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Project Forty Nine: High country flavour hits hipsterville

Gemima Cody
Gemima Cody

Go-to dish: Mushroom and chestnut raviolo with porcini brodo.
Go-to dish: Mushroom and chestnut raviolo with porcini brodo.Arsineh Houspian

14/20

Italian$$

Beechworth in high country Victoria has plenty going for it. Provenance restaurant, a bee school. The rolling vines of King Valley and Rutherglen producing fat wines through its chill winter and hot summer days.

One of those wineries is Project Forty Nine, at the hands of industry vets Rocco Esposito (ex wine curator for Vue de Monde) and wife Lisa Pidutti, who are clocking serious hours on the Hume Highway to bring all this glory to Collingwood in the form of a gargantuan cellar door, cafe, deli and restaurant.

Arguably it's the cafe-bar, opened in December, that's got the most pull. It boasts warehouse bones, glowing light, wine barrels and flouncy pink netting dripping from the roof. Between the tables sit racks of wine and olive oil to take home after a coffee and cake, or a negroni if you swing by at night.

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The room glows at this ambitious new project.
The room glows at this ambitious new project.Arsineh Houspian

And people are. For those dark Collingwood streets that often seem deserted, it's disconcerting to suddenly find a buzzing throng throwing back Pizzini rieslings and honey-drizzled cheese. 

Now the restaurant has followed hot on its heels in an equally huge room next door. Broad blonde tables are set for eight-somes. Banquettes run both walls and a kitchen island juts into the middle ground. Theoretically the menu has Italian roots, but it tends to shoot off in a number of directions.

There are potatoes, cubed and roasty, squiggled in a cross hatch of pepperonata and aioli – a random but welcome patatas bravas elbowing between chunkily cut seared beef carpaccio capped with fine lemony ribbons of zucchini and parmesan, and a contemporary cracker harbouring smoked eel and blitzed taro. It's a bit like listening to Spotify on shuffle, but there are some definite bangers in the mix.

Potatoes squiggled with pepperonata and aioli.
Potatoes squiggled with pepperonata and aioli.Arsineh Houspian
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A giant mushroom and chestnut raviolo is a pillow of gentle earthy funk bathing in a just-sweet porcini brodo twinkling with parmesan oil. It's one of the more accomplished dishes, technically, and could be even better were the pasta a fraction finer.

Chicken liver parfait is intense and creamy with a bright hit of orange. Roman-style gnocchi, a nutmeg-infused semolina batter, is fried in the pan in freeform scoops leaving it part-sticky with a golden crust. It's a rib-sticking winter side that gives you good reason to play with Eposito's list.

That list is, after all, 50 per cent of your reason to be here, if not more. The handful of by-the-glass options are fun odes to local talent – the nutty constance fino from Pennyweight; a nip of eucalypt-y Amer Nocturne from Maidenii instead of a montenegro, and Project Forty Nine's own chardonnay, light on oak, is an easy drinking good time.

Beef carpaccio with zucchini ribbons and parmesan.
Beef carpaccio with zucchini ribbons and parmesan.Arsineh Houspian

By the bottle everything is grouped by style from aromatic whites to pretty and juicy reds, pulling from Rhone to the Murray Darling without discrimination, and from $55 to $135.

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You wouldn't say dishes have quite the spit and polish of Marion or Embla. The meaty mains need work especially. Lamb breast, rolled and roasted, pork neck, and a beef short rib, all cuts that rely on careful cooking to render the fat and sinew, miss their magic spot by a fraction, either by being a little dry or not relaxed enough.

And while accompaniments are creative: an onion puree and a fistful of raw, dressed cabbage with the pork; rosemary milk and lightly vinegared silverbeet with the lamb, the end results are fairly similar.

Finely terraced tiramisu.
Finely terraced tiramisu.Arsineh Houspian

(A baby snapper fillet on the other hand is a beautifully cooked piece of fish with a standout midnight black sauce of charred carrots, shaded further with squid ink).

Even so, there is a lot of flag waving for the community that you can feel will drive Project Forty Nine's success.

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While you're eating a finely terraced scoop of tiramisu, a wine event for Pizzini might be next door; hazelnuts on your braised octopus are from North East Victoria.

Project Forty Nine's cafe-deli space next door to the dining room.
Project Forty Nine's cafe-deli space next door to the dining room.Penny Stephens

Everyone on floor and in kitchen is buzzing with the enthusiasm for what Victoria can do. It's taste of country community spirit, right in the dark depths of hipsterville.

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

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