I came across the gorgeous blog of Melbournienne Lucy Feagins.  She has done a great job blogging Gertrude St.  The beautiful photo of Amor y Locura above is hers.  I find so few blogs that I really want to read these days, but this is one of them. It’s so what blogs should be like: journalism without the corruption.  And with good photos.  Good blogs need good photos.  Free and ad-free.  But hers even boasts hand-drawn maps to die for.

Apart from Gertrude St, it has much of interest to whatever remains of Abbotsford Blog’s readership after its sad neglect by me.  For example, her posts on:

• Abbotsford’s Yello Diva (how to explain: just click on the link);
• Gertrude St’s Cottage Industries;
• the Gertrude St florist Mr Lincoln (move over Vasette);
• Abbotsford’s Mondo Trasho; and
• Abbotsford’s Studio Hacienda.

But then just about everything else is likely to be of interest.

And, just a week ago, Dani Valent reviewed The Royston in The Age, which I have also earlier posted about, and which is also a place I want to go for dinner. If only I had the time.

Reviewing is a difficult art. There are certain constrained forms I particularly like. The obituary. The chess column. The restaurant review. All so constrained by the necessaries, requiring clever use of what little room there is for the decorations. The English tend to do them best. Zia Mahmoud does the most with the least with The Guardian’s bridge column. Haiku fascinates me. The very word puts me on edge. I hate haiku about as much as shakuhachi music, but at the same time I love it about as much as a good egg breakfast, a short speech, photos of Japanese taking photos of cherry blossoms with unbelievably expensive cameras (snap thanks to a great photographer, Mark Alberding), and the way sacred cows get in the way of traffic in New Delhi. Short is good. Less is more. Small is beautiful. Metre is a useful discipline for the poet’s natural tendency to ungrammatical excess. Some of the most elegant writing going around today is to be found on this website. I particularly like:

After enough beers
My intelligence dazzles.
Others are jealous.

and

ugly red flowers
bloom on the floor of the bar
after the big brawl

and

Bagged a centerfold
But awakened to road kill
Damn you, beer goggles

All of which is an ironically long introduction to Jamie Wodetzki’s Breakfast Blog. He has concision down pat, and does well with the form of the restaurant review. Since first reading his blog, I was sure he was a lawyer. Many lawyers can’t write, but some can, and his writing had the ring of a lawyer who could write. A moment’s google searching confirmed my suspicions. See Jamie’s review of Cavallero here, Birdman Eating’s here, Cafe Rosamond’s here, Richmond’s New York Tomato Cafe’s here.

John Lethlean does well too. I think it would take some self-confidence for the town’s leading food critic to give Lentil as Anything a glowing thumbs up, but that’s what he did.

The Age has helpfully identified “10 of the best” — I like the modesty of these words in a best of list — inventive cheap eats. Southern Richmond’s Pearl gets an honourable mention for $16 eggs on toast (keep it real, Cheap Eats), but I have to admit it’s one of the best restaurants I’ve ever been to, and you can go there for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a drink. Then the Builder’s Arms on Gertrude Street Fitzroy comes in at number 3 for a $14 “3 mint pea soup with smoked paprika butter with steamed prawns” which sounds rather good. And Replete just down from MLC in Hawthorn, but metres away from being Kew, gets another gong at #6 for $12.50 ricotta hotcakes with lemon curd and strawberries. Thanks to Flickr’s Spin Spin for the photo of an uncommonly unpopulated image of the Builder’s Arms.

It was time for a mop chop at Dr Follicle’s again this week (actually it was well and truly time last week, but it just didn’t happen) and on the way I popped my head into Roundhouse Roti (don’t you think it’s amazing that no Melbourne Malaysian restaurant has called itself Koala Lumpur yet?), finally open, Rose Chong’s gift to her son of part of her emporium turned into an innovative eatery, a place that specialises in roti channai, a Malaysian specialty of really good roti and chicken curry, where you break the roti into pieces and into the curry and eat the combination. A girl was swinging around from the stove when I explained that “I’ve just popped in to check you out”. I realised at the same moment, as she swung into view, that she was a gorgeous vamp with beautifully defined eyebrows, and a nanosecond later that she was almost certainly Rose’s daughter in law (or daughter outlaw, depending on the marital status of the union which produced the child harnessed to her bosom). I quickly added in the direction of he whom I deduced to be Rose’s son “Well, not you personally”. I immediately liked the place. I want to go there now and eat roti channai, but it’s closed. Can’t tell you any more than that, but when you go, please leave a comment for all our benefit. Lee, son of Rose, is going to add roti pisang to the small little menu just as soon as banana comes down in price. That will be the day, ooff yeah. Maybe, in time, we will see durian cendol added as the ultimate in authenticity, and God! give me some nasi lemak.

