Vinesmith’s two-storey space is set up for tastings from two wineries at street level, but it’s the upstairs bistro that excites me most, writes Besha Rodell.
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If you look at the website for Vinesmith, the cellar door and bistro that opened late last year at the tippy top of Flinders Lane, you might surmise that the entire enterprise has been conceived and executed by a slick advertising agency.
A chocolate colour palette matches the stylised photos of customers tasting through the collections of two Victorian wineries, Glenlofty Estate and Blue Pyrenees. There are subheadings such as “experience architectural excellence” and “shop our selection”. It all looks very much like a brochure for an upscale luxury apartment complex, or, yes, a regional Victorian winery with a hefty advertising budget. In some ways, that’s exactly what it is.
Vinesmith is a project of Roger Richmond-Smith, a businessman who also owns the aforementioned wineries in the Pyrenees region of Central Victoria. The two-storey space (which used to house Kappo downstairs and Hihou upstairs) is set up as a cellar door at street level, where you can book tastings as if you were at the wineries themselves, and a bistro upstairs with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Treasury Gardens.
The idea of an urban cellar door is interesting, and I can see the marketing potential for a well-known label, though the utility to the public is questionable. Why go to a bar where only a couple of producers are featured when there are so many alternatives with broad selections? Take away the actual vineyard, the novelty of drinking wine that comes from the surrounding landscape, and the cellar door concept loses some of its romance.
Luckily, Vinesmith has a few secret weapons. Its service staff, helmed by venue manager Yuhan Jiang, is mostly young, French and extremely well trained. And its kitchen, led by chef Richard Hayes, is turning out excellent food that straddles the line between classic and modern French cooking with clever assuredness. Hayes is Australian, but he has trained in Paris and London, and his technical skill and talent for old-school knifework are evident.
There’s an elegance to this cooking that’s rare, a combination of inventiveness and classicism that strikes a perfect balance.
Downstairs, there’s a flexible a la carte menu that provides snacks or a full meal; in the upstairs bistro, the dinner menu costs $95, with a choice of entree, main and dessert. Before those, you’ll start with nibbles – perhaps a tartlet of smooth eggplant topped with a white anchovy, buoyed by a hint of tahini hidden in the silky puree. A lettuce leaf comes holding a tumble of eel and apple. It’s all fresh crunch and smoky eel topped with a chiffonade of herbs.
Many dishes take one extremely classic component – such as a deeply flavoured, seriously rich prawn bisque – and add a modern twist. In this instance, the bisque comes with a round of diced potatoes, fat hunks of prawn and the zing of finger lime.
A gorgeous veloute au noix – basically a luxuriant walnut soup – is poured over a tangle of shimeji mushrooms. Chou farci au lapin is a showcase of tender shredded rabbit meat wrapped tightly in a cabbage leaf, with a daub of prune puree and a pile of strikingly fresh purple kale.
There’s an elegance to this cooking that’s rare, a combination of inventiveness and classicism that strikes a perfect balance. You can tell no shortcuts have been taken, from the textbook pork and duck country terrine, to the hefty house-baked sourdough, to the intense fruit flavour packed into the blueberry sorbet on the Basque cheesecake dessert.
The wine list, as you might imagine, is dominated by Glenlofty and Blue Pyrenees, especially when it comes to glass pours. But the broader list is about 40 per cent non-house wines, which are mostly French and include some bottles of exceptional value.
Richmond-Smith has grand plans for Vinesmith, hoping to export the concept to Sydney, Brisbane and possibly Shanghai. Apparently, he baulks at people referring to this first location as a “restaurant” – he wants the venue to be known primarily as a cellar door. His staff are fully on board with this hierarchy, and their enthusiasm in selling Vinesmith as an extension of the winemaking brand is admirable.
But what excites me most are the things that pertain to its identity as – gasp – a restaurant. The broader wine curation is fantastic, and there’s great food to be had on both levels. I’m not sure how easily replicated those elements will be in other cities, but for now we’re lucky to have this version in Melbourne.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Corporate winery chic.
Go-to dishes: Country terrine ($27); chou farci au lapin (part of the $95 set menu); veloute au noix (part of set menu).
Drinks: Mostly Glenlofty and Blue Pyrenees Estate wines, with a lot of fun and affordable French wines on the bottle list.
Cost: $95 per person at dinner, excluding drinks; two- and three-course lunch menus are $49 and $59 respectively.
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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