Melbourne’s Commune Group has assembled quite the stable of restaurants in the last decade. Kicking off with good time, big flavoured, raucous pan-Asian joints with names like Tokyo Tina or Hanoi Hannah, where cocktails were as important to the mix as the food, Commune’s restaurants have become increasingly confident and ambitious. With its later restaurants New Quarter and Firebird, culinary authenticity was still not the point and cocktails remain essential to the mix but the ideas are more focused, the cooking sharper, the wine lists more adventurous.
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This is certainly the case with Moonhouse, its latest venture installed in the gorgeous, curvaceous art deco building in Balaclava formerly home to Ilona Staller.
Billing itself a restaurant that “honours traditional Cantonese soul”, Moonhouse probably more accurately honours Aussie-Cantonese soul and adds a touch of French bistro fusion in terms of décor and plating to create a thoroughly charming hybrid with a solid menu that occasionally spikes into greatness.
Prawn toast;
(Photo: Parker Blain)
Take the riff on steak tartare, for example, that sees the hand-chopped beef mixed with Cantonese vinegar, Sichuan spice added to the more traditional caper/egg yolk/chive mix. Served with deep-fried wonton crisps, it’s a flavour bomb of a dish, perhaps (like a good portion of the Moonhouse menu) a little too reliant on salt, but a cracking way to start a meal.
Another highlight is a superb steamed baby snapper, butterflied and then doused in a deft ginger and soy broth populated with lazily drifting glass noodles. Topped with sesame oil-doused spring onions, it’s a comforting and gorgeously balanced dish.
Also worth considering are the refreshing pickled vegetables teamed with swiftly sautéed fungus, and moreish “economy noodles”, wokked flat rice noodles tossed with whatever protein is extra in the kitchen that night (the beef version sung). Diced tiger prawn meat tossed with chilli and served in its shell topped with a crumb flavoured with fried anchovies and garlic flakes hit the right notes too, as did an almond sponge drenched in ginger syrup and teamed with lemon curd and whipped cream.
Efficient service leans witty without being annoying and, not surprisingly for Commune, food-friendly, on-theme cocktails kicked it, including a Black Spritz that, astonishingly successfully, united amaro, black vinegar, vermouth, lemon and prosecco. A two-page wine list ably navigates trends and the menu’s punchy flavours.
Moonhouse may not be one for the Cantonese purists but it pulls together a good time from many different elements. More please.
