Dining at Suze feels like watching the zeitgeist evolve in real time, says Besha Rodell, a fan of its bold cooking. But you’ll need to follow her game plan to avoid an all-out acid trip.
14/20
Contemporary$$
Here’s an equation: Take a small Melbourne restaurant, and multiply it by the power of wine bar. Add the coolness of Fitzroy North and two longstanding hospo professionals. What does it add up to? Suze.
Located in the two-storey corner building on Newry Street that most recently housed One Trick Pony, Suze is all angles and old windows and slate grey walls punctuated by bright angular modern art. Downstairs, a central slab of a bar is surrounded by tables tucked into the wall, while a staircase leads to a first floor open kitchen facing the intimate dining room.
Anchoring the kitchen pass, which has more cooks in it than seems physically advisable, is Steve Harry, a chef who has worked at Napier Quarter, Auterra and a host of other notable Melbourne venues. His partner, Giulia Giorgetti, oversees the front of house, which operates with the kind of friendly, informed cool that the inner north does best.
Is Suze an amalgamation of all the experience these two bring from all the other Melbourne wine bar-type restaurants they’ve had a hand in? Or is it a progression, a leap forward? I can’t quite tell – there’s a certain Parisian cool to the place, a move away from Italy as inspiration. It wouldn’t be the first time (or even the fifth) that Melbourne made this sidestep, but it feels very of-the-now at Suze, as if you’re watching the zeitgeist evolve in real time.
Harry’s menu is both familiar and wild, with dishes that might appear on other menus but wouldn’t taste nearly this bold or flavour-packed. There’s a house-made ricotta covered with a layer of lush sliced persimmon and doused in pepperberries that are downright prickly on the tongue, a punch of spice that’s as unexpected as it is beguiling. Raw fish – silky slabs of meaty tuna the day I ate it – swims in Tasmanian wasabi with puckery desert lime. A spanner crab linguine is a high-acid, high-intensity flavour bomb.
If you look at the descriptions above, there are a lot of adjectives somewhat synonymous with the word “acidic”, and that’s the biggest issue with the cooking at Suze. Individually, these dishes sing, but one after another? The acid trip can go off the rails.
If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to every chef it is: Sit in your own restaurant and eat a full meal, all the way through. Because so many dishes are amazing as one-offs when you’re in creation mode, but when strung together with every other dish, the experience can be wildly different to what you encounter while standing in the kitchen with a tasting spoon. If I were to try one bite of any dish at Suze, then I’d be swooning. As a single bar of music, this food is glorious; when you play the whole album, there is too much treble and not enough bass.
It would be unfair for me to say that every single dish on this menu is wildly acidic, it’s too easy to wind up going in that direction. But there are ways for diners to mitigate this potential. Have the Bay of Fire cheddar gougeres. Pick either the raw fish or the ricotta, but not both.
If you’re going for the whole fish, a glorious flounder in a very perky caper sauce fattened up with bone marrow, pair it with the agnolotti, delicate and heavy on the comte, with an overload of nutmeg that’s bold and brilliant. Maybe save the vinegar-forward braised rainbow chard for another day (say, when you’re in the mood for the lamb rump).
Whether you’re on acid overload or not, I’m going to say you should still order the grapefruit sorbetto because it’s maybe the best grapefruit dessert I’ve had in Australia, embracing the bitterness of the citrus while tamping it down with the sweetness of Suze, the restaurant’s namesake French aperitif, and giving it spiky energy with a smattering of pink peppercorn.
There’s also a tulumba, a dense Turkish doughnut, coated in a syrup made from black garlic that’s so umami-rich and dense that it almost reminds me of Vegemite. It works! I swear!
‘As a single bar of music this food is glorious; when you play the whole album, there is too much treble and not enough bass.’
It’s not easy to get a table at Suze these days, and I can see why. The vibe is perfect for this moment in time. The cooking is bold and creative. The wine list is varied and approachable and full of bargains. It’s an immensely fun place to spend an evening or a leisurely Sunday afternoon. And Harry and Giorgetti are a formidable team, so much so that I expect to see their influence in Melbourne restaurants for years to come, acid and all.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Modern Melbourne wine bar squared
Go-to dishes: Ricotta with persimmon ($22); agnolotti ($32); grapefruit sorbetto ($12)
Drinks: Short list with a focus on French, Italian and Australian wines, plus a fun selection of aperitifs
Cost: About $150 for two before drinks
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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