Koliba Czech and Slovak Restaurant

Update: Koliba is now the Heart of Europe Restaurant and Bar


11 Johnston St, Collingwood; 03 9417 3797

It's the simple things that can make you happy. For me, one of those is when you call to book an ethnic restaurant, and your booking is taken by someone who is clearly from that region.

Such was the case when we arranged to go to Koliba one chilly Friday evening. I'd been waiting for the weather to cool sufficiently so that I could make good on Sarah's enthusiastic recommendation. All that talk of goulash and dumplings and the promise of Krusovice on tap had me very enthused.

Situated just down from Smith St, the restaurant is warm and welcoming. Tables and chairs are all dark, solid wood, but plenty of lighting keeps the restaurant from feeling gloomy. High ceilings further ensure that the light offsetting the richly coloured walls and furnishings doesn't cause too much glare.

The menu is easy to take in (and it's available on their website). I was expecting to be more than nourished by their main offerings, so had to forego any entree. But how good does 'Devil toasts with minced beef and cheese' sound? The menu describes it as traditional style; I love a cuisine that builds meat and cheese into its traditional toast. Similarly, their 'traditional' garlic bread is fried and served with cream cheese and marinated capsicum. Now you're talking! (Check out Sarah's post - linked above - for her experience of a couple of entrees.)

When it comes to main course, the options equate to choosing which carb you'd like with your meat. This is not, unfortunately, a restaurant to take a vegetarian to. They'd be very restricted in what they could order, and would want to be a cheese fan, as crumbed Edam with tartare sauce, potatoes and salad is the only vego option on the list of mains.

I did toy with ordering the roast pork with braised cabbage and dumplings - the Czech national dish - but we'd had a quite extraordinary homemade roast pork dinner the night before. I was keen for something saucy too, in which respect I would have been fine with the roast pork as the cabbage is appropriately smothering.

It was a fait accompli though, really: it had to be traditional beef goulash with bread dumplings. The goulash glowed with paprika and was packed with chunked meat. The odd piece was a bit sinewy, but that's OK. It's not a premium cut dish - it's meant to be made with the lesser cuts, made wonderfully rich and gelatinous by slow cooking. The potato dumplings were reminiscent of Ethiopian injera, though without the sourness. They were marvellous for soaking up the sauce, and so pliant you could lay them on your pillow. It would have been drastically improved by even a garnish's worth of vegetable.

SG didn't have any pork overload problems, and went the crumbed pork schnitzel, with boiled spuds. Again, the portion size rewarded our entree ban, and the meat cut was suitable to the dish. While patchy meat was understandable, some of the potatoes were also a little underdone. Thank god, however, that there were some vegetables to nibble on.

There's something about strudel that makes it hard to knock back, particularly when you're in a Czech restaurant with a group nearby ordering in the language of the cuisine. Koliba's apple strudel with walnuts and cream was wonderful: moist, cinnamony and light enough for us to finish the lot.It would be improved by some ice cream melting against the warm pastry, rather than plain old whipped cream.

Koliba offers four fruit brandies as well - plum, apricot, juniper or cherry - perfect for that final warming hit before the ride home.

Cafeklatsch II: North II, Gingerlee IV, Cavallero

North: 717 Rathdowne St, Carlton North; 03 9348 1276
Gingerlee: 117 Lygon St, Brunswick East; 03 9380 4430
Cavallero: 300 Smith St, Collingwood; 03 9417 1377

It's not breaking any ground to say that Melbourne has a surfeit of cafes. It's also established that in certain parts of town, a certain style of cafe has become de rigueur. So what do they all do to differentiate themselves from each another?

In most cases, it's down to the menu. Innovative combinations, stand-out ingredients, or a signature dish are to the key to successful trade amidst the inner north's glut of relaxed dining options. In Carlton, the cafe called North has made extra certain by adding a particularly effective feature wall - seemingly drawn on in texta and featuring hundreds of cartoon-style, framed portraits. It would be endlessly arresting if their menu (also wall-mounted) didn't already give patrons enough to ponder.

