Melbourne hipster

While back in town, I wanted to see what was new on Melbourne’s hipster strip of Fitzroy. I started with “Easey’s”, a  frankly remarkable bar and burger joint housed in a series of old train carraiges, perched up four flights of grafittied stairs on an innercity sidestreet. Not only is the concept amazing, but the banging nineties hip hop, views, tasy burgers and cute straight bro waiters gave it a fun-time vibe.

 

Around the corner on Smith Street is “Hotel Jesus”,  perhaps the kitschiest of the city’s burgeoning crop of Mexican restaurants, designed by the same team as Bali’s (even more riotous) “Motel Mexicola“.

 

And finally, way down the end of Johnston Street near the river, is “Admiral Cheng-Ho.” The cafe is named after the Chinese explorer ( more often known as Zheng-he) who led a fleet to Africa in the thirteenth century and could hypothetically have taken coffee back to China. Since the closure of “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, a hipster congee and tripe cafe, this is the only Chinese-themed hipster cafe in Melbourne but to be honest, other than the teas on the menu it was mostly standard (and therefore, excellent) Melbourne cafe fare.

Melbourne street

Melbourne’s hippest street?

Pictured: Sonido

A story in the Age newspaper on the rise and rise of Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street with some interesting suggestions.Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street

Tikki!

Here is a cool new addition to Melbourne’s nightlife: the South Seas, a new tikki-style rum bar decked out in gleeful Brady-Bunch-goes-to-Hawaii style, playing kitsch Hawaiian music and serving mai-tai cocktails with little grass-skirted girls on stirring sticks.

The bar has opened in what was formerly the Centrelink (government unemployment office) on Johnson Street, opposite Hares and Hyenas. It had also housed, briefly, a dowdy bar called the Johnson which occassionally hosted fun lesbian parties, but as I mentioned to my friends when I visited, I thought it would have been cooler if the bar had kept its old name and theme – “Lets grab a drink at Centrelink”.

 

The newest incarnation – empty when we were there – impressed me though with its commitment to its theme. It has bamboo bathrooms, aquariums at the coat check and fake plants and Polynesian masks everywhere.

I loved it.

  

My Melbourne: Fitzroy

 

Fitzroy is my favourite Melbourne suburb – an old working class, inner city neighbourhood home to an interesting mix of immigrants, bohemians and more and more wealthy up-and-comers. There are gay bars and book shops, an African internet cafe (well there was, it looked closed), tatty Chinese homewares stores selling gaudy ornaments, super-expensive clothing boutiques, endless vintage shops, trees and bike  racks covered in “knitted grafitti” and miles of interesting street art down residential streets and alleyways. One street has a few real Keith Haring pieces left over from his visit to the city in the early 80s, just behind a block of public housing flats. There is a former Aboriginal health centre-turned cockail bar which trains Aboriginal youth in hospitality work, and a stretch of footpath outside a Safeway supermarket where other Aboriginal people often meet on the street. There are Turkish, Korean, Ethiopian and Afghan restaurants,  a forlorn former “Spanish strip” now consisting of a single Iberian supermarket, flamenco bar and a restaurant and cultish indie record stores and bookshops.

My Melbourne: Sonido

Melbourne has so many great cafes, with more springing up all the time. Everyone has their favourites, and it would be almost impossible to visit them all. My favourite is Sonido, a Colombian cafe on Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street selling arrepas con huevo and traditional Andean hot chocolate as well as the juices of unusual Amazon fruits (like the ‘mora’ and the ‘lulo’ ) in an atmosphere best descibed as homey-tropical-kitsch. The music and the staff are all Colombian. It is pretty much the cutest little place I can imagine.

  

Goodbye!

The other night I walked down Smith Street, possibly for the last time. The late afternoon sky was a weird moody yellow, as if the sun were shining through the most fragile, feathery veil of storm clouds.  Everything was golden, but gloomy, and a light rain was falling. In this end-of-the-world light a lone locust, the first storm trooper of the apocalpyse, an advance guard for the trillion of its kind massing on the city’s outskirts, hopped into the cafe where I was sipping my latte. It was an omen, but of what? The impotence of man in the face of nature? Or simply, the beginning of the end?  “Well, ” I said to the barman, as I drained my coffee,  “first there was (what felt like) forty days and forty nights of rain,  now the locusts – I guess I”ll be seeing you in Hell”.

But its not hell, I’m going. Although it will be hot.

It is hello Bangkok and goodbye Melbourne, goodbye Kyneton; goodbye the murderous magpies and jogging by the river, and end to four days of frenzied cleaning and battling with plump shiny spiders in my windowsills. An end to walking down the street through fluttering, skittering clouds of locusts, and long, lazy days at an empty school.

Goodbye to the kids I see around town on their bikes, the delicious pizzas at Pizza Verde where I dined with my mum, friend and (bizarrely) Australian television personality Tonia Toddman, on Friday.

Goodbye to Fitzroy, with its refugees in tower blocks and cafes and scrawled posters everywhere.  I did my last lap today of VideoBusters (how I love you!), the African internet cafe, Sonido ( I went, and had a guanabana vitamina).

Goodbye to my hopes of dining at Izakaya Den, the “buzz” restaurant for Japanese food in Melbourne for the last few years,  which was closed on my last Sunday night when I tried to go.

Goodbye to an old way of life that I will remember in years to come through this blog.

I’m ready. Bring it on.

Goodbye Melbourne!

Little Green Riding Hood

The Social Studio

The Social Studio, a small space tucked away on Smith Street just next to Video Busters, is an example of what makes Melbourne great. It is an offbeat, little specialist haven with a rough, funky aesthetic –  and a social conscience. The shop provides a training workshop and retail space for young Africans interested in the fashion industry. There is also a cafe at the back.

In the ever-gentrifying Smith Street strip, it is truly a step back in time to the old-skool Fitzroy. The African-based meals are hearty but basic, and served in a bright yellow painted kitchentte where you sit on old cushions, amid taped-up articles on the walls, wobbly tables and a portaloo out the back. There is  none of the pretentiousness of most of the new places that have opened here lately with their vogueish interiors and fashionable menus.

It is a real one-of-a-kind.

It was a well-timed find too, because next week Social Studio is hosting a “street party” in collaboration with the (ironically-named?) boutique “Hunter Gatherer”. Its on from 6pm on Friday.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere existence – Carl Jung

Back home: Melbourne style

Future city

This huge, wallsized photographic mural of a future Melbourne covers one wall of Radio Bar, a cafe on Gertrude Street. It reveals a Blade Runner-esque skyline of photoshopped-in skyscrapers hovering above Flinders Street station and interspersed with the city’s existing office blocks and hotels. Of the “additions” I recognized the Petronas Towers  (or one of them). There are also 3-D holographic advertisements and billboards in Chinese. Bring on the future!

Fitzroy streets