Bear’s Wine Bar in North Melbourne serves perfect potato cakes

June 10, 2025
1:45 am

This warm bear hug of a venue has plenty to offer, but its fate is tied to this excellent snack with startling crunch.

Critics’ Pick

Contemporary$$

Has winter’s generalised bah humbug disorder set in yet? If so, the perfect antidote can be found at a snug wine bar in North Melbourne, where the humble potato cake has received a glow-up for the ages.

Shaped like a flip-flop – a child’s size 10, at a guess – they’re a hefty, triple-cooked beast. Rich and creamy innards are cased in a rice and tapioca flour batter enlivened with bicarb soda and a flash of sherry vinegar, which react into a filigree of startling crunch. The sound is what you’d get if you were inclined to chew fine crystal glassware into a microphone. It’s like eating the Danish concept of hygge.

This being a wine bar and not the neighbourhood fish and chipper, there’s creme fraiche and lumpfish caviar to swipe these bad boys through, though just like any self-respecting local, they’re fond of throwing in an extra one for free (a serve is nominally $16 for three, but the room is full of couples cooing over their unexpected windfall).

Just add chicken salt and call them a late entry to the retro-nostalgia party that has seen Australian chefs embrace everything from Iced VoVos to vol-au-vents.

Bear’s Wine Bar is filled with those warm hygge vibes.Penny Stephens

The Queensberry Street hang is a great place to indulge your yearning for a kinder, simpler time. Austin Kangket and sommelier Nathan Schofield met while working together at Supernormal and took the plunge into doing things their way last year. Their ye olde shopfront is a beacon on a rapidly greying evening. Rough red brick walls and warm hued lighting are a dramatic code-switch from the street.

Being primarily a wine bar (I think), Bear’s is a place to ponder the great existential question: what is dinner, anyway?

A menu of mini cocktails is designed to aid the inquiry: a half-sized negroni, Tommy’s margarita and even a rye whisky and pony chaser that won’t send you to the sobriety wall. The clever wine list runs to their theme of “interesting wine from interesting producers” from all around Oz. Go by the glass and varieties such as gruner veltliner, garganega and marsanne muscle out old mates sauv blanc and chardonnay.

Natalie Imbruglia proved you can have one hit and coast on it for the rest of your career, but Bear’s menu is a pick-and-mix collection of club bangers disguised as snacky share plates.

Produce comes from Natoora, an ethical supplier that connects sustainable, small-scale farmers directly with restaurants – hurray for hyper-seasonality and Red Bison potatoes.

Kangaroo dimmies.Penny Stephens

The proximity to the Queen Vic Market plays its hand in the kangaroo dimmies, with the lean macropod meat mixed with bacon for a bit of fatty heft. Dip them into black vinegar for happy days. They suffer from the classic construction issue of fried dimmies everywhere – the puck of meat pops out of a wonton wrapper with no consideration for anyone who might be wearing white – but I’m happy to see roo staking its rightful place on a menu like this.

Prawn toast enjoys its current victory lap here, using the house-baked focaccia as its carby base and adding a sprightly burnt chilli mayo.

Pork belly dressed in ’nduja and honey.Penny Stephens

Miso eggplant topped with puffed grains is a little mono-dimensional but makes sense as a companion piece to the pork belly. Twice-cooked belly in its cubist abstract form is tossed in a dressing of ’nduja and honey; there’s plum adding its fruity sweetness and the bitter lilt of radicchio coming in from left field. It’s grand.

The sole dessert has me uttering a phrase so improbable it could be a secret code alerting friends to a kidnapping: I’ll have the deep-fried Tim Tam.

It’s a timely point to mention chef Gareth Thomson is a Scot. His CV boasts some exalted Glaswegian spots; nonetheless, it’s in his DNA to immerse popular confectionery items in roiling oil. This $15 Tim Tam riff crunches and squishes in all the places you would expect. The commercial vanilla ice-cream is fine, but the batter turns my mind irrevocably back to the only (potato) cake that matters here.

I’m sorry to essentialise Bear’s into one dish. This warm bear hug of a venue has plenty to offer across the board, but its fate is tied to this potato cake. Take it off the menu and there will be consequences.