German drinks meet Malaysian drinking snacks at Zaubertrank

When I was a teenager, my dream was to open an op shop/pool hall/live music venue that served cheap beer: all of my obsessions in one location. For Ben Duval and Alex Schulz​ of Carwyn Cellars, their teenage years included time spent on exchange in Hamburg, where they became customers of a strange business that sold home-made booze and more illicit substances. A muse was born, an idea for an ode to that Hamburg spot at home in Melbourne, offering German and Austrian wines and schnapps.

After Schulz spent time in the hospitality business in Kuala Lumpur, the idea expanded to include Malaysian bar food. All of their obsessions! In one place!

That's the idea behind Zaubertrank (also the name of the Hamburg apothecary – it translates to "magic potion") on High Street in Thornbury, which is owned by Duval, Schulz and Ben Carwyn, the founder of Carwyn Cellars.

The wines are mainly Austrian and German, or Australian interpretations of grapes traditionally grown in Germany and Austria. The food is mostly Malaysian, aside from a snack of curry knackwurst ($14), the food menu's only real nod to German influence.

And if looked at from the right angle, the smallish shopfront venue does have a kind of German beer-hall feel, with a wide wooden communal table down the centre, bright modern art on the walls, and an open kitchen.

The chef is Michael Pyke, who has no specific experience with Malaysian food – his employment background is in Tel Aviv and Australia, including, most recently, the Kingston Hotel in Richmond.

But Pyke nonetheless serves up some tasty things that do go exceptionally well with Germanic wines. There's a snack of fried anchovies with potato, onion and peanuts ($12), and crispy deep-fried chicken wings with a bright chilli sauce ($14).

More substantial dishes include whole fried prawns dripping with butter and covered in a shower of egg floss ($28), and a complex dry mutton curry ($28) that comes with sliced white bread as accompaniment.

A recent special of eggplant stir-fry ($14) was smooshy and spicy in all the right ways, while the seasonal greens ($16), mostly bok choy, were a tad on the bland side, as were some crispy rice cake cubes ($14), which were sprinkled with sliced spring onions and  drizzled with a sriracha-type sauce.

Pork ribs cooked in Guinness ($22) seem to depart from the Malaysian theme altogether, although Schulz tells me they're the restaurant's spin on classic Chinese-Malaysian pork rib dishes.

The food here is random enough that it makes sense it might be based on the nostalgic cravings of someone who used to be able to get certain dishes somewhere else – in this case, Schulz, in Kuala Lumpur – and not on any unifying idea of what might make a coherent offering.

This is a passion project through and through, and whether or not you like it will depend very much on whether your taste matches the owners' in some pretty specific ways.

Look, is there better Malaysian food to be had in Melbourne? Of course there is. By a mile. But the aim here is to present a specific kind of bar food, not to compete with the more traditional Malaysian offerings around town.

I really do wish the wine list were longer, and had a wider representation of the juice it claims to honour – if anything, the most interesting section of the drinks list is the selection of schnapps and digestives.

There aren't enough great riesling-focused lists around, let alone places to drink the fantastic reds that Germany, Austria and surrounds produce. But I applaud any effort to change that, even if only on a small scale.

Zaubertrank is an incredibly loveable and odd little place, one that could only come from these particular people. If you're in it for the wine pretension, the food snobbery, then maybe this isn't the spot for you. If you're in it for the fun? Even eye-rolling teenage me would have to admit, this place has fun in spades.

Vibe: Laid back and colourful

Go-to dish: Mutton curry, $28

Drinks: Short wine and beer list with mainly German, Austrian and Australian offerings

Cost: $75 for two, plus drinks