly, though, the bar dude did not even blink when Adam ordered the pasta dish.

$25.80 for the two of us kept us not just happy but completely full for the rest of the day (my next meal was not until dinner time at 6:30pm). We were so happy with our breakfast that we are definitely keen to come back to try their tapas menu accompanied by a jug of Sangria when the weather gets a bit warmer. Ahhh *cue Lou Reed now* We might have been bummed about not getting to try Cafe Beelzebub but if it weren’t for the fact that they were closed, we would have never stumbled upon Bebida. And that would have been a real shame.

In other news:

-Adam, being the old man he is, decided that he was tired after brunch so he left to go home while I went to the city library to get some reading done before going to Borders to get started on the new Dan Brown book (I certainly wasn’t going to buy it in hardcover). I figured that I may as well stay in the city so that I could rock up to Body Balance at 4:30pm as it’s been a while since I’ve been to a class.

-I have 12 days to learn everything there is to know about criminal law. Okay, not everything – we did homicide last semester – but close enough. This is going to be fun – no, I’m serious… given the nightmare that has been Research And Writing, ANY OTHER SUBJECT will be a fun house compared to RAW.

-I’m going to be home pretty much all weekend. No races for me. No biggie, since I still can’t work out what’s so fun about spending $50 to go into a venue to watch a bunch of horses run around. If I did go to one race day event, I know I’ll spend the majority of my time with my nose in a book… which sorta defeats the purpose of going there in the first place.

-Gossip Girl is becoming ridiculous and sucky. While I’m liking season three Chuck, Blair is starting to piss me off.  So’s Serena. So’s Jenny’s hobo outfits. And Dan’s penchant for fugly brown clothes. I’m saddened to say that I’m only watching it now out of habit.

-It’s been a while since I stepped foot in Borders and suddenly, all these new awesome books are there. ZOMG, WANT!

Adam and I stumbled upon Little Creatures Dining Hall yesterday afternoon while on a stroll around Brunswick St, looking for clothes. Modeling itself on its Fremantle predecessor, LCDH Fitzroy can be described as a cross between a cafeteria and barn house with its enormous cavernous interior and communal tables which seemed to be full even at 2:30pm. Stepping into the beer hall, one may understandably be all “what the heck do I do?!” as they survey the former warehouse space, wondering whether they’re supposed to order at the bar or whether a waitress was supposed to seat them.

I was going to start this entry on the current economic conditions by using that tired old cliché, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock will know all about what’s happening in the financial markets at the moment. However, I reckon that statement is rather inaccurate because I think that even hermits who live under rocks and on remote Pacific Islands where there is no TV, internet, newspapers etc would realise just how bad the global economy is.

The crisis means that essentials such as petrol and food are more expensive (as if they weren’t already expensive anyway) and discretionary spending on pretty bags, clothes and shoes should be kept to a minimum (I say “should” because I know a lot of girls spend spend spend anyway, no matter what!). Even I had to cut back on my fine dining adventures, opting to use the weekends for catching up on some reading (i.e. frantically reading the 9th book in the Gossip Girl series a day before it’s due back at the city library), going to the gym (I may not have lost that much in terms of overall body weight but I am finding it easier to fit into clothes that never used to fit me and I don’t feel sluggish as often) and renting foreign movies for free at city library. While I’m hoping to do Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons in two week’s time (edit: idea scrapped, it looks like either Il Bacaro, Seamstress or Trunk), Silks on Nov 21^st (18 month anniversary, you see) and perhaps squeeze The Botanical in there somewhere, it’s going to take a lot of planning and budgeting to be able to dine at those places. Damn you financial crisis.

Just because I don’t have as much money to spend on food, however, doesn’t mean that I must resort to eating toast or two minute noodles every day. Sure, you might not be able to eat yum cha once a month like you used to (maybe once every 2-3 months) and sure, you have to think twice before spending $30 on a mid-week buffet lunch with your colleagues but it doesn’t mean that you must suffer. Living in Melbourne means that you are always surrounded by a plethora of decent restaurants and cafes, and the good thing is that not all of them command a huge bill at the end of your meal either. A fine example of a place that does food really cheap is Bimbo Deluxe on Brunswick Street.

Established by the same team who gave us Lucky Coq, BD appeals to those who are tight arses careful with their finances. Their menu only consists of cheap pizza and alcohol, which is why students love places like this. On a regular Saturday afternoon, pizzas cost somewhere between $6.50 and $9.00 but if you visit during certain times such as Thursday night, it’s $4 per pizza. Not bad huh? I doubt you can even buy a cup of coffee at Bistro Vue with $4, much less a satisfying meal that’ll leave you full for hours afterward.

