Farmer's Daughters

Farmer's Daughters is one of the new restaurants in the 80 Collins Precinct that opened earlier this year. Kate, Sally and I have had a couple attempts trying to eat here that were thwarted due to lockdowns, but tonight we finally got into The Restaurant for our Gippsland Getaway set menu dinner for $110 per person.

 

All the dishes in each course were part of a seasonal farm-to-table journey through the Gippsland region of Victoria. Even my cocktail, the Farmer's Collins, contained Gippsland Vermouth, pink grapefruit and elderflower (it's fantastic). The set menu can be tailored to meet different dietary needs, which happened for us having a vegetarian and pescatarian at the table.

The first course was the Lakes Entrance crudo with preserved tomato, Cafresco Organics vegetables and chargrilled O'Connor rip cap on a metal skewer.

Next was my absolute favorite course of the night with the house baked soda bread and cultured cream, and baked Baw Baw Alpine trout with mountain pepper cream and trout caviar. The dark soda bread was so good that we ordered more to eat and then had them chop up a loaf three ways that we could take home. The cream sauce and the trout were also excellent - I would eat that dish any day of the week.

The next two courses were the Sugarloaf cabbage with clam butter and Snowy River Station seagrass, and the Campfire Corner Inlet fish, with Japnut pumpkin and marjoram.

 

Our final main dish was the Terramirra Park venison with baked quince and pine mushrooms, which tasted great.

For dessert we had a little Carob and mandarin pavlova, which was a light dish to finish the menu with. Overall we really enjoyed all the courses of the meal along with the excellent service from the staff as they explained the origins of each dish when they brought it out to us.

Farmer's Daughters is located at 95 Exhibition Street, Melbourne. The Deli on the ground floor is open Tuesdays - Saturdays for lunch and dinner, with The Restaurant on level 1 open for dinner on those days.

RISING- Golden Square and Ancestral Memory

RISING is a new winter arts festival in Melbourne that has taken the place of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and White Night. It has a mix of ticketed and free events around the city. Tonight alongside a total lunar eclipse and rare super blood moon was the opening night. RISING has done a lot to make the festival COVID-safe with many events occurring outdoors, but unfortunately a potential snap lockdown is looming in the next couple days due to a new cluster of cases from a hotel quarantine breach in Adelaide.

 

Ebony and I met up with her friends Jenni and Tony in Chinatown and started our evening at the Golden Square car park. The works at this location were curated by Grace Herbert under the theme Inland Tides. We climbed up to the roof of the car park where we could watch projections on neighboring buildings, and then saw the different works on each level as we walked back down to street level. Some of my favorite pieces were Reko Rennie's short film Initiation OA_RR, Lu Yang's inflated head Power of will - final shooting, and Monira Al Qadiri's floating hamburger The End.

Also part of Golden Square but projected onto a neighboring car park wall was Atong Atem's short film Banksia, which tells the stories of Australia's first African settlers.

After grabbing some dinner in Chinatown we said farewell to Jenni and then headed down to Hamer Hall for the light projection piece Ancestral Memory by Maree Clarke and Mitch Mahoney. It showed the metaphor of the Spirit Eel, which connects time and place for the peoples of the Kulin Nation.

RISING runs until 6 June 2021.

West Side Place Artcade

West Side Place is a new residential, retail and hotel high rise development being built on Spencer Street in the Melbourne CBD. While their retail arcade is currently vacant they have handed over the shops to a variety of contemporary Australian artists to do an "Artcade" of installations for the next six months. Ebony and I headed over there this afternoon to check out the space and see this public art gallery.

 

Artists that are featured include John Aslandis & Mayonaize, George Rose, Adnate, Rone, Meggs, and Reko Rennie. It is a kalidescope of colors with the murals and installations, but unfortunately you can't go inside the spaces to get a closer look. 

 

My favorite was by Rone as his piece was a nod to his Empire exhibition at Burnham Beeches. If you are around Southern Cross Train Station, go check out Artcade before the retail stores move in.

White Night Reimagined 2019

White Night Melbourne has gone through a few changes this year. Now called White Night Reimagined, it is being run over three nights during the winter on 22 - 24 August 2019 from 7pm to midnight (2am on Saturday) instead of over one whole night in the summer. The footprint is also smaller, with the program mainly contained to three park precincts: Birrarung Marr, Treasury Gardens and Carlton Gardens.

I started my White Night evening tonight in Treasury Gardens, which was themed the Sensory Realm. It was one of the few sites that had large scale light projections, which were done on the building facade of 2 Treasury Place by DAE White Night and The Electric Canvas in a piece called Sensoria.

There were a few experiential pieces in the Gardens, but considering the time constraints of the night I wasn't willing to waste time waiting in line. The other pieces I liked were the audio-visual installation Cluster by Playmodes Studio and the human brain like Synapse by Jack Burton, Monica Lim, Josh McAuliffe and Patrick Telfer.

My next stop was Birrarung Marr, which was themed the Physical Realm. The absolute highlight was the Dutch street theatre company Close-Act, who had The Odd Platoon and Drummers roaming through the crowd strapped to bobbing cranes and the 40 minutes long acrobatic performance Globe, where they performed on a globe shaped scaffolding structure as well as in the crowd.

My last stop for the evening was up in Carlton Gardens, which was themed the Spiritual Realm. This precinct was pretty similar in scale and scope to last year. I really liked the Spirit Creatures by The Lanternist, which were similar to animals done at the Taronga Zoo for Vivid Sydney.

The Guardian by A Blanck Canvas was a giant roving puppet that looked like a lion. Awakened by Balooga Entertainment was another giant puppet, this time of a meditating spiritual being that had audio-visual components.

