It bodes well for any meal when the opening dish is so good you close your eyes to better concentrate on its flavour. The dish, from the menu at the recently relaunched Anchovy, is a wedge of crisp, cold sapo melon compressed with ginger and sprinkled with tangy plum salt that’s both pretty and punchy. It’s a triumph of palate-cleansing, appetite-whetting simplicity. And it gets better from there.
Thi Le and Jia-Yen Lee’s brilliant modern Vietnamese diner has been knocking diners’ socks off since opening in 2015. The restaurant has closed and reinvented itself since then and there are more plans for change, most notably, knocking a hole in the wall between the restaurant and sibling rockstar banh mi outlet Ca Com, to create a larger, unified space.
Given that Anchovy has attracted consistent acclaim in all its various guises, it should come as no surprise that this latest version is so excellent. But surprise and delight have become something of a Le calling card due to her finessed cooking and constant experimentation.
Take the abalone sandwich, for example. Vac-packed and steamed into sublime tender-chewy submission, the abalone is served on fluffy white bread with mizuna (Japanese mustard greens) and a scintillating version of Gentleman’s Relish spiked with the salty depth of anchovy paste, a by-product of the fish sauce Li makes from locally sourced anchovies. It deserves a place on every “best Melbourne sandwich” list.
There’s similar textural and flavour brilliance with the bánh bèo, a silky combination of steamed rice cake, yellow split peas and tiny dried prawns, and housemade silver needle noodles tossed with a combination of pork, squid and dried prawns, cooked out in XO sauce then topped with bean sprouts and an egg yolk.
A fillet of mulloway is given classic northern Vietnamese treatment with a salty-sour combination of turmeric, shrimp paste and fermented rice while quail, barbecued on skewers, arrives rich, tart and glistening under a sauce of curry vinaigrette and burnt butter.
The starkly minimalist dining room at Anchovy means all the attention is on the food while the short, sharp wine list, dividing its time equally between the old and new worlds, and leaning towards lighter weight reds and whites with a little residual sugar, makes for an easy, happy partnership with the robust flavours on the menu.
This latest version of Anchovy has already exceeded raised expectations, and it’s exciting to imagine what might come next.
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