Mood-lit restaurant Juni plays it safe with a selection of greatest hits from Michael Lambie’s pan-Asian playbook.
13/20
Modern Asian$$
If you’ve eaten in any large Western city in the world in the past 40 years, chances are you know the scene: Throbbing, lightly electronic music; a dark room lit by a red light glow; fruity cocktails with almost risqué names; a large menu that touches on Thailand and China and possibly Vietnam or Malaysia. It’s tempting to think of the modern pan-Asian restaurant as cliché, and yet it is so pervasive and so popular that it’s possible the more appropriate word is classic.
Juni, the new restaurant from Michael Lambie, is all of the above, a pan-Asian restaurant from central casting.
Lambie is no stranger to this genre, having bought Melbourne’s Lucy Liu in 2014, before selling it in 2020 and decamping to the Gold Coast, where he opened Rubi Red, which played with a similar set of looks, vibes and flavours.
Now back in Melbourne, Lambie is doing what he knows in an Exhibition Street space that looks and feels quite a lot like Lucy Liu, only darker and redder.
Is it so bad that everything about the place feels familiar? Some would call that comfort. If you compare the menu of Juni and Lucy Liu, the preparations, ingredients and even menu categories are strikingly similar. This isn’t a criticism – Lambie has written a successful playbook, and he’s got a right to use it.
The drinks are pure fun, with names such as “Stormy Daniels” (a riff on the porn star martini), and eminently drinkable. Subtle they’re not, but neither are they saccharine nor overwrought.
I particularly liked the Origami Glider, made with Mekhong Whiskey, chilli-infused Aperol, amaro, lemon and ginger bitters. It was tropical but balanced – someone who knows what they’re doing worked on these cocktails. (Wine feels a little less considered, a kind of something-for-everyone list without a real point of view.)
Juni has oysters, fresh and creamy and cold, with a perky nam jim sauce and aromatic lime leaf. There is wagyu beef tartare, with betel leaves for wrapping. Is the nam prik pao, used for flavouring, a little blunt, a bit too sweet; are the rice crackers served alongside a little less than perfectly crunchy? Perhaps.
Dumplings made from crayfish in a ginger sauce are slippery and delicate. Fried eggplant is perfectly crisp but a little bland apart from the palm sugar caramel drizzled on top.
By the time I got to the dry-aged half duck with cucumber, pickled daikon and spicy hoisin, I was content if not wowed by the food. It did what it set out to do: to go well with cocktails, to appeal to a wide range of diners, to be interesting without being challenging.
But the duck was a true disappointment: the flesh overcooked, the fat under the skin sitting un-rendered, the accompanying pancakes too heavy, too gummy.
There has been fantastic Peking duck in Melbourne since before I was born, and it’s hard to understand why you’d want this version instead, if not for the drinks and the scene and that good-for-Instagram red glow. But in the nine years since Lucy Liu opened, we have gained so many worthy South-East Asian restaurants, at every level, in every setting.
I’m not a slave to authenticity, nor am I a reverse snob who thinks great noodles can be had only from hole-in-the-wall digs, but that’s the glory of our current era of Thai and Malaysian and Chinese food: greatness can be found with or without cocktails, in restaurants where the wine list is as serious as the food, in sleek rooms and shabby rooms, and everything in between.
Juni is familiar, and some of the food is tasty, and the lighting is sexy as hell. The staff are friendly and efficient. But there are so many brilliant alternatives these days that I’d be hard-pressed to heartily recommend it in its current iteration.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Swanky and red-lit; not quite a club restaurant, but getting there
Go-to dishes: Origami Glider cocktail ($25); oysters with nam jim ($6.50 each); crayfish dumplings ($24)
Drinks: Fruity and fun cocktails and mocktails; wine list without much focus but suits a wide range of tastes
Cost: About $150 for two before drinks
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