Streets ahead

By Rita Erlich
June 28, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/06/27/1119724554563.html?oneclick=true

The collective noun for food in Melbourne is often street. Food halls are all very well, but for most, food stores and restaurants are best when they come in groups, strung out on both sides of the road. There are dozens of food streets in Melbourne, local shopping areas that have withstood the pull of the mega-shopping centre and the giant supermarket.

I could have written about dozens, the ones in Kew and Yarraville, Footscray, North Carlton, North Fitzroy, Hawksburn, Brighton, Box Hill and Hawthorn. But these three are especially dear to me, and each tells its own story of a changing Melbourne.

Gertrude Street, Fitzroy

When I first lived in Fitzroy, on Nicholson Street near the corner of Moor Street, I was woken every morning by the sound of a cock crowing. No kidding. Somewhere on Moor Street someone kept chooks. It was probably more than one.

Fitzroy in the early 1970s was a particular kind of foodie haven. Its residents were Australians, old and new. The newer ones, mainly Italian and Yugoslav (as it was then), grew food in their front and back yards. Tomatoes, herbs, zucchini, beans, silverbeet and chooks. I never saw the chooks, only heard the rooster in the morning.

A decade later, food was becoming a glamour commodity. But in my part of Fitzroy, there was nothing very grand about it. A van came around to the factories (now transformed to apartments) selling vegetables to the female workers, who streamed out at the sound of a siren. There was cheese, too, from a factory. I remember almost warm, still wobbly, ricotta. "Put it straight in the fridge when you get home, love," they told me. A wonderful old Italian couple had a grocery on Brunswick Street, of the kind you still find in remote villages in Italy. Crusty bread, pyramids of tinned tomatoes and tuna, sacks of dried beans, and home-grown lemons.
Gertrude Street, however, was dodgy. We didn't walk near the pubs, which were violent places, all grog and fights. The violence was entirely personal, I think, but I wasn't going to risk getting caught in the fall-out. I remember someone who had been around in the 1950s telling me of houses with dirt floors and no electricity, and children with the diseases of poverty.

But Gertrude Street had its better moments. There was Potts Bakery, where bread was baked in wood-fired ovens that were a century old. There were Yugoslav restaurants where they served immense bowls of vegetable soup and even larger servings of grilled meat and salad at absurdly low prices. There were funny little cafes with tables of men playing cards and drinking coffee from tiny cups. English was scarcely spoken, not even at Potts Bakery.

There was a wine store, one of the last few with an Australian wine licence so they could sell wine but not beer or spirits. It was called Grovers at one point, I've forgotten what before that, and I used to buy single bottles of gorgeous wines for what seemed like very high prices. One example: in the early 1980s a bottle of mid-1970s Leo Buring riesling cost me $2.65 - we drank it many years later, and the price tag was still on the bottle. The wine store is now a restaurant called Yelza.

Perhaps surprisingly, the street is largely unchanged architecturally. A couple of new houses have appeared on a vacant block, businesses have changed hands and names but, basically, it looks much the same. The stretch between Smith Street and Gore Street now forms an earnest little foodie village that includes Enoteca (for wine, any time) and Ladro (for pizza, at night).

Books for Cooks233 Gertrude Street, 8415 1415
Part of the store used to be my local milkbar. It's now a double shopfront, full of books about cooking, food, wine, eating and drinking, new and second hand. It is cheerfully sociable, since anyone who wanders in is likely to meet someone they know.

Gertrude Street Organic Bakery228 Gertrude Street, 9417 5998
Janine and Paul Schillier established the bakery in March 1997, and make mainly sourdough loaves that are, as it were, the best thing since sliced bread, although they may not see the joke because they don't slice bread to order. But they do sell bread knives.

Organic Gertrude238 Gertrude Street 9417 775
Fruit and vegetables, grocery items, and a separate dairy refrigerator. There is also food to go.

Lygon Street, Carlton

Gertrude Street has acquired food stores, Lygon Street has lost them. Or rather, it has acquired different ways of selling food. Where there were once greengrocers, delicatessens and butchers, there are now cafes and restaurants.

The transitions - there have been many here - show how life keeps changing. Carlton was an immigrant suburb for decades - first Jewish, then Italian, with a fair overlap between the two in the 1950s and 1960s. Frank Lucchiari, from Excell Meats, remembers with fondness the last kosher butcher in Lygon Street. "He used to make us hot dogs. Beautiful. And his pickled meats ..."

When Lucchiari came to Lygon Street in 1972, the butcher shop that is now Excell belonged to a Mr Williams, whose family had been there for about as long as King & Godfree. Vince's, the butcher's across the street, had been the first Smorgon butcher shop when that family settled in the 1920s. Now it's a fish shop.