Many are drawn to North, however, on the promise of a particular menu item. Hence, while they may be distracted by huevos rancheros (pictured right...and let me tell you, you won't eat for the rest of the day if you make it through that plate), or the house (cannelini) beans, they read only as far as: Reuben sandwich - grilled corn beef on an open sandwich with Swiss cheese, dill mayo and sauerkraut.
It doesn't look like much when it comes out, but it does the job. Look at the perfectly grilled cheese, just turning black at the edges; check out the corned beef slices overhanging the edges of the bread. And did someone say sauerkraut? They're as generous with the cabbage here as the bratwurst stand at Queen Vic Markets. I've soft spots for both corned beef and for old-school, open-topped sandwich-type arrangements, and this particular example made for a fine, filling and fulfilling lunch.

Grab a $2.50 gingerbread man on your way out the door.

Gingerlee doesn't seem to have skipped a beat since it opened almost two years ago - it's consistently packed, and its Syrian French toast is frequently written up. The cafe sits squarely in a concentrated eating zone, with Small Block, Poached, Sugardough and La Paloma all nearby, not to mention Rumi immediately across the street. Gingerlee's original menu seems to have held pretty steady, with Middle-Eastern touches on their breakfast and lunch dishes their signature. The French toast (with orange-blossom water and labne) is a case in point, along with their breakfast tagine. There's also the option, for those seriously in need, to order a Bloody Mary with breakfast.

Even their poached eggs come with something a little exotic, in this case one of my all-time favourite indulgences, Persian fetta (last featured on this blog in the creamed spinach from Greg Malouf at Stones). The poached eggs and fetta are accompanied by sourdough toast (of the bring-me-a-steak-knife-to-cut-this-crust variety) and avocado. Half an avocado to be exact - happy for them not to skimp on that! What I loved about this dish was building taste combinations on my fork - eggs, avocado, toast; creamy fetta and buttery bread; toast, avocado and fetta; and, more often than not, everything piled up together and manoeuvred with no small amount effort to my waiting mouth, followed shortly by a little squirm and a smile as all the tastes blended together.

Over Collingwood way, what does a cafe do among the bevy of Smith Street options to let everyone know they're both worthwhile and safe to try? At Cavallero, they start at the front, with elaborate wrought-iron gates across the front of the shop. A stag-head behind the linear, understated bar is incongruous amongst the otherwise bare walls housing booths and communal tables. By day, oodles of light flows in from front and back, but at night, funky light fittings keep the mood low-key.

Cavallero is succeeding at being different things to different crowds, achieving status as both a cafe and a bar. On the eating front, they've done interesting things when divvying up their menu, picking times of day rather than style of dish. One can choose from Early, Middle or Late, roughly equating to breakfast, lunch, dinner/tapas. Only roughly, however. Under Early there are also Extras, that really don't match the expected bacon, mushroom etc, but instead offer more obtuse mixed options, featuring avocado and gremolata, for example. It's a frequently changing menu as well, so a winning dish may have been usurped if you go back for a second try.

A subsection on the menu, under Middle, offers Bread, but goes much further than just a house-style, including filled options such as pide, or a combo of bread and olives. It's the Bread section luring many a customer, either for the Carolina-style pork sandwich (with roasted pork belly and a barbecue sauce fashioned on site) recently featured in the age (melbourne) magazine or their fried chicken and coleslaw sandwich.

The pide on this occasion came with spiced vegetables and a lively labne. It was certainly hearty and offered enough flavour kick to keep things interesting. I'm never so sure about putting potato into a sandwich, however. The eggplant, onion and labne were very welcome, and the potato was pretty tasty on its own, but a less starchy veg would have been preferable.

An honourable mention in the interesting menu stakes to El Mirage in Brunswick East, where a recent visit saw me making a win-win choice between rare beef salad with haloumi and basil, or poached eggs with fig chutney and ricotta, while others at the table went for an accomplished penne ragu, as well as $6 fruit toast with honey. Great with a T2 chai.