The Sketchbook has told me something I really wanted to know: what this beautiful and seemingly taken-for-granted building with its French-inspired roof was: the Yorkshire Brewery, cleverly captured in this image by Ronny Restrepo. According to Walking Melbourne, it was designed by James Wood son of Yorkeshireman Thomas Wood who founded it, and built in 1880, and was for 10 years Australia’s tallest building. Today, it’s in a state of disrepair (for a photo of it in 1974, see here). Brian McKinlay wrote:

“Brewing and Collingwood have a long association. …

Melbourne’s first brewery was opened in 1838 by a young pioneer publican named Moss at the back of the Ship Inn in Flinders Street. Earlier pioneer breweries tended to be linked wth one or several local pubs or inns, and there seem to have been almost as many small breweries in early Melbourne as there were pubs. By 1856 it was estimated that there were thirty-five breweries in Victoria and by 1871 the number had grown to 126.

Sometimes the backyard brewer was tempted to dilute his product, and he added substances in order to give the beer the correct bitter taste much prized by brewers and drinkers alike. Sometimes their search for a bittter aftertaste led brewers to introduce ingredients like Epsom salts, arsenic, or even sulphuric acid. In such cases the result was disastrous for the drinker, who paid for his pleasure in more ways than one.

Gradually Melbourne’s brewing passed into the hands of a number of larger breweries on whose product the public could rely. Several of these were located in Collingowood. A Yorkshireman, Thomas Wood, had established a chain of breweries in the area and by 1864 he had become Collingwood’s major brewer. In 1877, with his sons as partners, he established a brewery in Wellington Street which was noted for its six-storey tower complete with hydraulic lift and a groud-level stable to accommodate twenty-six brewery horses.”

And, according to Walking Melbourne:

“The former Yorkshire brewery is a stunning landmark consisting of a huge romanesque and second empire combination tower that features polychrome brickwork. Surprisingly, the Yorkshire was the tallest building in Australia for 10 years until it was superceeded by the 10 storey Finks building in 1888. The Yorkshire is currently being converted into apartments, although several speculative developers have left the site scarred, with the original stables now demolished. The Yorkshire brewery building is now heritage registered and controls are in place to preserve it.”

On Monday it was my special holiday. Miss K was at work. Just enough colleagues were as well that I could relish the schadenfreude so essential for a successful random day off. I ambled up to eat baked eggs at Birdman Eating, coffee at Gertrude St Enoteca (sorry Dr Java), and get my mop chopped at Dr Follicles. Folly was closed and so was Birdy. That was a blow. Shaggy haired and hardened by hunger, the coffee at Gert’s no longer appealed. I tried Dante’s, but Maria wasn’t there. No one new me. The place was empty. I popped across the road to the Renown Tavern, one of the least blinged-up pubs in the inner city. A former manager who left in “very bitter circumstances” had gaily advertised the unrenovated air of the place in chalk on the side of the building, and I thought any place in Fitzroy that advertised its lack of renovation warranted a visit in order to stave off renovation any longer.
I had an experience very reminiscent of sitting at the front bar of the Union Hotel on the High Street of Nhill. Both places sported publicans from another era who lived up above. Both sported a woman very much at home there at noon, and both featured a crumple faced old geyser of exactly the kind which is made homeless by renovations — a scandal little reported on by the mainstream media but which I call the Second Stolen Generation.

Old Sam Matthieson had spent 30 years behind bars in Geelong, back in the days when barmaids would be pleased if a traveller would shout them a pony of beer. He’d been sitting on that particular stool daily for the last 10 years, and lived in the Gertrude St housing commission flats which are apparently a lot better since they were “re-done inside”. Get him talking about the shortcomings of Geelong Bitter and you’re in for an entertaining spiel. Mind you I was nodding away in agreement — the loathesome stuff used to be on tap at the Builders Arms in its last but one iteration, but hidden under some apparently so-Fitzroy “Dolly” label.