Until the early 1980s, Lygon Street was a local shopping street, its immigrant population intermingled with the students and academics from Melbourne University. Because of the students, there was room for cafes such as Genevieve (in Faraday Street), and then Tamani (where Ti Amo is now). The academics came to the University Cafe and Jimmy Watson's. When the pubs started to upgrade and turn their dining rooms into restaurants, it was a clear signal times had changed. And when the pubs started closing and being turned into fashion stores, times had obviously changed again.

My old Italian Carlton included Mamma Varrenti, a deli that is now Ti Amo 2. There was the Lygon Food Store, an Italian store that sold great cheeses and salume, much photographed because of a giant provolone in the window. Lesley's Ham and Beef was the relic of an older Australian Lygon Street. King & Godfree was a licensed grocer that split into a wine store and a supermarket around the corner in Faraday Street. There was Grinders, next to which was a little cake shop called Brunetti. When Brunetti moved in the 1980s, as I wrote in a guide to food stores called Good Enough to Eat: "I took the change of premises rather gloomily. With each year, Lygon Street loses more of its character - that special cosy, sometimes shabby air, the look of a street that has kept its history."

But it's still there. Now the supermarket is part of the Lygon Court complex, King & Godfree has a restored veranda, Lygon Food Store has lost its provolone but gained a cafe, there are still two excellent butchers and a charcuterie, and Jimmy Watson's is open for dinner. And Grinders coffee is available throughout Melbourne.

Frank Lucchiari, however, notes the shift in his customers. There used to be lots of Italians who lived locally and had large families to feed. Retail sales have halved: "There are fewer families in the area. The Italians have moved out, others have come in with maybe one or two children."

What has grown is the wholesale side of his business: he supplies about 30 restaurants.

Excell Meats307 Lygon Street, 9347 5516
Great veal, chicken, offal and aged beef.

Donati402 Lygon Street, 9347 4948One of the more elegant butchers in Melbourne. Excellent lamb, veal and pork.

La Parisienne PatesRear 307 Lygon St (off Tyne Lane), 9349 1852
A worthy addition to the street and a great charcuterie.

King & Godfree293 Lygon Street, 9347 1619
Excellent wine store; a good place to pick up oil, bread and salume.

Grinders277 Lygon Street, 9347 7520
This is where it all began, in 1962, with Giancarlo and Selma Giusti.

Chapel Street, Windsor

There used to be four points on the food compass of this end of Chapel Street, south of High Street: Rubinstein's, the grocer; Hansa, the butcher; Paterson's, the cake shop; and Santos, the coffee shop (it sold beans, not cups of coffee).

"A generation of European-born shoppers used to build their shopping around those four centres. People used to do a circuit and the other traders fed off those retail icons," says Fred Gomo, co-owner of the coffee shop, now called Cisco's. The other owner, Danny Ehrlich, is the son of the couple who established the store in the early 1960s (a little before Giancarlo Giusti opened Grinders in Lygon Street).

The Ehrlichs (no relation to the writer) had moved into a lively and long-established area. Paterson's, the cake shop, was much older, dating from about 1916, when a pastrycook called Ortner opened his shop. It was taken over by a Mrs Paterson, in partnership with a Swiss-born pastrycook called Stauber, with whom Walter Schneider worked. The Schneiders bought the business in 1952, and Peter Schneider still works there, 50 years after he joined his grandfather, father and aunt.

Rubinstein's was established in the early 1930s and was an important food centre for more than 50 years. Hansa came much later, in the late 1950s, about 20 years after another butcher, Julius Redlich, had opened his first shop further south along Chapel Street.

This used to be a local shopping strip for people who cooked and ate at home. It's hard to believe in an area that now contains so many opportunities for eating out.

Perhaps the biggest change to shopping and eating habits was the disappearance of the shoe and textile industry in Windsor. Fred Gomo talks about all the factories that closed and were turned into apartments. The women who worked in the factories used to shop in Chapel Street. Now the former factories house singles and couples who regard themselves as time-poor and shop at weekends in between breakfast and lunch.

In 1997, Paterson's added a small eating area to the cake shop. Those picking up one of the wonderful celebratory cakes can stop for a cup of coffee and an eclair, or a pie, as many locals do.
Hansa has changed hands many times and is now a small butcher selling meat and vegetables. Rubinstein's closed in the 1990s.

