Hotel Nest

It's not the best way to start dinner. Arriving to a screeching noise, only to discover that entertainer Vanessa Amorosi is performing for a private party, more or less where you're planning to eat.

To make safe haven on the other side of the throng, we must run the gauntlet of party girls, and the aural assault of a song. Not a calming experience.

Now don't misunderstand me. Live music is great. Standing in front of foldback speakers holding beers (plural) chanting Two Cabs to the Toucan was important to my development as an adult. I'm just not sure live music and smart dining make comfortable bedfellows, even when it's someone as talented as Ms Amorosi.

And Hotel Nest does promise smart dining.

The pub many will remember as The Red Eagle has been done up. The GDP of a Pacific island nation with a diminishing coastline has been spent re-christening her the good ship Hotel Nest. It has more bright-red Illy coffee machines, white marble benchtops and bottles of Aesop mandarin hand-wash than anywhere else in Melbourne. There are bars, lounges, private dining zones and, of course, a restaurant. Pubs are the new restaurants.

It's just that getting to it this particular night requires fording the Amorosi stream. And, until the party subsides, keeping the big doors shut, giving the faintly sterile dining room a rather claustrophobic personality.

It's a high-ceilinged, white-walled room with tall, multi-panel Victorian doors, tall window frames draped in sheer fabric, dark carpet, a few clever wall lights (no signature pendants from the ceiling) bentwood bistro chairs and a large vintage Billecart print on one wall. I like vintage booze prints, but...

You might call it Comme-Lite; it shares design values with the city restaurant but the finished product lacks the same punch.

Mind you, any dining room is difficult to inject with life when the doors are shut, Amorosi's mob is partying and your table of two is the entire customer base. Fortunately, things change.

The noise drops, doors open and more diners arrive. Add a couple of friendly, professional staff, a bottle of excellent wine and what starts as a relatively fraught dinner eventually relaxes into something you would be happier to exchange cash for.

Cash. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? How much of it they want and what you get in return. And in the food and wine department, Nest has a pretty keen pencil. You may have noticed $14.50 entrees in your local all-day breakfast place lately, so seeing several here, given the quality of the crockery, service - and of course, cooking - comes as a pleasant surprise. Ditto mains. And a super wine list.

Paul Raynor is the chef, and his menu is your classic Brit-Pack mixed bag, although most of these things have been around since his days at Stokehouse. A while.

There's nothing wrong with that; just be warned that Nest isn't breaking a lot of new territory. And while the food's pretty good for the money, we can see in several instances how prices are kept reasonable.

A "traditional Hopkins River (that's the beef's origin) tartare" ($14.50) with a quail-yolk crown and garlic croutons has a bit of piquancy but fairly ordinary capers stop it reaching great heights.

Interestingly (or arrogantly), no salt and pepper is furnished and more than once, one or both might have helped.

The smoked haddock risotto, for example, served with a poached egg on a very groovy ribbed plate, a Raynor signature ($15). It's a nice northern England meets the Veneto sort of hybrid, this, but a little more seasoning and bit more smoky character to the fish would have helped. Maybe a little less dill in the risotto and better-quality parmesan over the top, too.

A tanned lobster boudin (sausage filled with a light mousse, $16) is served on "truffled leeks" (not a lot of truffle) and a sauce Americaine, a brick-red, well-made butter/tomato/shallot/white wine/brandy liquid. Again, very smart crockery.

A whole pigeon ($28) is the sort of thing you would expect a Brit chef to do well. The breast meat, still on the carcass but easy to remove, is crimson, almost bloody and, really, quite perfect. There's a kind of crisp potato wafer roesti, cauliflower polonaise (with herbs, hard-boiled egg and fried breadcrumbs), whole grapes and a fairly fruity sauternes jus, which in itself I'd call an interesting partnership with a red-meat game bird.

Still, it's pretty serious cooking and effort for $28.

You'd have to say the same, too, of a king dory fillet ($28.50) pan-fried a smidge too far, perhaps, that arrives on slightly creamy, dill-speckled saffron "nage" with mussels, yabbie meat and cubes of chorizo. The sauce is nicely balanced and of pleasing consistency, although perhaps a bit "round" in texture: acid somewhere, to offset richness, might have helped.

Mains seem to make side dishes almost redundant. For the record, pommes frites are in fact fat, hand-cut chips ($5.50) while a salad of rocket, fennel and orange for the same price works pretty well.

A fig tarte tatin ($13) with truffled honey and vanilla ice-cream has a particularly pleasing sound to a fig-and-puff-pastry enthusiast but fails to convey quite the sweetness of it all, sadly, and the truffle impact is, again, subtle. Decent idea.

The rhubarb-and-pear crumble ($12.50) is more like decent poached fruit topped with muesli, a loose gravel of grainy stuff with no buttery/caramelised character. With table and wine service that almost makes up for its deficiencies, it's a crumble in name but not tradition.

A bit like Hotel Nest itself. A pub in name (and perhaps liquor licence) but not like the pubs most of us grew up in with grungy decor, appalling food, lousy beer, and noisy live music.

And Nest promises the music was a one-off.

Rating system 

1-9: Unacceptable. 10-11: Just OK, some shortcomings. 12: Fair.  13: Getting there. 14: Recommended. 15: Good. 16: Really good. 17: Truly excellent. 18: Outstanding. 19-20: Approaching perfection, Victoria's best.