The other drinker looked like he was drinking very slowly indeed, and was studying his half-empty pot intently. He did not descend into conversation. He had very long white hair and a very long white beard, and looked like someone retired off the set of Lord of the Rings. The mysterious woman seemed at home in the front bar in her faux leopard skin coat.

Sam and the publican told me at some length with an absolute earnestness which indicated complete conviction, about the ghost of the fellow murdered upstairs. A key bit of evidence was that some chips fell off a shelf without explanation one time.

But best, I discovered that the Louisana Shakers play there. I know these guys vaguely through a Fitzroy Great Gatsby who throws brilliant jazz parties, often with bands put together by Alan Brown and various associates, including in particular Chris Tanner, a world clarinet genius who just happens to live in Melbourne and may still be playing with his band Virus every Saturday at Laundry on Johnston St, a brilliant gig. They are a very good band. They play free on Sundays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. This is one gig where you could be guaranteed, as the chalked sign on the side of the pub says, no pretentiousness.

The Sketchbook also tells of the Royal Terrace, pictured here in 1966, probably completed in 1858 despite the 1854 engraved in its stone. So it is two years shy of 150 years old. The Sketchbook says:

“When Royal Terrace was built in Nicholson Street at the height of the gold rush it was a most fashionable address, partly because the terrace was one of the most imposing of its kind then standing, and partly because it lay so close to the city.

Sir John O’Shannassy, three times premier of Victoria, found it ideally placed, being handy to the Parliament building nearby in Spring Street. At about the same time Nicholas Chevalier, a painter of Franco-Russian origin, resided there, conducting a studio where he became Melbourne’s best known portrait artist, until he departed with Prince Alfred for London in 1868, commissioned to undertake a series of royal portraits. Oddly, Chevalier is best known today for his splendid engravings and watercolours of the Victorian countryside.

Perhaps the most colourful tenant was Dr L. L. Smith, whose range of interests and involvements seemed endless. A Member of Parliamnet as well as amedical practitioner, and later Lord Mayor of MElbourne, he ran what would be considered today a fairly unorthodox medical practice, selling a Medical Almanac which claimed to contain remedies for almost every known complaint.”

Miss K, renascent party girl, took me on a bar crawl of Gertrude St on Friday. We checked out Little Rebel (don’t share my barber man’s enthusiasm), Radio, and Gertrude’s (more anon). It involved dinner at Ume Nomiya (ume: Japanese plum, usually pickled — pictured, thanks to Matt Helminski; nomiya: drinking house) the tiny 37-seat Japanese place next to our regular haunt, Tandoori Times. Indolent Andy said it was his favourite Japanese restaurant, and that was enough to pull me out of some inertia and get in there. Mind you I think lingering first impressions when the place was but a bar and was not all that busy were preying on my inertia. Then, it was a bit too cool for school, weird even, though that was back in 2001. We loved every minute of our relatively quick dinner and warm sake slurp there.

Miss K, who uttered the heresy “I like this more than Wabi Sabi Salon”, had a stir fry on luscious Japanese white rice ($14.50). Apart from the very well executed tempura vegetable parcels, it was just a stir fry, but it was how stir fries — surely the most frequently badly cooked dish — should be. My small meal of kangaroo tataki ($11.50) was a work of art: rare kangaroo medallions with tiny cubes of dark purple jelly (ponzu jelly?) and wasabi mayonnaise. It was one of the best plates I have devoured in a long time.

Like Wabi Sabi Salon, it’s got decidedly un-Japanese front of house staff and a strongly caucasion crowd, with quirky Japanese chefs out the back pushing the boundaries of Melbourne’s understanding of Japanese food. They maintain a bottle keep system a la Japonnaise where you can buy a bottle of whisky or sake and have it kept aside for when you come in.
The proprietress is Fiona Craig, a kiwi with an arts degree majoring in sociology who fell in love with Japan while teaching English there for 3 years or so in the mid-90s.

The details are:

197 Gertrude St, Fitzroy — 9415 6101 — food 6-10 p.m. except Sunday and Monday