Ume Nomiya, Gertrude Street’s Japanese drinking house

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. Continue reading “Ume Nomiya, Gertrude Street’s Japanese drinking house”

Asleep at the wheel again

Well, I’ve been nodding off again. You’ve just missed Melissa Jackson‘s Fringe Festival performance. Her frantically making her famous hats in the front window of her Gertrude St shop in the leadup to what used to be called the Melbourne Cup and which we are increasingly accepting as the Spring Racing Carnival.

But here’s something that may be worth trotting along to: the Map 44 Urban Art tour at 2 p.m. this Saturday (14 October 2006) departing Dante’s, led by a man described in the official literature as half Aboriginal and half Ethiopian, Jason Tamiru. Seems many of the shop windows on Gertrude St between Smith and Brunswick Sts have been decorated and he’s going to show us around.

And now to Aesop (pictured). They have a beautiful website, I’ll grant them that. They peddle skin stuff at $60 for 200 ml, with quotes from Voltaire, Virginia Wolf, and Camus. They have redefined luxury on the back of the industro-chic so lapped up down the road at Industria, promising elixirs so wondrous — we’re talking topically applied antioxidants — that they are sold in these austere apothecary’s vessels.