The big attraction though was the Mad Max Fury Road vehicles, light projections on the back of the Royal Exhibition Building and live performance in the Melbourne Museum forecourt. The vehicles were spread around so you could get an up close look at them, and the performance had people dressed as the characters get up onto the vehicles. However, because it was so spread out it was a bit hard to follow and see all of the performance.

My final stop on the way out was for the neon Love Triangle by Carla O'Brien and the aerial performance Loved by Acrobatica.

Overall the crowds weren't too big on the first night and I managed to cover pretty much everything in around four hours. This is not the White Night of old though, and with limited time you have to make choices about what you want to see and try to time things so you don't miss any performances. It felt more like Vivid Sydney than the all encompassing White Night experience, which I think is an unfortunate development. Who knows what will happen when it is merged with the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2020.

Mork Chocolate Brew House

Mork hot chocolates are well known in Melbourne, and today I went to the Mork Chocolate Brew House in North Melbourne to try some of their signature drink creations. The Brew House is located in a converted 1950s-era bakery and has items for sale along with a cafe where you can sit down for a hot chocolate or something more inventive.

One of the signature drinks we ordered was the Campfire, which is made of 70% dark hot chocolate served with maple smoke, charcoal salt and a toasted house-made marshmallow. To drink it you turn over the glass with the maple smoke, pour in the hot chocolate, add some of the charcoal salt and then stir it together with the marshmallow. Like the name suggests, it tastes like a campfire.

The other signature drink we ordered was the Forager, which is inspired by Australia. It contains macadamia hot chocolate, macadamia and wattle seed ice cream, eucalyptus honey, bush scents and foraged flora. After spraying the bush scent, you pour half the hot chocolate into the bowl, eat the ice cream, and then pour in the rest of the hot chocolate to drink. This one had a menthol taste due to the eucalyptus, but was still good.

The Mork Chocolate Brew House is located at 150 Errol Street, North Melbourne and open from 9am-5pm on Tuesday through Sunday.

Shop The City: National Marshmallow Day

Today was Australia's first National Marshmallow Day, which was all part of this year's Shop The City event at the big shopping complexes in the Melbourne CBD. Mary and I started our evening of sweet treats at QV to make our own s'mores in their little winter village set up. It was a bit difficult to get the marshmallows toasty enough to melt the chocolate, and there weren't any graham crackers, but they still turned out ok. If you feel like making your own s'mores, the village is open on Thursday to Sunday from 4-7pm until 10 June.

Next we headed to Melbourne Central for their Ultra Violet Party (the Pantone color of the year) featuring different pop-ups on various levels. They had a Naked Negroni bar, an Ultra Violet Room for the ultimate selfie, marshmallows dipped in a chocolate fondue fountain, and some violet fairy floss. It was a yummy sugar rush.

After some dinner at Din Tai Fung we ventured to The Strand for their mini wagon wheels, and then to the Wonderland Bar at Emporium, which had Alice in Wonderland themed shortbread cookies and cute little potion bottles with a "Paint the Roses Red" drink made of Archie Rose gin infused with T2 chocberry tea (it was quite tasty).

White Night Melbourne 2018

It's one of my favorite events of the year - White Night Melbourne! This year the crowds seemed a bit smaller than in previous years (noting that I arrived around 1am). While there were some interesting works, I didn't feel this White Night was as strong as other ones I've been to. These were my highlights from the evening:

In the Queen Victoria Gardens was the whimsical Neon Dog Park installation by Carla O'Brien. People had lots of fun interacting with these glowing dogs.

There was a bit of a space theme in the Alexandra Gardens with the inflatable installations of the solar system La Terra Al Centro Dell' Universo by Namaste Europa and the spaceman coming out of the ground Calling Occupants by Felipe Reynolds.

Floating over the Yarra River were the illuminated birds of Le Bal des Lumineoles by Christophe Martine, which added some movement to the night skyline.

The Flinders Street light projections The Secret Life of Buildings by DAE White Night and The Electric Canvas highlighted different eras of pop culture. These projections were more static than in previous years, with the ones on The Forum being the best of the three buildings.

In St Paul's Cathedral was a fantastic piece by Victoria University's Skunk Control with Altar to the Future. It appeared to change colors due to the large rotating circular portal that you viewed the work through. It was exciting to see them have a piece at White Night as I've been such a fan of their windows at the Gertrude Street Projection Festival.

At the Melbourne Town Hall were more beautiful light projections by DAE White Night and The Electric Canvas to accompany the Guerrilla Opera performances by BK Opera on the verandah. It was a nice respite to stop and listen to them sing.

One of the most innovative pieces of the evening was PlusMinusZero by Alexander Mitchell. Incorporating projections onto a large paste-up mural in a car park off Lonsdale Street, you could download the EyeJack app to see the work come to life in augmented reality.

Inside the State Library Reading Room was another work by DAE White Night and The Electric Canvas called The Secret Life of Books, which showed what might happen to the books after hours in the library.

The site at Carlton Gardens expanded to include even more works this year. Phantasmagoria by Christopher Langton was a fantasy land of giant inflatable toys and animals as you walked toward the Royal Exhibition Building.

The highlight of the light projections was What If... on the Royal Exhibition Building by Limelight Projection Mapping. The 3D video mapped projection made it look like the building was changing shape and it raised the bar from previous years.

Finally, on the Melbourne Museum Plaza were two interesting pieces. One was The Serpent Mother by Flaming Lotus Girls, which was a reptile with a moving head that had flames coming out of its spine. The other was Birdmen by Close-Act, where these Technosauruses roamed around the plaza as the puppeteers on stilts interacted with people and each other.