Pubs not so grubby: Union Hotel and Prince Patrick

Prince Patrick: 135 Victoria St, Collingwood; 03 9416 1455
Union Hotel: 109 Union St, Brunswick; 03 9388 2235

Pubs are known for re-inventing themselves. It seems the desire to drink in a particular locality is fairly constant, but our taste for the surroundings in which we drink needs to be regularly updated. As a rule, these re-inventions shift the pub away from the seedy end of the scale and towards the classy end. Sometimes a few clues as to the pub's lewder past are left behind, something for the refined, classier crowd to chuckle about as they congratulate themselves on picking out the diamond in the rough.

Collingwood's Prince Patrick Hotel has retained its distressed concrete interior, but contrasted it against the plush banquettes and soft carpeting of the interior. A large, well-lit bar divides the 'pub' area - with big screen - from the 'dining' area - with tables, booths and cosy stool and table arrangements. The resulting atmosphere is more Sydney chic than Melbourne grunge. This is a pub that offers a $25 steak sandwich on their menu, and doesn't baulk at charging $7.50 for a pot of beer. Having said that, the bar staff are friendly, the food is well prepared and the portions generous. As always, however, I would vastly prefer to have $5-10 knocked off the price of a plate and receive half as much food, so that it's a serving size I could actually finish. But cheap pub food isn't the look we're going for here.

A calamari and chorizo salad promises a protein charge. It's enormous, littered with curled and scored pieces of calamari, no dearth of moist chorizo, and, just when you thought it was filling enough, thinly-sliced potato. I've no issue with the execution, but I prefer a salad to be under $20, and I don't feel good leaving that kind of decent produce behind after I've eaten more than my fill.

The chicken parma perhaps presents a better ratioed serving - certainly in the photo above it almost looks wee. In reality it was a good-sized serve, but at least one doesn't have to feel as bad leaving fried, sliced potato behind. Avoiding the oily decadence of the salad's chorizo, or the Union's pasta (see below), the parma is straightforward; better than de Biers' $5 version (don't go there), but not particularly imaginative.

The Union Hotel in Brunswick West has taken a running leap up the class scale, leaving behind its repuation as one of the last gentlemen's pubs, replete with strippers, to be reborn as a bright, airy, diverse, family-friendly establishment with a long list of restaurant winners on the menu.

They've done astonishingly well revamping the space: there's a small section of pubby bar in view of the television, demur tables around a small stage, an even more refined dining room at the back of the building, and outside a partially covered beer garden big enough for the non-smokers and smokers to still have their own space.

The main menu starts down the path of list of pub staples - parmas, steak sandwich, pie and veg, pasta - then veers off into interesting territory: duck lasagne, anyone? The specials board is almost as long as the menu again, and shows similar adventurism, drawing on cuisines from the Mediterranean - zucchini fritters - to the Oriental - duck featuring again, this time wrapped in wontons.

Their pasta is aptly handled. A pasta special with prawns, asparagus and eggplant would be at home in a well-heeled Italian restaurant - plump, juicy butterflied prawns perch jauntily between a generous serve of fettucine and chargrilled eggplant. The dish was quite oily; richness perhaps being a trait common to their pasta dishes: at Where's the Beef they also review the pumpkin ravioli, along with several other worthwhile vegetarian dishes.

Their steak sandwich is suitably ample and flanked by thick-cut chips. Plenty of meat nestles between the toasted turkish bread, smeared with a quality aioli and decent Swiss cheese. The steak sarnie sits on the specials board rather than the main menu (and is about half the price of the Prince Patricks'), but the main menu does feature a beef burger, distinguished with pickle and tomato relish.

The Union also has a commitment to local beers, with Mountain Goat on tap, and an imaginative wine list, also with plenty of local options.

