Inside the Ballroom at Flinders Street Station

Plus the three best meals of the last fortnight as I couldn't decide on one.

Hello and welcome to the second half of January! I hope you’re still feeling that ‘new year, new me’ motivational buzz that hits 1 January every year (or 2nd if you’re severely hungover from New Year’s Eve shenaningans, no judgement here) and carries on until approximately mid-February, ending with an inevitable slide back into sloth. Well. That’s how it is for me, anyway.

This is the third issue of ‘What’s Cooking’. Are you having fun? I am. Definitely still playing around with things here, seeing what works and what doesn’t. Let me know if there’s anything you like in particular and I’ll… I’ll do more of it!

RONE at Flinders Street Station

Every city has its secret spaces and for a long time, the ballroom above Flinders Street Station was one of Melbourne’s most intriguing.

It was occasionally opened to the public during Open House Melbourne, one of the best events in the city if you like a good sticky beak. But it mostly has sat, rotting in its foundations, destined presumably for something as uninspiring as flats for the rich – until last year, when it became an exhibition space for Patricia Piccinini’s A Miracle Constantly Repeated as part of Melbourne’s new attempted-to-launch-several-years-in-a-row-thanks-for-naught-covid RISING Festival.

Geelong-born, Melbourne-based artist RONE has taken over the space until the end of April. I viewed the exhibit a couple of weeks ago. I think RONE’s work is fine, if not distinctive – his thing, for the uninitiated, is painting portraits of beautiful young women.

The rooms have been stylised to look as they did back when they were educational and social facilities for railway employees, each featuring one of RONE’s trademark murals. Someone’s raided every op shop and antique store in town to achieve this, but it works. It’s beautiful and it’s eerie in many ways – touches like a tea cup on a work station and flickering lights in a room give the impression of a human presence. Layers of artificial dust and cobwebs say otherwise.

Just being in that space is really something. For now, Flinders Street remains the central hub for Melbourne’s train-related transportation needs, but it’s hard to envision it as the social hub it once was, with the ballroom and places like the Loungers Club, a space for women where they could freshen up, wait for tardy friends, read a local broadsheet or have a cup of tea, with a fresh scone on the side.

The best bit of the exhibit really, is the guest book…

The ‘ancients’ – I’m sure the ‘Gen Z’ who wrote this is like, 25.

If I had a time machine, I’d take myself straight to that champagne fountain.

This feels… intimate?

Well, there’s just no pleasing everyone, is there London?

Tickets to TIME are selling like hotcakes. Get in before the end of April, if just to see the ballroom itself. I’m definitely interested to see what happens within the space next. Hopefully it remains accessible to the public and doesn’t ever end up falling into the hands of some greedy developer.

Review: Vegan with Bite, by Shannon Martinez

Melbourne has quite a few rockstar chefs and Shannon Martinez definitely counts among their number. She owns Smith & Daughters, Smith & Deli and is the Executive Chef of Ovolo Hotel’s restaurant Lona Misa, which I’ve wanted to eat at for well over a year, but somehow haven’t made it to. Yet.

Her first cookbook Smith & Daughters contains recipes from her flagship restaurant, cooking in a style which leans heavily on her Andalusian roots. A second followed, Smith & DELIcious containing – you guessed it – food from her deli, all with a vegan twist, of course.

Perhaps it’s good to be clear here – I’m not vegan. Because seafood. And cheese. However, if you fancy yourself to be a bit of a flexitarian like myself, this is an excellent cookbook to have in your kitchen. And it’s also worth mentioning that not all the recipes are purely vegan anyhow – some contain beef or chicken stock, which you can of course veganify, but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Martinez herself is not vegan, she’s just damn good at replicating the things she likes to eat into plant-based plates of delicious goodness.

The recipes in all three cookbooks don’t have an estimated cooking time, which is a real annoyance. Sure, they look simple, but you’ve somehow spent three hours chopping things up finely, there’s still time in the oven to go and you’re hungry. Fortunately, Vegan with Bite does at least focus primarily on Asian-inspired vegan cuisine – there’s many a stir fry contained in these pages, which can be whipped up mega quick.

As someone who likes to cook and also very much likes books, I have quite a few cookbooks and I appreciate any you can flip through when you’re after something tasty, that isn’t going to take half the evening to make. There’s quite a few recipes in here that have become go-to meals in my household and they’re all damn delicious.

For a taste of what the book has to offer, check out these five recipes. I have both the burrito rice and Penang char kway teow on regular rotation. I substitute the Asian chilli paste for local Melbourne cafe Mabu Mabu’s version, which gives it a kick and a half – in my sinus if I accidentally put too much in.

And the best recipe in the book? Well. If I’m not eating her tteokbokki, I’m thinking about it. That’s how good it is (for the uninitiated, tteokbokki is a Korean dish, containing ‘rice-cake noodles’, paired with a spicy, or soy-based sauce). Martinez’s version contains hotdogs (vegan or otherwise) and cheese (again, vegan or otherwise), making it taste like the inside of a pizza ‘rounda’. Did anyone else have these on sale at their school canteen? Food of the gods, honestly.

The best thing(s) I ate in the last fortnight

Three winners this week.

Brunch at Brighton Soul in, well, Brighton, Melbourne was a colourful affair.

And this very pleasing plate of garlic bread and mussels from Fairfield Park Boathouse, on the Yarra River.

The only downside to eating here is if you’re seated by the water, you have to walk up a couple of flights of stairs to place your order, walk back down to your seat, wait for the little buzzer to go off. It’s back up to the grill, then you somehow navigate back down the stairs, clutching your plates as you go and praying for no trips or slips.

And I don’t have a picture of it, but I’m still thinking of the black pudding and haggis breakfast bun I ordered from a Scottish food truck at a market. I know some folks think offal is awful, but I find it deeeeee-lish.

What’s cooking next time

I’ve pushed my dumplings content out a fortnight because I’m eating dumplings tonight and thought that would help me get in the mood to talk passionately about these parcels of perfection. I’m going to have a stab at making xiao long bao (soup dumplings) for the first time ever. Tune in to find out whether it’s a success, or complete mess.

That plus an update on the kitchen garden situation – it’s happening.

-Celine

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This is the world now. I don’t like it either. But I do appreciate it!