The critic’s verdict on George Calombaris’ new restaurant, Hellenic House Project

Previous SlideNext Slide

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: There are many people who think that George Calombaris should fade into obscurity, never to own another restaurant or get any media coverage, forever doomed to pay penance for his company’s wage underpayment scandal. There are also many fans of Calombaris, whether it be for the food at his previous restaurants, or his status as a celebrity chef and television personality.

Most readers, I suspect, fall into neither category, and simply want to know whether a new restaurant is good enough to visit, worth the money, and all the other things a restaurant review generally covers. (These readers tend to be far less vocal in their opinions than the fans, and especially less so than the George-haters.)

Should someone’s past mistakes preclude them from any kind of successful present? That’s not for me to say. And, frankly, it’s slightly irrelevant, because whether you like it or not, Calombaris does have a new restaurant and people are going there in droves.

If you take Calombaris at his word, Hellenic House Project in Highett is an attempt to get back to his roots, to create a small-scale place that feels like a home, where he can care for his team and his guests in a far more personal manner than he was able to when he was the face of multiple venues that employed hundreds of workers.

On a recent appearance on the Dirty Linen podcast, created by Good Food contributor Dani Valent, Calombaris acknowledged that perhaps he wasn’t good at running a huge company in which he often didn’t know the names of his employees. What he is good at, he hopes, is running a neighbourhood joint with a souvlaki bar downstairs called The Kitchen and a dining room upstairs called The Good Room – a play on the idea that in many Greek homes, daily eating is done in the kitchen, and bigger more celebratory meals are served in a different, more formal space.

Even so, you shouldn’t expect the kind of formality you might have seen at his hatted (and now defunct) Press Club.

Hellenic House Project is focused on street food downstairs and home-style cooking upstairs, all imbued with clever cheffy twists that keep you from saying “I could do this at home”. For the most part, you probably couldn’t do this at home. Because love him or hate him, Calombaris is an excellent cook.

He’s helped in this endeavour by head chef Anthony Thalassinos. In The Kitchen, they’re serving dips, souvlakis, salads and chips. The chips ($9.50) are perfectly hot and crisp, but only live up to their full potential if you add feta, garlic oil and oregano (a $3.50 addition), at which point they become a snacking masterpiece.

Souvlaki range from traditional slow-roasted lamb ($16.90) and prawn kataifi ($17.90) to a daily special ($21.90) that was tender pork the day I visited, wrapped in so much pickled cabbage and onion it was downright puckery.

Upstairs, The Good Room is painted a deep shade of blue, with a large glassed-in wine wall and an intimate feel (only 44 seats).

Calombaris and Thalassinos excel at taking utterly traditional dishes and adding just the right amount of zhuzh to make them thrilling. The eggplant dip ($14.50) is adorned with sweet fat mussels, and the dolmade ($16.50) are made with shiso and draped with raw kingfish.

Love him or hate him, Calombaris is an excellent cook. 

The giant prawns you’d expect to see at any decent Greek restaurant are here drowned in ouzo, cooked, slathered in butter imbued with taramasalata, and served over sliced green tomato ($32). The effect is resplendent, an overload of seafood flavour pierced by the subtle anise of the ouzo and the tartness of the tomato.

Saganaki ($22) comes in a sizzling cast-iron pan with individual wells for the rounds of cheese, which each have a scoop of black garlic and fig paste at the bottom.

Tuna kibbeh ($17.50) is like a racy tartare piled atop a crisp made with a cheesy Vegemite scroll. (Yes, it really has Vegemite; yes, it works beautifully in this context.)

Mains tend to be slightly more traditional. There’s a lemony barbecued chicken ($32), grilled fish that changes weekly, and the requisite hunk of lamb shoulder ($55, feeds two). But what a glorious falling-apart hunk it is, with a glaze made from peppered prune, and a tzatziki made umami-rich thanks to the addition of dashi.

It’s worth noting that the staff here are extremely welcoming and seem genuinely excited to be representing this chef and this food. If the goal is to achieve an atmosphere akin to welcoming someone into a home, they’ve absolutely done that.

Does all of this – the quality, the welcome, the warmth – absolve Calombaris of his former sins? Again, that’s not for me to say. And again, your own feelings about it are probably valid and likely irrelevant: The Good Room is booked well into the latter part of this year. George is going to be fine.