Reviews

Broadsheet Melbourne Online Magazine
August 9th 2010

There is plenty of history at the Middle Park Hotel - from the relaxed front bar and its polished brass kick-rail, to the moody wood-paneled dining room (with English oak originally from the MCC Long Room). It’s like stepping back in time but still being touched by the modern flair that we’ve come to expect from owner Julian Gerner (Royal Saxon, Albert Park Hotel and ex-Public House).

Originally built in 1889, MPH was refitted in late 2009 by architects Six Degrees restoring the building to its former glory. Keep an eye out for Gerner’s specially commissioned monogrammed rugs. With a fresh coat of paint, the corner pub spills onto the street and a sunny courtyard for warm days.

But it’s the menu that got us really going. Pub dining as it should be; hearty with quality and variety. Consulting chef Paul Wilson (Albert Park Hotel and ex-Botanical) teams up with head chef David Marshall, their English roots giving us a menu heavy on British pub classics that include scotch eggs, pork chops, offal dishes and full English breakfasts complete with black pudding and Cumberland sausage. It’s heavy stuff, but in these surrounds it feels right. Especially with a beer from one of the 45 taps.

Australian Gourmet Traveller    (Excerpt)
March 2010

Melbourne’s enjoying a gastropub revival as big-name chefs - Mangan, Lambie and Wilson - lend their talents at glammed-up watering holes. It’s pub food reborn.

There’s nothing particularly zeitgeisty about a pub getting serious about food, but it’s hard not to start trend-spotting when three chefs more associated with high-end dining (Michael Lambie, Luke Mangan, Paul Wilson) suddenly do the revamped pub thing. It’s even harder to avoid flagging a trend when these pubs - Barkers Wine Bar and Bistro in Hawthorn, South Melbourne’s The Palace by Luke Mangan and the Middle Park Hotel - open within months of each other, all with retro-leaning menus and a predilection for the meaty side of things.

Admittedly, Lambie, of Taxi Dining Room fame, had already dipped his toes in the pub pool at Lamaro’s and Paul Wilson’s last major gig was at Botanical, but there’s no denying that these three freshly overhauled pubs are all reading from a similar script, one advocating a return to traditional pub food values. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. What’s not to love about menus loaded with updated versions of oysters Kilpatrick, prawn cocktail, devilled eggs, steak with peppercorn sauce or Café de Paris butter and sherry trifle, particularly when quality produce and skilled cooking are also in the mix?

But while all three certainly channel nostalgia, none of them gets stuck in a retro theme-park rut. Lambie, Mangan and Wilson may be playing with history but they’re not repeating it....

...The Middle Park Hotel has its proportions right too, achieving an ideal balance of traditional and modern pub moves, both in its feel and its food.

An obviously pricey refit, courtesy of architects Six Degrees, has given the Middle Park a cosy sporting-club feel. It’s a clever move in a pub that wants to be known for its love of sport (the public bar has several screens switched to whatever ball is being kicked or whacked that day) but is also serious about the dining and drinking experience.

In the dining room, there are mounted deer heads, monogrammed red, blue and gold carpet, pre-loved wood panelling (salvaged from the Long Room at the MCG), an open fireplace with a mantelpiece stacked with bottles of Calvados and Cognac, and walls laden with framed and artfully placed sport-themed art and memorabilia that ranges from signed cycling jerseys to 18th-century-style paintings of racehorses.

It’s a cosy space and one that works very well with Wilson’s big-boned, robustly flavoured food. Wilson is the consulting chef to the Middle Park, and his menu, cooked by head chef David Marshall, caters to the meat and offal fans of the world, to lovers of retro classics (scallops Provençal, pavlova) and to those who like a bit of Italian rusticity in their lives.

Main courses are mostly about meat, but among the entrées there are some excellent alternatives, including a vibrant salad that teams quality tuna sashimi — all dark pink and gently shining — with delicate slivers of radish, whole basil leaves, chunks of black Russian tomatoes and flecks of horseradish. Also good, and pretty, is a white asparagus salad that tosses together toasted hazelnuts, quartered baby figs, shavings of Meredith blue cheese, witlof and a slightly creamy vinaigrette.

There’s a list of five steaks, meticulously footnoted and itemised, that are wood-barbecued and served with a salad and béarnaise, but there’s plenty of fun to be had eating other beasts.

A dish of pork cheek (tender, glistening, crisp salty skin) and tongue (grill-striped, juicily textured) is accompanied by a slice of beautifully rich black pudding and a pale disc of Lyonnais sausage, all of which sits on a supremely comforting soup-like mix of slightly salty lentils and green sauce.

Wood-barbecued blue-eye, gloriously smoky and topped with a tumble of broad beans, dill and parsley, comes with a simply dressed salad of snow pea shoots.

The Middle Park’s desserts, cleverly updated versions of old-fashioned classics, are similarly good, such as the cute stack of raspberry shortcake, not-too-sweet Melba sauce, peaches and fresh raspberries that lands on the table looking like a scale model merry-go-round.

A nicely selected all-Victorian wine list and service that rarely misses a trick add to the Middle Park Hotel’s considerable charm.

Three pubs with similar pedigrees and outlooks might signal coincidence rather than trend. But if Barkers Wine Bar and Bistro, The Palace and the Middle Park Hotel’s appealing blend of quality, casualness and nostalgia indicate what can happen when you cross a name chef with a traditional pub, here’s hoping for a movement that takes Melbourne by storm.

