Then and now in Carlton

Marcel Proust, eat your heart out. Better still, eat your childhood madeleines and drink your lime tea. Nothing could compare with the coffee-scrolls and apple slices from Monaco’s cake shop in Lygon Street washed down with a bottle of Passiona while waiting for the North Carlton bus on the corner.

If you have to ask about Monaco’s and which corner, then you didn’t know Carlton in the 40s and 50s. Even then, Lygon Street between Grattan Street and Elgin Street, together with the surrounding neighbourhood, provided a magnet for foodies. Except as high school and university students we didn’t know that’s what we were.

Today, the Carlton food scene, despite the usual ups and downs of the restaurants, bakeries, delis and specialty stores, has that word association pulling power. Say "Carlton" and you can do more than just smell the coffee and taste the pasta.

You think of Jimmy Watson’s which, fine restaurant though it continues to be today, was revolutionary in its early days, literally teaching thousands how to enjoy real wine and how to savour more imaginative cooking. Or consider the pioneering role the Lygon Cheese Shop and King and Godfree’s have played in Melbourne’s food culture. Where else can you see the size of the Italian wine bottles matched and exceeded by the size of the Parmigiano cheeses?

A whole generation of Melburnians, perhaps even two generations, has come to take it all for granted.

But for those of us who grew up in Carlton but no longer live there, the memories enhance the contemporary experience whenever we return. I can stop for a soul food lunch at Brunetti’s or just a coffee and the incomparable ricotta cheese turnovers. At the same time I look at the building’s distinctive facade knowing that this always welcoming eatery now operates where the original presses of the Australian Jewish News used to be.

From Brunetti’s I can then walk to at least three other restaurants that not only serve good food , but offer the bonus of personal – and gastronomic -- history as an added attraction.

So across the road in Faraday Street on the Drummond Street corner there’s the recently established and quite innovative Sicilian Vespers [now, in 2001, Vue De Monde]. That’s where the Pagone family welcomes diners in the same house which my late father ran as Café Tel Aviv from 1928 to 1933.

In Drummond Street itself, Doninni’s pastas have replaced the borsht, chopped liver and shnitzels of Cohen’s, the leading kosher restaurant in Melbourne of the 40s and 50s. It was where the legendary Professor Goldman, the foundation professor of Semitic Studies, used to hold court amidst fellow academics from Melbourne University eager to find an outpost of European cuisine.

Or I can wander up Lygon Street, say hello to the inimitable Gian Carlo at the Universita, enjoy the whole garfish and steamed spinach, and recall the wasted but wonderful student hours -- even before Gian-Carlo’s time --of playing on the soccer tables while discovering the benefits of the early model cappucinos.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, that’s true. But then it never was. Except in the restaurants and food shops of Carlton which, so far, seem to find ways of renewing themselves. Long may they continue to do so.

Sam Lipski, March 24, 1999

© Sam Lipski 1999