Martin FrimetNot quite enough pep for all Cafe Vue's promise
May 18th 2008 02:50
Everything was perfectly set. A warm day, an empty stomach, and an earthy, outdoor seat in amid granite greys and grassy greens. Add to that engaging and attentive staff who were outgoing without being sickly, an intriguing menu full of new flavours as well as a liberal spread of older favourites like croque-monsieur, filled Yorkshire puddings and home-made burgers, and not forgetting its well-inked reputation, and I will admit to having a ripple of excitement running through me as I waited to eat for the first time at Cafe Vue on Little Collins Street.
Though opened as a sidearm to the massively successful Vue De Monde (recently voted among the top 100 restaurants in the world) Cafe Vue has been doing good business all of its own for some time now, offering a range of affordable lunchtime staples like salads and sandwiches, as well as its now-famous lunchbox, comprising four or five small courses, changed on a monthly basis, and all yours for just $15.
By the time my lunchbox was presented to me, charmingly self-contained in a warm, inviting claret cube, that initial ripple of excitement had turned into something closer to the kind of Christmas morning insurgence that I hadn’t felt for decades.
And there was no disappointment as I opened the lid to see four perfectly formed courses, each small but part of an exciting, hair-tingling whole.
First was scotch quail's egg, a dish that was indicative of a menu that had seemed to want to render old-world classics in inventive new ways. A couple of nibbles in and I was already able to see why the Vue de Monde model has begun to cause such rapture. The breadcrumb coating was light and crunchy and the sausage inside that perfectly seasoned to enhance but not obscure the soft quail’s egg at the very inner. This was school dinners in a wonderful, alternate world where good food was always king.
However good that may have been, however, it did not last long and I did not need much more invitation to move swiftly on to my second course, a tuna pasta salad with peas and tarragon. In other hands and in other places, this would be a turgid, greasy dish but here it came deliciously sweet and juicy from the fresh peas and yet also pleasingly sour from the sassy tarragon. Now all I waited for was the knockout blow and, lifting the palm-sized sandwich of roast beef with oven-roasted tomatoes on rye up to my mouth, I could tell I was about to get it any time now.
Except I never did. The rye was entirely negligible to taste, the oven-roasted tomatoes were sloppy rather than silky and the beef lacked a lick of mustard or horseradish or pickle or something that might have lifted it from flat to fierce. In short, it was bland. Not quite normal school dinner stuff but nothing exceptional either. My dessert of creme caramel had a good sweet-egg hit but was again short on flavour and too-uniform in texture.
I sat a moment, confused. None of what I had eaten had been bad (save for those ungracious tomatoes perhaps) but yet already there was not one flavour or combination or idea in what I’d tasted that I could still really savour after my box was closed. Those at Cafe Vue clearly know what they are doing, but they seemed to have been hedging thier bets so that this lunchbox might cause a minimum of offence when, if the idea was to to re-imagine the normal lunchbox, I would have been hoping for something altogether more adult.
Cafe Vue
430 Little Collins Street
Melbourne
Though opened as a sidearm to the massively successful Vue De Monde (recently voted among the top 100 restaurants in the world) Cafe Vue has been doing good business all of its own for some time now, offering a range of affordable lunchtime staples like salads and sandwiches, as well as its now-famous lunchbox, comprising four or five small courses, changed on a monthly basis, and all yours for just $15.
By the time my lunchbox was presented to me, charmingly self-contained in a warm, inviting claret cube, that initial ripple of excitement had turned into something closer to the kind of Christmas morning insurgence that I hadn’t felt for decades.
And there was no disappointment as I opened the lid to see four perfectly formed courses, each small but part of an exciting, hair-tingling whole.
First was scotch quail's egg, a dish that was indicative of a menu that had seemed to want to render old-world classics in inventive new ways. A couple of nibbles in and I was already able to see why the Vue de Monde model has begun to cause such rapture. The breadcrumb coating was light and crunchy and the sausage inside that perfectly seasoned to enhance but not obscure the soft quail’s egg at the very inner. This was school dinners in a wonderful, alternate world where good food was always king.
However good that may have been, however, it did not last long and I did not need much more invitation to move swiftly on to my second course, a tuna pasta salad with peas and tarragon. In other hands and in other places, this would be a turgid, greasy dish but here it came deliciously sweet and juicy from the fresh peas and yet also pleasingly sour from the sassy tarragon. Now all I waited for was the knockout blow and, lifting the palm-sized sandwich of roast beef with oven-roasted tomatoes on rye up to my mouth, I could tell I was about to get it any time now.
Except I never did. The rye was entirely negligible to taste, the oven-roasted tomatoes were sloppy rather than silky and the beef lacked a lick of mustard or horseradish or pickle or something that might have lifted it from flat to fierce. In short, it was bland. Not quite normal school dinner stuff but nothing exceptional either. My dessert of creme caramel had a good sweet-egg hit but was again short on flavour and too-uniform in texture.
I sat a moment, confused. None of what I had eaten had been bad (save for those ungracious tomatoes perhaps) but yet already there was not one flavour or combination or idea in what I’d tasted that I could still really savour after my box was closed. Those at Cafe Vue clearly know what they are doing, but they seemed to have been hedging thier bets so that this lunchbox might cause a minimum of offence when, if the idea was to to re-imagine the normal lunchbox, I would have been hoping for something altogether more adult.
Cafe Vue
430 Little Collins Street
Melbourne
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