John Lethlean, Reviewer
August 29, 2006

A restaurant with a sense of purpose and style.

Verge is a restaurant with a sense of purpose and style.

Verge is a restaurant with a sense of purpose and style.
Photo: Rebecca Hallas

1 Flinders La, Melbourne
(03) 9639 9500
International, Japanese, Modern Australian
Mon-Sat noon-3pm, 6pm-10.30pm.
Bankcard, Visa, AMEX, Mastercard, Diners Club
Price Guide
Typical small dish $16, typical main $33. Corkage: By arrangement, $15 per bottle

Score: 16/20

The sun is down. Lights on the City Museum building make Spring Street look so grand. Nocturnal life in the verdant gardens opposite stirs. And inside Verge, in the upstairs dining room, it's like being in an intriguingly lit and coloured cement-and-glass pod, perched just high enough to take advantage of all the varying local architecture and landscape. And Simon Denton is explaining the change of ownership at the restaurant he has driven, through good times and not so good, for the past five years.

He is telling us that long-time waiter Ainslie Lubbock and head chef for the past 18 months Dallas Cuddy are now partners in the business he started with former wife Michelle Bowen, and former head chef and current hands-off partner Karen White. He is unwittingly providing reason to the intangible - but very definite - new mood at this quintessentially metropolitan little house of style and substance.

"I have a young family now. I don't want to be here all the time," says the now bearded, slightly greying and slightly less slender - but no less superbly adapted to the vocation he has chosen - main man of Verge. His new business partner smiles the smile of a toothpaste model as she escorts a diner to a table; a plate of perfectly symmetrical, slender oysters from Coffin Bay arrives on the table garnished with cubes of piquant bloody-mary jelly and coriander cress; and suddenly Verge feels a whole lot different from the arty/edgy angst-driven little food-and-wine den it started life as.

A good different. The different you get when you throw a dash of humanity and warmth into the mix.

I like Verge. Always have. But I think I like it more now than in any previous incarnation, including the launch period, when three ex-Luxe staffers put their heads together to create something special in a rather special location, opposite the Treasury Gardens. And parts of the restaurant remain just as they were back then, testimony to the investment in good design that was so much a part of the restaurant's schtick. The spare aesthetic; the timeless furnishings and accessories; the emphasis on wine.

Other parts have, however, developed, not the least of which is the rather excellent, original food of chef Dallas Cuddy, who served as understudy to his predecessor, Karen White, for 10 months before taking the helm. Cuddy's is a bold, highly individual cuisine fusing lots of Japanese ingredients with a modern cooking style. It's a style inspired by a year at Nobu in London.

Where nine restaurants might serve a green vegetable such as broccolini with some kind of Mediterranean dressing, Verge is the one in 10 that smothers it with a simply delicious, light dressing of sesame oil whipped with smoked tofu and black sesame seeds. Salmon gets a bonito hollandaise; venison is served with buttered cabbage, marinated figs and braised daikon.

Japan doesn't entirely dominate. But it's there in some way with most of Cuddy's clever, aesthetically poised dishes. And as I've said before, modern, Western-trained chefs experimenting with Japan have provided a more convincing argument for crossover than Japanese chefs and restaurants coming back the other way with lamb loin chops arranged in yin-yang patterns with splodges of miso sauce on the plate.

Apart from the absolutely confident service and affability of a hands-on owner, one of the past pleasures of Verge has been the ability to cast off responsibility for choosing wine; this is Denton's thing, and he clearly derives a lot of personal satisfaction from running a list from which predictability and cliche have been banished. Tonight, I put him out of business with a choice of pinot grigio from Collavini, a medium-size Italian house (although large for Friuli, I'm told) - "unless you'd like to talk me out of it". He would not.

Following the simply perfect oysters ($3.50 each) is a duck breast marinated in a miso-based paste. It has been roasted - but super rare - and sliced thinly over a salad of mango, mint shreds and pickled daikon ribbons. It's almost like duck sashimi, but the long curing process of the marination has changed the texture from raw duck meat to something exceptional. With it is a wafer of rice crispie - a deep-fried rice-and-nori cake - and a tangy, miso-based sauce splodged in dots of diminishing size ($16.50). Quite an exceptional dish.

As is that consisting of two subtly spicy tiger prawns wrapped in yuba, or tofu skin, and fried ($17). They come on a moulded bed of farro cooked in dashi, like a risotto, and finished with spring onion, a lemon/lime-and-cream veloute and splodges of Avruga, the Spanish herring roe. Again, there is marvellous harmony of flavours, and the texture of farro cooked properly is quite seductive.

Yuba is used again with a rolled rabbit loin, wrapping the chicken mousse-filled meat where crepinette would more conventionally be used. It gives the roasted rabbit roll - served sliced - a lovely "skin". A mix of small, sauteed mushrooms beneath the meat adds an earthy dimension. There's a pasta parcel of more robust leg meat on a spring onion puree and a light jus spiked with ginger splashed on the plate, with a few pink and green sprouts scattered for decoration ($33.50). It's classical with a twist, and shows plenty of technical ability. Clever.

The other main works well too, although some might question the portion: it's a small piece of crisp-skinned wild barramundi fillet on a puree of house-smoked tomato ($33.50). The garnish is a combo of daikon ribbon, braised salsify, blanched fresh soy beans, baby leeks with a little Japanesque green salsa and shredded shiso. It's an unpredictable team, but one that works well.

Personally, I reckon the way to go here is three entrees and dessert, because the latter show all the care, precision and spark of the savoury dishes, and the smaller dishes seem to me just that bit more interesting. A millefeuille ($13.50) using super-thin layers of compressed filo, between which the chef puts poached pear and a chestnut-chocolate mousse, is quite something else. Reiterating the pear-chocolate relationship is a grainy pear sorbet on top, while the plate's perimeter is dotted with cubes of Pedro Ximenez jelly. Brilliant.

I was less convinced by a zesty individual baked cheesecake of honey and mascarpone served with poached quince and its syrupy reduced juices; too rich and heavy, I thought, and a little out of sequence with the chef's obviously light, inspired hand. But we are talking degrees of relativity. At $13.50, very reasonably priced.

As is the entire offer at Verge, given what you've read already. Bearing in mind the attrition of restaurants in Melbourne, even the good ones, it's very satisfying to see a place such as this embarking on its second five years with such a positive realignment of the core values. A good different.

Since our visit, Verge has closed for a few weeks for refurbishment. 



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