Grace Darling II

114 Smith St, Collingwood; 03 9416 0055
Collingwood's Grace Darling may use a bit of a daggy name for their discount food night - Tightarse Tuesdays - but their meals are all class. Diners hit the jackpot when an establishment offers dishes off their regular menu at a bargain price. At the Grace the same menu services the bar and restaurant, so you can choose your level of ambience and whether you want someone to take your order (including for drinks) or you want to take it to the bar yourself. The dining area at the back of the building is hardly pretentious, and its downstairs 'atrium area', with a glass roof and decorated with ferns and straw partitions, feels more like a beer garden. The main meal prices range from $10-15.
The Grace runs a dedicated steak night on Thursdays, but a red-meat-fix is also available for $14 as part of the Tightarse Tuesday menu. Alternatively, their steak sandwich with fries is also a winner. The chicken burger with avocado, brie and hollandaise sauce is a standout.
Feeling cosy, warm, buoyed by socialising on a Tuesday and liberated by the range of great food at a good price, I went left of my usual field and ordered the corned beef, with mash, cabbage, bacon and mustard sauce. It looked a treat on the plate: several slices of meat, not too thick, positively glowing with pinkness, but looking firm and fresh; no sign of that glossy sheen on cured meat that indicates it's past its best. On reflection I was a little surprised at the inclusion of bacon with the meal: corned beef tends to be a fairly salty serve on its own. Fortunately this sample didn't taste like it had been sitting in brine since the pub's namesake rescued the survivors of a shipwreck in 1883! Each of the meal's components contributed to make a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. The mash was particularly straightforward - not overly creamy nor buttery nor herby, it tasted pretty much like, well, potatoes that had been mashed! - and the mustard sauce was more of a mayonnaise. But piled up in a forkful with with the crunchy cabbage and pliable meat it made for an enjoyable home-style meal.
SG chose the beer-battered fish and chips. How cute is the spoonful of tartare sauce? Rather than one great slab of fish with a puffy batter, the Grace serves up three smaller, firm fillets, each more dusted than dunked in the batter. I've never found fault with their fries, and these steak-cut chips were just as crunchy and irresistible as ever.
If you haven't overdone it on fries and still have room a range of desserts - such as orange bread and butter pudding ($7.50) - is available.
What is most notable about the Grace's Tightarse Tuesday is that it's only the prices that are cut back. There's still a good choice of food - the range extends beyond traditional pub grub to include restuarant-style dishes (such as prawn risotto) - and the serving sizes are generous. There is also ample seating and the service is friendly and attentive.
Click here for an earlier Grace Darling review

Grace Darling

114 Smith St, Collingwood; 03 9416 0055

The Grace Darling is a winner on a Tuesday night - a full-sized, quality pub grub menu with almost everything under $15. We first ventured there weeks ago for the $12 steak: with creamy garlic mash and a decent jus it is extremely good value. After a few too many heavy meals of late I had a craving this time for something Thai, which the Grace also offers from its Thai This menu. I went for the prawn stir fry with spring onion, garlic, chilli and cabbage. SG stuck to the pub mood and went with the steak sandwich.

Since the start of August the Grace has introduced trivia on a Tuesday night as well, and I did wonder how the kitchen would cope - that's a lot of $11 parma to carry upstairs. With a 20 minute or so wait the smells of heartier pub fare - fries, breads and pie pastry - left me a trifle disappointed when my stir fry arrived. I'd been hoping for a Thai taste explosion, but the first few mouthfuls were closer to (well) dressed coleslaw. The rice though was well cooked - not at all dry, and the kernels nicely separating. Despite a visual presence of red chilli I didn't detect any heat in the dish. It was saved, however, by the presence of four, fat king prawns. They had been lightly fried and I perhaps would have preferred them having some more time getting to know the marinade. The use of more delicate spring onion rather than its crunchier cousin saved the dish being over-powered, which made up somewhat for the runny, not-so-flavourful sauce.

Definitely on the plus side though, it filled me up, without a heavy feeling, which left room to polish off the remaining crispy fries on SG's plate.