Adam ordered the Agnello ($7.90), a dinner plate-sized flat-crust pizza with the basic foundation of mozzarella and tomato, topped with a sounds-weird-on-paper-but-tastes-yummy combination of spiced lamb mince, pine nuts and sultana with a generous dousing of rocket leaves. I quite liked it actually – tasted a bit like a sweet kebab on a pizza. Adam, on the other hand, just thought it was “weird.” Heh.

Because Adam’s pizza had all the heavy trimmings, I decided to go light with a simple aglio olio pizza (translation: “olive oil pizza”). At only $6.50, the same flat-crust pizza was covered in a liberal sprinkling of olive oil and Parmesan cheese with soft garlic cloves all around. One lone red chilli served as a garnish to the pizza. I’m not sure if I liked the fact that the garlic cloves looked like they were just plonked all over the pizza like the chef can’t be bothered mashing them up and spreading the garlic paste eventually, which I had to do myself. Nevertheless, my pizza was a fresh change from the usual garlic bread or foccacia which I usually have when I eat pizza.

Service, although sometimes friendly, was perhaps true to its namesake – bimbo-y and ditzy, and dare I say, lazy. The Asian chick struggled to get my order right and I had to point to each item on the menu to show what I wanted (I hate it when I do that – I love waiters who simply nod when I say that I want “the fish” or “the scallops” or “that last one on the menu.”). She refused to bring us cutlery, and made us get the forks and knives ourselves from the dispenser at the bar. I am well aware that a lot of places do that, particularly those wonderful cheap Asian cafes, but somehow I doubt that they pay the staff at BD $5 an hour, particularly on a Saturday, so therefore, they should do what they’re supposed to do, dammit! On the other hand, when the pizza is good and cheap, however, I guess you shouldn’t really be fussy about the service. After all, what do you expect from a pizza restaurant that has a name which is more suited to a brothel in South Melbourne?

That’s what the previous chef of Old Kingdom , a Chinese restaurant on Smith St, used to say to the diners during their meals. He was one helluva eccentric dude and used to freak me out. But now he’s gone and Old Kingdom has a new chef. And the duck tastes better too. I mean, the first time I went there, I didn’t really like the duck. It smelt funny and when my sister took a bite of her Peking duck, all this oil and fat came oozing out and spilt all over her. Ew. But the second time we went there, there was a big improvement. I think it was our third time here – it wasn’t as good as our second visit but definitely far from the sub-average score that I gave them on my first visit. I don’t think I’ve done a proper review of this place so here goes…

So, my parents are friends with this couple who come down from Indonesia every now and then because their only son goes to school here. They’re obsessed with the duck banquet at Old Kingdom and while I think it’s good, it isn’t THE best duck in Melbourne (I stand firmly with Flower Drum‘s peking duck). Nevertheless, I can see why this place is always packed during dinner as it serves decent duck for the price you pay. In my opinion, Melbourne’s 2nd best duck.

So these friends-of-my-parents, they invited my family and my cousin Jess’ family to have dinner at Old Kingdom. They also invited Adam along but given that he’s been having early starts all week and given that he’s got another long day tomorrow, I think it was wise of him to give it a miss. Dinner was at 6pm and we had until 8pm to stuff ourselves before the next set of diners arrived. Fine with us. Except that in true Indonesian style, the friends-of-my-parents rocked up 45 minutes late citing “traffic” as an excuse. Poor form guys . It’s Friday night and it’s Melbourne. You can do better. If everyone else got here on time then I don’t see why you can’t. Anyway, even though our allocated eating time had dramatically decreased, we still managed to be out of there by 8:01pm. Let me tell you what we had. Firstly, the duck banquet. Most people come here just for the duck as everything else on the menu is just average. Because the duck banquet is so popular, you need to pre-order in advance (give 1-2 days). For $25 (I can’t remember if it’s $25 per head or $25 per duck), you get a banquet out of one whole duck.

1) Peking Duck. Our table ordered 4 ducks which was more than enough to feed the 11 of us. They give you a plate of pancakes and another plate with spring onions and cucumber. But they ration it so if you run out of pancakes or whatever, you need to pay for another plate which is a bit tight arsey of them but I suppose a cucumber does cost an arm and a leg these days .