Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander Winery

A summer's evening in Healesville brought me to the new Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander pizzeria-bistro-artisan bakery on the outskirts of town. It is a modern new complex where you can tour the winemaking facility, try any of their wines, have lunch on the terrace or dinner in the airy restaurant.

I sat at the bar and tried a glass of their chilled rose. The wines are stored in temperature-controlled fridges and the beer casks are in full sight behind glass, rather than hidden in the cellar.

The staff were incredibly friendly and helpful, and the restaurant was fully booked for their regular Curry Night that evening.

I am looking forward to coming back to try their Harry's Monster, a huge cabernet/shiraz/merlot/ petit verdot blend retailing at $49 a bottle.

BYO white wine only

Take a look at the conditions applied by this Chinatown restaurant on their BYO policy. I wonder if they are trying to save on laundry bills?

China Bar

It was Chinese New Year and an acquaintance's thirtieth birthday: what better opportunity to try another cheap and cheerful Chinatown eatery. China Bar came recommended by a few people. There are three branches, two in the city and one in Box Hill. We met up with the others at the Russell Street branch, right beside the entertainment stage where Chinese dancers, gymnasts, singers and performers entertained the hundreds of Melburnians who had braved the forty-degree heat to celebrate New Year in style.

China Bar is pretty small. It probably holds about fifty diners when full. Full roasted chickens and ducks are displayed proudly in the window, and above the counter a selection of dishes are displayed in full photographic glory.

We sat down the back with six others at the formica table, and helped ourselves to extra glasses for our BYO wine. Hunger, and the sheer beewilderment of the number of dishes on offer, made choosing an impossibility. Others picked my first choices - Mongolian beef, belly pork, choice of two roasts - and I was reluctant to order the same dish twice for the table. For the first time in my life, I sent the waitress away with no order from me after everybody else had chosen. Finally, somebody suggested that I limit my choice to the Specialities section, and I finally opted for satay beef.

We shared rice, noodles and stir-fried vegetables along with our own personally-chosen dishes. Everything was enormous and delicious.

We thought nothing could have detracted from our evening, until one creepy-crawly was detected on the wall near our table. In the course of the evening four baby cockroaches were seen emerging from the air-conditioning vent on the opposite wall, and making their way over to our table. They were dispatched with the aid of roll-up newspapers, but not before one almost made it into my hair, and one onto the table itself.

Now, a week later, the memory of the delicious food is fading as quickly as the memory of the cockroaches is growing. Despite the amazing food, I'm not sure if I will eat there again.

Arintjis

French chef Jacques Reymond has lived and worked in Melbourne for almost 25 years. His eponymous restaurant in Windsor is one of the top restaurants in the city. A few years ago he opened a new, more casual restaurant in the city's Federation Square, Arintji.

We ate there on a weeknight, and the place was full of after-work functions, birthday dinners, couples and small groups of friends. I arrived first and ordered a glass of Jacques Reymond Selection shiraz, from the Victorian Pyrenees.

The decor is modern and low-key, and you can see clearly into the open-plan kitchen. The menu is described as pan-national or modern Australian in the reviews I have read, but there is a distinct Asian slant to most dishes. Orlando started with croquettes of chorizo, spanish hard cheese and potato aioli and my starter was a warm salad of green beans, olives and feta (alright, these dishes are more Mediterranean but keep reading). Both dishes were very small but perfectly balanced in terms of taste and texture. So far, so good.

The main courses were a mixture of delight and disappointment. My stir fry of pork, shiitake mushrooms, kim chi, water chestnuts and rice drops was divine: a generous bowlful of dark and delicious goodness. Orlando's roast duck noodle salad with ginger, sesame and soy was so small he called the waiter back to enquire whether he had been given a starter portion by mistake. The waiter explained to Orlando that the dish he had ordered as a main was actually from the starters list, and that the noodle salad was the correct size. It was gone in a few delicious mouthfuls - and I had to give him some of my stir fry to keep him from wasting away.

Later we checked the menu online and Orlando's tiny dish was actually listed in the "Mains" section. Admittedly it was one of the cheaper dishes, but at $15 it was neither value for money nor a genuine attempt to satisfy a normal human's hunger pangs.

Lee's scotch fillet was perfectly cooked and amply proportioned, as was Daniel's pork cutlet with piquillo pepper and grape couscous.

The evening ended with three of us satisfied by both the quality and quantity of what we had been served, and one slightly hungry individual who was left wanting more.

on-tray

A hand-written notice in the window of our local Indian restaurant (I won't embarrass them by naming it) proudly advertised a new takeaway offer:

"BUY THREE MAINS, GET ON-TRAY FREE!"

I wasn't sure if I was reading it incorrectly, in that they would come to your house and serve it to you on a tray, or whether they were in fact offering entrees free (which is what starters are called here).

I also surmised whether they were doing what my friend Denis in Goa did: when choosing a name for his new beach shack, he came up with Stringfellos, spelt incorrectly with no "w" at the end. His rationale was that arrogant British tourists would delight in coming up to him and pointing out his mistake, at which point he would thank them and invite them to sit down for a drink/lunch/whatever. His gift of the gab would take over at this point, and they would be persuaded to stay at his shack for the rest of their holiday and spend all their beach money there.

You would be amazed at the number of people this worked on...

Anyhoo, the day I stopped my car to take a photo of the aforementioned offending notice, they had discreetly changed the word to "entree".

Now you will never believe me.