An insider gave me a new taste of Melbourne’s incredible food

It’s succulent. It’s sweet. It melts in the mouth … It’s not my typical pairing with a morning latte. But these thin ribbons of porchetta, served in a paper cup alongside my latte, come from a typical Melbourne hole-in-the-wall cafe with obscure signage and a growing crowd of in-the-know patrons waiting for their morning fix.

The porchetta is usually served in a sandwich, but this 10.30am morsel serves as a symbolic segue on a Foodie Trails walking tour of Melbourne, leading into an explanation of how the Italians came to influence the city’s food and drink scene when they flocked to Melbourne in the 1940s and ’50s as part of the post-World War II migration boom.

Italian influence permeates Melbourne’s food culture, with Lygon Street, in particular, long recognised as a hub of pizza, pasta and gelato. Then, of course, there’s the coffee, which has rooted itself to almost every street and suburb, creating a city of proud caffeine snobs. And the Italian influence on Victoria’s capital is just the start of it.

Melbourne is my home city. And on any given day, I can walk past cafes and restaurants serving countless international cuisines – this is Australia’s most cosmopolitan city, after all. Though I have a vague understanding of how it all came to be, my four-hour Foodie Trails tour, started by India-born Himanshi Munshaw Luhar, who came to Melbourne as an exchange student in 2005, maps out the city’s layered migrant history and Indigenous culture through a series of food stops and a visit to the Immigration Museum.

The tour reinforces the notion that Melbourne’s food culture has long been a mirror of the people who built and continue to build it: from early British pub meals to the dumplings and noodles introduced by the Chinese during the gold rush, when Melbourne became one of the richest cities in the world.

From the post-war Italians who sparked the city’s coffee revolution to the waves of Vietnamese cooks who turned simple herbs and broth into neighbourhood landmarks, and a fast-growing Indian community whose spice-laden regional cuisines now hum across suburbs and CBD laneways. Today, a farm-to-plate ethos threads these influences together, making it clear where ingredients come from and who produced them.

“Packing up and coming to Australia is a really big deal,” says our guide Christine Guilfoyle as we settle in for a fluffy Vietnamese bao at a quiet CBD cafe (the history lesson here is that, after the fall of Saigon, Australia accepted large numbers of Vietnamese refugees under its humanitarian and resettlement programs), then dumplings at a modern eatery in Chinatown.

Christine notes that, in international terms, Australia, and Melbourne, is a long way from everywhere. “But people move here for lots of reasons – you could be escaping a natural disaster, war or famine, or you’ve fallen in love with an Australian, or you’re on a gap year. Or maybe you just want to come to a country where there is freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and lots of opportunity to make a better life.”

Embarking on such a big move often means bringing some of the comforts of home, which often end up on a plate. Now, Melbourne has a plate of something from just about everywhere, and each stop on our tour symbolises one of the many chapters that led to this happy coexistence of myriad cuisines.

Having traced Melbourne’s Italian and Vietnamese history, our next stop takes us to a rowdy Indian street-food cafe that I must have walked past, and duly ignored, at least 100 times. The thin, papery masala dosa we tear apart and use to scoop up spiced potato is as good as I had in India. The spherical pani puri burst with flavour. The Indian expats at the table beside us chat over a steaming plate of dahl and rich butter chicken.

I wonder how many other gastronomic treasures I’ve missed across the city due to the habit of following a predictable pattern on home ground?

One shows up minutes later when we make a bonus stop at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it oyster bar. There’s no historical pin, but I won’t say no to a couple of mid-afternoon oysters before we round out our tour at chic restaurant Farmer’s Daughters, sharing dense soda bread, cured marlin with capers and trout roe, beef carpaccio, and a chunky pork sausage.

The establishment almost exclusively serves food from Victoria’s Gippsland region, bringing us firmly back to Victorian soil. But really, everything we’ve eaten is Victorian, having been adapted from all corners of the globe then folded into Melbourne’s story by the waves of migrants who now call the city home. And it makes me realise that, even at home, there is always more of the story, and more flavours, to uncover.

THE DETAILS

TOUR
The Melbourne Foodie Cultural Tour starts at the Melbourne Immigration Museum and runs Tuesday to Saturday, 10.30am-2.30pm, $180 a person.
Foodie Trails also run a Flavours of Melbourne Night Trail starting at Federation Square from Tuesday to Saturday, 5.30-8.30pm, $220 per person.
Private tours available.
See foodietrails.com.au

The writer was a guest of Foodie Trails

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