Very sad news. The owners of The Terminus have sold, and have bought the Yarra Glen Grand from a guy who was born in it, and whose family has been running it for 77 years. Judging by the photo of the Grand, the pair must have grown up, and done well out of The Terminus too. They should give the Healesville Hotel a run for its money. If you haven’t been to the Terminus’s restaurant, better go this month, as I heard that the new peoples were moving in this month. It is a splendid restaurant, and one of its dishes made it into John Lethlean’s top 10 dining moments in the Melbourne Magazine recently. Previous posts about The Terminus are here.

Check this out: it seems that the windows from the Grand have yellow glass in them:

Meanwhile, The Age has written another story about The Terminus.  The Age likes The Terminus.  I like The Age and The Terminus. This time it’s the Terminus’s bingo night — Wednesday — which gets a rap.  Other posts about The Terminus are here.

Today’s Good Weekend has a “2 of Us” profile by Bernadette Clohesy of the pair who own the Terminus Hotel, 39 year old Alison Whyte, and 41 year old Fred Whitlock. It’s certainly changing. Upstairs is the now mandatory fine dining restaurant, but there’s also a big party room giving out onto a large deck. Haven’t tried the restaurant, but the pub grub is superb. In fact, it’s a great pub. The place has a website which I have just discovered. Its history of the pub, which the pair purchased in 1996 — 11 years ago — is entertaining. It reveals that the original third partner is the bloke who bought and presumably did up the Healesville Hotel, another great pub, though mainly for the well heeled, unlike the egalitarian Terminus. I signed up for the mailing list so as not to miss out on events such as the 7 Culinary Disasters from the 70s for $70 dinner just gone.

Since the profile of the Whyte-Whitlock combo doesn’t seem to be available online, here are the bare bones, the bits at least not already covered by this newspaper (here and here). Whyte’s from Tasmania, Whitlock from New Zealand. They met at the Victorian College of the Arts. The class of people who transferred from Duntroon to the VCA might conceivably number one: just Whitlock. They have three children under 6: Rose, Milly and Atticus, and live in the Yarra Valley. That seems to have something to do with Whitlock getting stabbed in the head by a local:

“We’re now living in the Yarra Valley; it’s about an hour’s drive from the pub. We first moved out to the country in 2000 after Fred was assaulted while we were walking our dog in the local park. A fellow with two pit bulls came out of the bushes and one of them attacked our dog. Fred managed to pull the dog away and told the guy off. The guy said ‘I’m going to come back and kill you.’ On our way back, there he was with his two brothers and a very large knife. Fred got stabbed in the head. It was terrifying; he had to have stitches. Fred actually cahsed them back to their house and th epolcie came and the guy was arrested.”

I like this:

“Fred’s great qality is his humanity. He tries to help where he can; it’s a very lovely way to approach the world. And it’s the way I want to raise our children.”

and

“Some of his schemes are annoying — but then that’s also the most fascinating thing about him. We’ve got a shed full of coconut oil. He was going to fry the chips in it and he bought an enormous amount. He was so keen; he said ‘We’ll be helping local farmers in Fiji and Samoa. It’s a good fat too.’ The customers were very helpful in giving feedback — they said it was crap.”

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.

My mate from Hanoi, the future Chief Justice of Vietnam, and I trundled down to the Royston this evening. I once lived in the inner eastern suburbs and rode my bike to university over in Parkville. I thought I had been along every road in the big rectangle in between, but it seems not. The other day, I pedalled over from the ‘ford to Ma and Pa’s and took a radical route. You know, most of the many combinations are left right left right but this was on the extreme sides of the rectangle. It was straight, straight straight, right, straight, straight, straight, etc. And suddenly, I saw a sign “The Royston“, just after I saw the mountain goat symbol writ large on a roller door and realised that the Mountain Goat Brewery had finally yielded up its secret location to me.

