Thi Le and J.Y. Lee’s Viet-Australian restaurant is not a slick machine, but it has soul − and creativity − in spades.
15/20
Vietnamese$$
In the introduction to Thi Le’s new cookbook, Viet Kieu, Le’s partner in life and business, Jia-Yen Lee, writes with moving compassion about the chef’s struggles as a Vietnamese-Australian, born in a Malaysian refugee camp and raised in western Sydney, who didn’t fit in with her Anglo Australian school peers or the Vietnamese community.
There is significant trauma in Le’s backstory, including sexual abuse and struggles with her own sexual identity, and Lee writes frankly about the anger issues that arise from these circumstances, including “the physical and emotional outbursts that have manifested from the stresses of running a small business”.
I thought of this while dining at Anchovy, Le and Lee’s Viet-Australian restaurant in Richmond, on a recent busy weekend night. As usual, Lee was running front-of-house and Le was in the kitchen, but it appeared they were pretty severely understaffed on the service side. (They have recently been advertising for front-of-house staff.) Lee was the only dedicated service person on the floor, and things such as cocktail orders would derail her ability to get to tables and take orders in a timely fashion.
Quickly, Le emerged from the kitchen, the two of them working in an almost mind-meld synchronicity, Le slipping into a waiter role for the moments when Lee was side-tracked. Despite the obvious stress of the situation, both of them presented as calm and friendly and completely in control, and while it sometimes took longer to place an order than might be standard, no one seemed to mind; the feel in the room remained celebratory, neighbourly, convivial.
While I’m sure it wasn’t a particularly fun night for either woman, their stress never seeped into the experience of the guests, and it appeared to me to be a master class in the way to handle the obvious pitfalls of running a small business – it may be that Le has struggled in the past with handling this type of situation, but you’d never know it from what I saw (and I tend to absorb the emotional energy in a room, to a disconcerting degree).
Almost every time I eat Le’s cooking, I come away with one or more dishes that I know I’ll be thinking about for years.
In some senses, this year marks Anchovy’s 10th anniversary, though it’s not a straightforward timeline. Le and Lee have toyed with moving the restaurant, but they came across various logistical and bureaucratic issues along the way. For a time, they operated Joew out of this space, serving a fantastic Laotian menu. Last year, they relaunched Anchovy here in its original location: a classic intimate Melbourne shopfront dining room.
Almost every time I eat Le’s cooking, I come away with one or more dishes that I know I’ll be thinking about for years. Most recently, that was a gorgeous plate of rosa radicchio, its pink mottled leaves pulled apart and then reassembled into its flower-like formation, each crisp and lightly bitter leaf filled with juicy smoked duck that had been imbued with fragrant galangal. The crunch of cashew, the snap of the chicory, the lushness of the meat, all added up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.
Le’s use of cashew throughout the menu is somewhat of a signature. Scattered across the whole fish with turmeric, it lends a softer, more mellow nuttiness than peanuts would, complementing the green herbs rather than competing with them.
There’s an abalone sandwich that showcases Le’s playfulness with Australiana, the bouncy abalone meat a sweet stand-in for fried fish on soft white bread, complimented by the deep umami of anchovy mayo.
A bright dish of prawns and papaya is accompanied by the prawniest prawn crackers you’ve ever had, a glory of crisp oceanic funk.
As always, Lee is a very fun wine conversationalist, and her list is uncommonly attuned to the menu. The house riesling, made in collaboration with Victorian winemaker Sierra Reed, is especially good – you can sense it was engineered for this restaurant and this food.
Anchovy is a profoundly human restaurant, for all kinds of reasons. Most of those reasons have to do with the creativity and deliciousness of the food and drink, and the genuine welcome you’ll feel. It is a shining example of what makes Melbourne a great restaurant town, precisely because it is so imbued with the soul of its owners. It is not a slick machine – it is a deeply personal expression of place and culture and the sometimes messy but always fascinating intersection of passion and business.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Classic but minimalist; the personality here is all in the food and service
Go-to dishes: Rosa radicchio with smoked duck ($30); abalone sandwich ($34); prawns and papaya ($36)
Drinks: Short, smart cocktail list, exciting international wine list that’s engineered for the food
Cost: About $170 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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