Is Chapel Street's success in the past? Gomo says in the past 11 years he's seen three or four major changes in the strip, and there are more to come. To some extent, Cisco's has been protected because there are so many people devoted to coffee. But their business is now largely wholesale and they supply coffee to about 200 places around Victoria. (They also send coffee to former regulars who have moved away, including a woman in her 90s who moved to Adelaide.)
There has been another significant change in food stores. Gomo grew up around another food street, Acland Street, and remembers the feeling of freedom on the street as a child, watched over by the shopkeepers who knew all the local children. He remembers being given lollies, almost as a form of greeting.

So what's new? As Gomo puts it: "These days, I tell the staff you have to ask the parents first and get their permission before you give a child a sweet."

Paterson's Cakes117 Chapel Street, 9510 8541
For decades, no one would have dreamed of a party without Paterson's sausage rolls, or a celebration without one of the big cakes, made to order.

Cisco's106 Chapel Street, 9510 7997
Check out the hard-to-find beans from South America, Africa, Papua New Guinea. Or buy some tea.

Rita Erlich is an author and freelance writer, and a former editor of The Age Good Food Guide.

Celebrating the unique spirit of Melbourne

Hi,

Below is the text from an article in Melbourne's daily paper The Age (www.theage.com.au).
Melbourne is one helluva cool place. There is such a strong community spirit there, especially amongst the music community. There are 3 pretty popular community radio stations located in the northern suburbs, and 2 of them were involved in a fundraising event last week for a local charity.

Anyways, the article says it so much better than I ever could.

cheers, Tony

Celebrating the unique spirit of Melbourne June 28, 2005

Community and footy came together at the Junction Oval on Sunday, writes Tracee Hutchison. Something quite extraordinary happened in Melbourne Sunday afternoon. About 22,000 people went to the Junction Oval to watch a football match and raised more than $165,000 for charity. The game was a sell-out - even though, at times, it was a bit like watching the Dimboola thirds, with substantially less match practice.

So why all the people and why all the dosh? A little thing called community. Now in its 12th year, the Sacred Heart Mission Community Cup has become much more than the social game of kick to kick between local music luminaries and volunteer broadcasters from community radio stations 3RRR and 3PBS that it began as. The event has come to signify a profound sense of belonging.

A reason for being, at a time we need it most. And warmed by the knowledge that all proceeds from the day from the gold-coin entry, to the sales of donated hot pies and cold beer, help make the daily work of St Kilda's Sacred Heart Mission that little bit easier. The community bound by a love of live music and heartland-Melbourne radio happily hands over whatever it can afford so it can be part of it.

Much has been made of the passing of the grassroots footy feel of AFL football and, with the loss of Princes Park this year, the Cats' Kardinia Park - I just can't call it Skilled Stadium - remains the last vestige of the code's original suburban appeal. This was the very thing that founded the traditional rivalries, now known as "blockbusters", that helped propel the game to an elite national competition.

While much of what happened on this AFL split-round Sunday afternoon at Junction Oval was about restoring a sense of ownership of Australian rules football in the game's home town, it was actually staking a claim on something that goes to the heart of what sets this city apart. In its simplest terms, we do things differently in Melbourne. And, at the risk of sounding like a parochial idealist, I think that's because we are more likely to say "yes" to being part of something that means something to us first, and worry about how much, if anything, it might be worth to us financially, second.

Maybe it has something to do with the city's long history of benevolence and patronage that arrived with its founding fathers. Or maybe it's just that we have nurtured a keener sense of the strengths and rewards of collaborative effort; a realisation that there is power in the passion of the many and a willingness to carefully harness that passion and bring everyone along for the ride.

It is hard to imagine an event such as the Sacred Heart Mission Community Cup in any other capital city in this country; to imagine the subscriber-base of two community radio stations drawing crowds that rival some of those at the game's elite level; to imagine hundreds of volunteers and thousands of dollars of donated goods and services being trucked in and cleaned up to help a modest, but vital, local charity. And while it's not impossible to imagine Australian bands in other cities lining up for fund-raisers, because there is a long and proud tradition of our musicians being unfailingly generous when it comes to charity dollars in this country, it is impossible to imagine some of the biggest names in Australian music clambering over each other to play between the sirens at a charity football match.

Paul Kelly, Tim Rogers, Dallas Crane, Spiderbait, Magic Dirt and a re-formed Weddings, Parties, Anything - these are some of the home-town favourites proud to say they've played the Community Cup. In our music community and our community radio stations - and I think it's important to state that the involvement of both the community radio stations and the local musicians is entirely self-funded: no government grants, no subsidies or tax concessions - we have something unique in Melbourne.

And we have men, women, kids and dogs - some with means, others with next to none - side by side and screaming wildly at a bunch of local heroes, desperately trying to will an oval-shaped leather ball between the big sticks. Part of something. Part of the spirit of this city.

Tracee Hutchison is a Triple R broadcaster and was part of the calling team at this year's Community Cup.