The Age Good Food Guide 2016: Melbourne's top 10 dishes of the year
1. Flounder's fin nigiri at Minamishima
Forget tuna belly. It's all about the fin. Here at his eponymous sushi restaurant, Koichi Minamishima takes the soft, buttery strip of fat-rich flesh from the flounder and runs a blowtorch over it, just for a second. It smells like a grilled marshmallow and somehow eats like a firm slice of toasted butter, laid over the base of on-point rice – cream in colour and lightly fusty from the vinegar. Watching him put it together in a tandem with Hajime Horiguchi is one of the best experiences your dining dollar can buy right now.
2. Pâté so at Anchovy
On the one hand, this little pork pie is possibly one of the less impressive dishes at Anchovy, where Vietnamese cooking is filtered through modern techniques, and served with a tight list of wines, but it sums up what they're about. The buttery pastry shell filled with gingery pork mince and flecks of wood-ear mushroom, amped with pickled fennel and mustard is as much a mission statement as a snack. It's pretty much a written command to sit at the bar, order seven for dinner and regret nothing.
3. Ocean tartare at Kappo
Kappo came out swinging when it opened in late 2014. Everything about the place from the dense carpets to the chance to choose-your-own-chopsticks is considered, refined. The omakase-style degustation is built on a daily changing list of ingredients that you get to pick or nix but has consistently had at its heart this ocean tartare, an assortment of sea treats that may include sea grapes, uni, salty roe and diced squid and little black sesame crumbs you get to chop and mix into one pure taste of the ocean.
4. Cow udder, corn and crab at Lume
Another one from the book of who knew? Of all the wild witchcraft going on at Shaun Quade and John-Paul Fiechtner's Lume, the dish that sounds the most confronting, by virtue of it featuring shaved ribbons of cured-and-scorched cow's udder, also happens to be the most polished. The combination of silky crab mustard, moulded to look like a baby corn, served with corn silk, a little marjoram for perfume and a big polenta crisp delivers a both-hands-in-the-air-moment for originality, balance and beauty. It's everything they're aiming for in one bite.
5. All the pasta at Tipo 00
The restaurant is named after the flour used to make pasta for a reason. This place is a beautifully curated chamber of torture for coeliacs. Except that it's not – they take as good care of the gluten-intolerant here as they do everyone else. It's that kind of place. But really, it must be hell to see the glossy black strings of tagliolini stained with squid ink, twisted into a tornado with little flecks of white squid, bright orange roe and pungent bottarga (that crumbly dust of salt-cured tuna belly) glowing like delicious debris. Or the juicy shredded rabbit with pappardelle. Pure hell.
6. Tonkatsu sandwich at Supernormal
One of the best thing that happened this year was the peace treaty with white bread. In Sydney, Guillaume has been pumping out chicken finger sandwiches and we've been doing katsu on soft slices of white. Supernormal serves up crumbed pork, piquant Bull-Dog sauce and shredded cabbage between two slices of well-buttered fluffy bread.
7. Mackerel, black sesame and chilli-lime snow at Nora Small Dinner Club
There's also a crunchy sliver of watermelon compressed with mirin in the mix in this contemporary Thai dish, which has the richness of fresh raw mackerel and sesame paste countered by the surprising fire power of icy-hot chilli-lime snow. Multi-talented cafe owner Sarin Rojanametin, of Nora, plated this for the Fridays-only dinners that put the likes of puffed fish bladders and silky bantam legs on the menu.
8. Charred fennel, baby corn and pork fat broth at IDES
Peter Gunn has had a busy year. When he's not being the sous chef at Attica, he's organising his once-a-month pop-up restaurant IDES, where you might get the likes of a porky, smoky, fragrant broth made from charred fennel and pork bones, washing around al dente baby corn, barely cooked in more buttered-up pork stock, joined in the bowl by cubes of rendered pork fat, chopped coriander stalks and a powder of dried lime and star anise. It's clear proof that Gunn is going places.
9. Milk and honey at Highline at the Railway Hotel
Simon Tarlington, who cut his teeth at Quay in Sydney, has spent the past six months cooking at Highline, a restaurant with lofty intentions above a Windsor pub once better known for its 24-hour bottle shop. He's doing technically impressive things with produce from the pub owners' farm. That includes a dessert of the year – a milk and honey dish where you get a snowdrift in a bowl of dehydrated milk-skin crisps – some plain, others infused with honey and a meringue-like version whipped with sugar. Dig through the debris to find a dense honey cake and syrup, and the subtle softness of a mousse that tastes like chilled milk sucked though an Anzac biscuit.
10. Cucumber and buttermilk at O.My
These guys. The brothers Bertoncello have done some seriously impressive stuff at their restaurant in Beaconsfield, including growing most of the produce that fills the plates every day. There's not a patch of dirt in or around their property they haven't pressed into service. So they have a natural respect for what comes out of it and are well able to let the likes of cucumber maintain its integrity in a sweet-savoury dessert of buttermilk and cucumber sorbets wearing cucumber slices and vanilla meringue like a light, delicious hat.
The Age Good Food Guide 2016 will be available for $10 with The Saturday Age on Saturday, September 26 from participating newsagents and supermarkets while stocks last. It can also be purchased in selected bookshops and online at theageshop.com.au/agegfg2016 for $24.99. #goodfoodguide
Gemima Cody is former chief restaurant critic for The Age and Good Food.