I thought it was a doss house, but was uncertain enough to peer in the window. And there I found a hotel which I had never seen before. And it looked enticing. And I realised that I had never been in this particular part of this street, the end bit of which I knew quite well. It’s a good place, consisting of a large front bar with many boutique beers on tap, a large dining room out the back, and a pool room giving onto a fairly serious kitchen. Two years ago it was renovated. Many years ago it serviced the tannery workers in what is now the Mountain Goat Brewery. I like a backstreet bar, and this is one of them. Thanks so much to the photographer of the mountain goat, my old mate Anne Kelliotte, photographeure phabuleuse Canadienne du Flickr.

I got lost in the backstreets of Collingwood north of Johnston St, a place I realised I had never been to before. From the car, I spotted the Leinster Arms Hotel in Gold St, described by someone on the web as one of Melbourne’s best side street hotels. It has a restaurant open for lunch and dinner seven days, and was, like The Carringbush, a favourite haunt of Uncle Chop Chop, who once described himself, politically, as to the right of Genghis Khan. Apparently they do a good roast goat and a hearty crab and mussell hotpot. But this is a lame post, I know. I will go there, despite the large photograph of Eddie Maguire, and then I’ll tell you more.

I assume without quite knowing that Abbotsford was named after this place, Sir Walter Scott’s last home, Abbotsford House, in Scotland. Other Abbotsfords are to be found in Sydney, Dunedin, Johanasburg, British Columbia, and Wisconsin. That great hotel, the Rob Roy, may take its name from Scott’s novel of the same name. I just discovered the Rob Roy does accommodation from $25 a night with half-priced meals from the kitchen thrown in.

Bugger the opinionated Stephen Downes, letting the cat out of the bag about my local boasting 5 open fires, The Carringbush, and nominating it the best cheapish restaurant in the Hun’s latest survey. Interestingly, he’s managed to negotiate a deal whereby his reviews are reproduced on his own rudimentary Wordpress blog. Two places nearby which got into his book 100 Gastronomic Experiences to Have Before You Die are Babka in Brunchswick St (“perhaps the world’s best cafe” from a man who eschews hyperbole) and some noodle dish at Fenix, down on the Yarra near Victoria Gardens shopping centre (best restaurant in the financial year ending 2005 (why oh why in the financial year?)). Since his blog has categories for each score, one can see that The Carringbush is in fact the equal eighth best place in Victoria (well, it’s one of 7 on his blog scoring 17 and only one scores 19 and 6 score 18). You’re right. The photo has nothing to do with any of the threementioned establishments. It belongs to Rolf Strohmann whose Night in Bangkok Flickr set is seriously good.

I decided yesterday to stroll down to the CUB brewery and take some photos. I discovered the following things:

• the Nash Hotel, one block west along Victoria St from Church St (on the corner of Lambert St) looks like a good if slightly sterile hotel with a spic’n’span dining room; I had written it off without ever having peered through its windows: can anyone speak of it from experience?
• at the end of Church St opposite the back end of the brewery, and near this sign, is what appears to be a hidden residence with spectacular views;
• there is a warehouse down this driveway off Victoria Crescent which seems to have some lucky folk living in it, luxuriating in views like this and this and this and this;
• another warehouse is said to be the Victorian government’s secret art storage facility;
• I rediscovered the hidden park Flockhart Reserve, down the end of Flockhart St, which has The Terminus on its corner, on the other side of the river from the path which leads from the Gipps St bridge to the Walmer St bridge (Victoria Gardens);
• there is a massive prop and scenery building enterprise down there;
• there are two horses on a vacant block which must be worth a fortune, adjoining the hidden park, on which is also to be found two antique horse-drawn carriages and the frame only of what must once have been a home — unfortunately it was at this point that my camera batteries ran out.

It had been a long time since I went to the Terminus, so I went over for dinner last evening. It is a good place, and the food is top nosh. Miss K went out on a limb and had a lentil and pumpkin tagine and was not disappointed, while I had a chicken parmigiana which was better than the Carringush’s. As usual, either meal would have done us both.And here’s the front bar, as it appeared to my camera last night (it had had a bit too much to drink as its wrist cord was drooping at one stage into my pint of amber ale and was wicking up into its thirsty little central processing unit):