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Pascale Bar & Grill review

Gemima Cody
Gemima Cody

Go-to dish: Whiting in a pretzel crumb.
Go-to dish: Whiting in a pretzel crumb.Wayne Taylor

13.5/20

Contemporary$$$

There is a breakfast drink of camel's milk and Baileys at Pascale. Served hot. Something that might surprise if this weren't the jewel in the crown of QT, Melbourne's shiny new experiential hotel, which asked prospective employees to do a Zoolander-style walk-off when they "auditioned" for jobs.

Hotels have long been cashing in on the local dime when it comes to their restaurants. See Monster in Canberra's Hotel Hotel, and Automata in Sydney's Old Clare. Melbourne is a tough crowd and QT has hit the ground with heavy artillery. Downstairs, Korean-Japanese bar Hot Sauce serves excellent fried chicken and drinks. A Japanese knife shop and cake purveyor selling eclairs and cocktails feeds all your addictions.

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The interior of Pascale Bar & Grill.
The interior of Pascale Bar & Grill.Wayne Taylor

There are niceties to hotel dining. Door people welcome you and get your cab home. A stuffed peacock guards the stairs, and staff are designer-clad. You try not to trip on a flowing gown as they take you to leather booths. Swirling glass encloses a temperature-controlled pastry cube. There is a huge cocktail bar bristling with shiny studs where getting hollered at by men with year-round tans is still on the cards.

Everything is bigger, bolder, shinier. This extends to a menu that's incredibly broad but with a seemingly singular brief: to cram as much luxury into each dish as possible. Chef Robert Marchetti is on food direction and executive chef Paul Easson (last seen at Rockpool Bar & Grill Melbourne) is beside him.

No bell, whistle, animal fat or adjective has been spared. Oysters are billed as "live". Multiple things are bathed in camel milk, including fried chicken. There's no point fretting whether the $28 cauliflower cheese is worth it. Call it hotel tax. You're either willing to pay it or you're not.

Festival of luxe: clam carbornara.
Festival of luxe: clam carbornara.Wayne Taylor
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Reading the menu feels like you're participating in performance art. It starts with a "choux box" of (very) crisp profiteroles piped with cheesy foam and a ghost of truffle paste.

Next a sardine toastie takes our well-trained waitress longer to explain than for us to eat: the fish is butterflied, boned, sandwiched in rye, bookended by its own head and tail, schmeared with a sea urchin and black garlic butter and topped with a capery dressing. It's fishy, oily and zingy, but a case of so much happening that you get the flavour equivalent of white noise.

Frilly morel mushrooms are glistening bombs filled with foie gras and ham, bedded on cheesy gruyere grits with a butter moat. Clam-peppered fresh spaghetti is spooled through a cream sauce, crested with salted fish roe bottarga and glistening black avruga pearls. Luxe, yes, but mostly reminiscent of fishy alfredo. It's as if every dish is directed by Baz Luhrmann and by three courses in we're sending half of everything back, senses overloaded.

Tomato and friends salad at Pascale.
Tomato and friends salad at Pascale.Supplied

Granted, we've ordered richly. There is a lighter section of poke (the Hawaiian chopped raw fish dish of right now) and salads. But we could also have gone bigger. Our budget doesn't allow for the wagyu beef tomahawk – that neanderthal steak on a foot-long bone at $95 a head, minimum four people. Instead we opt for Flinders Island long lamb chops, excellent meat we would love to see in two parts so the tender eye fillets and sinewy ribs get the separate cooking treatments each needs.

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Whiting fillets are pleasantly caught in a golden pretzel crumb. Fried duck drumsticks in a star anise-fragrant batter come with soft buns, blitzed cucumber, Vegemite-y rather than sweet kecap manis to counter intense candied orange peel for building. It's a little off-balance, sadly.

Soft meringue in a camel milk creme anglaise – it tastes innocuously like a soy milk custard – with fresh raspberries beneath a nut-studded white chocolate shell is weirdness that works.

The 'Napoleon Blanky' raspberry millefeuille.
The 'Napoleon Blanky' raspberry millefeuille.Wayne Taylor

QT is the kind of quirky hotel I want to stay in, despite living within walking distance. It's serving a considered and on-trend selection of Australian, German and French wines. Drinking cocktails on the huge rooftop bar will be fun come summer. And chefs are going to envy Pascale's exhaust systems, Josper ovens and robata grills.

The razzle-dazzle does it for me everywhere but the plate. Less here would be so much more.

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Gemima CodyGemima Cody is former chief restaurant critic for The Age and Good Food.

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