Relative comfort: Creole-inspired My Mexican Cousin is well placed to attract the theatre crowd, but should not be overlooked by foodies.
DARRIAN TRAYNOR
I haven’t been this enthusiastic about the food I’ve reviewed in Melbourne for a while. Don’t get me wrong, a fortnightly analysis of the city’s middle-tier venues certainly has its perks. But it’s no surprise the cuisine is not quite as cutting-edge as in our fine-diners.
Tucked in the city’s premium theatre precinct – next to the Melbourne Theatre Company, the Melbourne Recital Centre and a hop away from the Arts Centre, the Malthouse and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art – this three-month-old restaurant/café/bar is a massive gust of fresh air, but it’s not overrrun.
Inspired by Creole cuisine, with an irreverent approach to décor and a deferential approach to food, it’s bound to become an establishment to cross town for – particularly given the entertainment on tap and the dearth of nearby culinary competition.
The combination of astute placement, imaginative fit-out and inspired cooking is not surprising, considering the names behind MMC: Salvatore Malatesta (St Ali, Sensory Lab), Jerome Borazio (St Jerome’s, Ponyfish Island), DJ Grant Smillie
(360 Agency) and Andrew Mackinnon (Taboo marketing group). Chef Maurice Esposito (Esposito, Saint Peter) stepped in for a short time as executive chef to launch the menu.
Esposito quickly passed the baton to Kiwi-born Simon Den Boogert, who lists NZ fine-diners Euro and Toto on his resumé and has spent the past few years working on privately owned 220-foot super-yachts, catering daily for the wealthy and 100 or so of their closest friends as they cruised through the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the south Pacific.
“All of this helped increase my inspiration and my ability to cook all kinds of world cuisine,” says Den Boogert, who, for now, is running the menu he inherited.
“The owners want to be seen at the forefront of authentic Creole cuisine,” he says. “We want it to be as authentic as possible, but at the same time it must be adapted to be acceptable to Melburnians. There are a lot of exciting plans to come. I’m classically trained, so it’s easy to adapt the core ingredients of many different cultures.”
He lists smoked paprika, cumin, coriander, chilli and lime as the chief Creole ingredients.
The group installed food blogger, Creole cuisine aficionado and Louisiana devotee Jess Pryles as a menu consultant about a month after the restaurant opened, following her stinging criticism of its legitimacy and its explanatory menu glossary.
MMC isn’t Mexican at all. The restaurant is named after a breakfast dish of eggs, spinach, corn fritters, haloumi and kasundi on the menu at St Ali. There are three “styles” of cuisine in the glossary.
Mexican Cousin dishes – looser interpretations of Creole cuisine – include a divine scallops ceviche with pea purée. The molluscs, marinated in lime juice, red onion, capers, chilli and olive oil, are draped in a verdant, silky-smooth dressing of peas, fish stock and mint. There’s also a very fine, twice-cooked beef short rib with sweet potato pickle. The rib, prepared with red wine in sous-vide style for 48 hours, was exquisitely charry and crisply caramelised; its accompanying pickle was lacklustre.
In the same category, there was a pleasant cornbread-crusted pulled-pork dish served in a cast-iron skillet. The pork, prepared with the traditional Creole trinity – onions, green capsicums and celery – in a dark roux braise, was made with love. The pork, braised for eight hours, then cooled and cooked again with fresh herbs, was topped with a tight, dense cornbread. If these dishes are MMC’s interpretation of Creole, that’s OK with me.
There’s also modern New Orleans cuisine that, according to the menu notes, includes “the classic French preparations of the Louisianan Creoles but also the rustic fare of the Cajuns”. Praline bacon candied with brown sugar and pecan – crisp, salty, sweet and slightly chewy – was ideal as an appetiser or to nibble with one of the impressive list of “original” cocktails: perhaps the Southside, with fennel and blackberry jam, fresh mint, gin and citrus. A must-try is the sensational chicken and sausage gumbo, with more of that dark, rich roux as its base.
Caribbean Creole, described as “an evolution of the African, Spanish, French and Indian heritages of the region”, includes offers such as salt-cod fritters with seafood cream and a daily fish offering served with traditional West Indian sauce.
Desserts are really more of the Mexican Cousin style, borrowing from the best of everything: bourbon pecan pie, coconut sherbet with a plantation Nicaragua rum float, or beignets with salted caramel dipping sauce.
So go along to MMC, but not for a week or two, please: I’ve got a nice little group booking there next week. And the theatre crowd probably isn’t keen to share, either.
Eat This
Concealed beneath the honeycomb exterior of a hive of live performance centres, this vibrant café/bar/restaurant could become the preserve of arts devotees and tourists. But that would be an oversight by food lovers. Themed, textured glass and leadlight in avocado green, chilli red, aubergine and sunny-sky blue (a decidedly Latino colour combination) add rusticity and interest from the outside, while black padded banquets, hanging cylinder lights, exposed air-conditioning ducts and an open stainless steel kitchen add interior industrial chic. That just leaves chunky blackwood furniture, timeless carpet and a huge Louisiana Hot Sauce mural to provide an exotic flourish.
My Mexican Cousin
Corner Sturt Street and Southbank Boulevard, Southbank
Cuisine \ Creole
Chef \ Simon Den Boogert
Prices \ Breakfast $6-$14.50; share plates $5.50-$30; desserts $12
Open \ Monday 7am-4pm; Tuesday to Friday 7am-late; weekends 8am-late
Phone \ 9686 3389
www.mymexicancousin.com.au
The verdict \ Drop everything
