What A Charm The 2nd Time Was

When I finally started catching up with AJ on a semi-regular basis, one of the things we did together was attend the inaugural Taste of Melbourne. Back then the first night was pretty civil with the longest queue belonging to that selling the lamb souvlaki, I found a great olive oil company and Lindt was using the event to work out whether it was worth opening a cafe in Melbourne.

This year, the queue for the opening night was so long it spilled into four directions to make sure people would not end up blocking any walkways. Fortunately we, unlike many others, had the benefit of precise planning. With the aid of a map distributed before the doors opened, we worked out our walk route and eating programme. Then the doors opened, and we were off like a pair of rockets. We were focused, we were determined, we knew what we wanted and we were not willing to go through any more long queues for them. The vendors were fresh faced, keen to please, happy to pose for pictures, smiles all around. We were all ready to enjoy the night.
Gawking at big-name chefs who were hovering around their stalls to make sure everything worked well ("Oooh, Jacques Raymond! Hey, there's Frank at Movida, and George at The Press Club, and of course Gary is visiting from the Boathouse"), we set out to share entree-size dishes of:

• Mauritian tamarind cured kingfish and scallops served with green chilli, curry leaf and ocean trout pearls from The Court House (mmmmm),
• black miso cod from Nobu (ooooo),
• pressed duck leg + mushroom miso soup from Verge (oh my gosh good),
• baked Portugese crab from Silks (yuuuum), and
• Turkish delight filled doughnuts, with pine nut sugar and rosewater honey from Maha (honey honey honey).

We picked up cocktails for the equivalent of ten dollars each - yes we did note there were a lot more cocktail vendors compared to last year - as well as lots of ice cream (seriously, Maggie Beer's quince with burnt almond ice cream is INCREDIBLE, and they gave me two serves. For FREE!!!!). I pondered over the idea of ordering the Yarra Valley Punt Road Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage Bundle (one bottle each from the 2000 - 2005 vintages; the 2003 has aged beautifully) while AJ had to work out whether the price of South American organic chocolates was justifiable (it was). I also nabbed a large punnet of colourful heritage tomatoes as AJ agonised over Red Hill brewery beer, mussel pots and cheese. We missed the Vittoria coffee gift package giveaway but we were quite happy tasters at the New Zealand wine promotion stand.:P

Then we found a barrel to sit at (another improvement: a lot more seats!) and pondered over what we could do with our last two Crowns as we sipped on our second cocktails. Another look at the menu, another discussion over savoury versus sweet, and off AJ went to get ten more Crowns so we could officially declare Verge's TOM repertoire as most enjoyable by going back to them for a coffee cured ocean trout, roast cauliflower and buckwheat vinaigrette dish. In the meantime, we noted that the dinner queues had gotten considerably longer than when we had just got in, and we were very pleased with our planning.

Back at the barrel, and no coffee to be had as we were out of Crowns & the young Vittoria baristas would only sell coffees for two Crowns. Fortunately we had cash to purchase baby cupcakes...
Thank you Entertainment Card for the 2-for-1 ticket offer, because we like TOM very much. Really Very Much. So back there next year!