The Age Epicure Online
IT'S fitting to wind up at the revamped Middle Park Hotel for the last review of the year, because in dining terms it's been one hell of a meaty 12 months.

This has been primarily because this phoney recession made chefs rediscover the budget-friendly joys of what we might euphemistically call "the middle bits" but also because it's the year provenance went mainstream - there's definitely something in the air when Maccas is spruiking the bloodline of its latest burger.

The Middle Park Hotel (let's ditch the formalities - it's MPH from here on) is largely about meat, served with a hefty dose of irony, to make one crowd-pleasing package.

Meat aside, the menu is dotted with names straight from the Women's Weekly Home Almanac from some time around the mid '60s: Scotch eggs and pigs in blankets and pavlova. How much more unabashedly, ridiculously retro can you get than that?

OK, maybe on the stereo, where Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder are warbling Ebony and Ivory at a discreet volume. The fit-out of the pub - owned by the same names behind the Albert Park Hotel - has been done by Six Degrees, probably the only design firm in Melbourne in danger of becoming a household name.

They've ditched the stainless steel vats of the former Gunn Island Brewery for a look that's more sorority house meets elk lodge. It's tongue-in-cheek and yet in some ways perfectly sincere because in the massive bar area (with an impressive 40-plus beer taps), they're aiming at the sporting fans and have gone to town in the sports memorabilia department.

There are television screens tucked unobtrusively into each booth to make this the upmarket sports bar du jour. Even if you're not, like me, a fan of sport or sporting detritus, it's impossible not to concede that one of the strengths of MPH is its rock-solid identity.

It doesn't take much imagination to figure out the sort of menu that goes with this super-masculine approach: sturdy and old-fashioned, tried and true, protein and fat. And it's right on the money.

The menu of British pub classics devised by Britpack darling Paul Wilson hardly reinvents the wheel, although some of these ideas have been gathering dust so long they seem brand-spanking new. The dining room is tucked away down the back — head for the trophy cabinet and turn right, or use the separate entrance off Armstrong Street.

It's decked out in bold, custom-made, monogrammed carpet, wainscoting (the wooden panels lining the walls were commandeered from the MCC Long Room) and a deer-antler chandelier. There's a lived-in feel despite its youth.

The waiters, clad in jeans, polo shirts and butchers' aprons, are similarly young yet well-versed in things that can easily fall by the wayside, such as pouring individual glasses of wine at the table. Wilson was the marquee name used to launch the place but the test was whether it would keep rolling along happily once he decamped the kitchen.

Under head chef David Marshall, another Brit who cooked with Wilson at the Botanical, it does. The MPH is a pin-up gastropub, backed by a philosophy of using carefully sourced Victorian produce, rare breeds (there's a plan to introduce rare-breed weekend roasts) and a solid, all-Victorian wine list.

Starters are a mix of retro lovelies and more-modern ideas. In the former camp, Scotch eggs ($9), their yolks still slightly gooey, are the right mixture of crunch and soft. Fish fingers are a winningly rough-hewn mixture of fish and whitebait, bound in big, golden-brown panko-esque crumbs. More noughties is the two-minute calamari stew ($17): deeply scored and tender cephalopod, gutsy slices of chorizo, red capsicum and basil swimming in a smoked paprika sauce, served in a cast-iron pan with a toast rack of chargrilled bread.

The offal salad ($15) hits a bull's-eye: crumbed and fried sweetbreads, liver and kidney pieces gently sauteed and served pink, discs of black pudding, grilled tongue and slices of wagyu heart and brawn in a crunchy, bitter salad of dressed leaves, parsley and cornichons. It provides the right antidote to the richness of the offal. It's the sort of dish the French or Spanish would relish - how far we've come.

The biggest part of the menu comes under the heading "steaks, chops, offal and sausages". In the steak department there are five options, served with the meanest wooden-handled knives since Hagar the Horrible. The 400-gram rump (full name: 400g Rangers Valley 200-day grain-fed Black Angus rump of beef, $38) plated with marrow in the sawn-off bone, and a nicely acidic little parsley and shallot salad, has had its time on the wood barbecue well judged. It mightn't be the finest steak I've ever met but it's good.

If fish is your thing, there's a generous fillet of blue eye done a la plancha - one side on a flat grill plate - with minted broad beans, a perky salsa verde and a cress salad. Simple, fresh and lovely. Not everything on the menu has such a seasonal kick - perhaps the operation's Achilles heel.

In hot weather not everyone's thoughts turn to pig's tongue and cheek ($29) - even if it's a winning combo of grilled tongue and a large disc of black pudding resting on a piece of expertly prepared meat. The neo-classical bent continues with desserts.

The last time I said: "I'll have the pav, thanks" was probably somewhere in about the late '70s but it's a welcome return for the big Australian - snowy peaks of dense, crunchy meringue with a toe-curlingly tart passionfruit sorbet, fresh mango slices and rich cream ($15). There's also a rib-sticking strawberry and sherry trifle ($12) that's set in a parfait glass and so rich the only garnish it needs is some crumbled honeycomb. It's an admirably solid performance.

But then again, it's not rocket science. Great produce handled respectfully - how difficult is that? The only wonder is why more pubs aren't getting stuck into the sort of nosh that should be their rightful domain. But that's a question for next year.