Melbourne review
Not all is as it seems at Nora as it shifts from café to restaurant.
Few places could make the change from daytime café to dinner-only dégustation restaurant seem like business as usual. Then again, not too many places would start a meal with a container covered in synthetic turf bearing crunchy deep-fried coriander roots dusted with “tasty powder” and a deep-fried sardine skeleton laying on edible dirt (dehydrated mushroom, scallop and longan) inside. And then call them What Goes Up Must Come Down and Beneath the Ground. And then manage to turn a potentially disastrous collision of multiple ideas into something delicious.
Not many places. But Nora does, emphatically. Understanding just how surprising this is calls for a bit of backstory.
Its owners, Jean Thamthanakorn and Sarin Rojanametin and, are restaurant novices who fled the worlds of advertising and finance to open Nora in Carlton in 2014. Before they opened, Rojanametin spent time working in cafés such as Brother Baba Budan and Seven Seeds, and Thamthanakorn taught herself to bake. The black charcoal pastry tarts she began supplying to various cafés attracted a cult following.
That scant experience aside, all the couple appeared to bring was a singular vision and an uncompromising determination to present that vision intact in one of Melbourne’s most traditional food suburbs.
Not everyone appreciated the no-espresso, no-avocado, no-bacon-and-eggs approach at Nora. And when breakfast expectations are thwarted by a menu of smarty-pants dishes such as Churning of the Sea of Milk (smoked jasmine-cured fish, coconut ricotta, flying-fish roe and succulents) some might interpret uncompromising as arrogant. There were walkouts.
There was also a groundswell of fans drawn to food cooked by a self-taught chef who combined the ingredients he loved when he was growing up in Thailand with a fascination with modern cooking technique. But the format remained problematic. Rojanametin might have been creating unique flavour combinations but did people want to keep eating them for breakfast?
The answer came when the set-course Small Dinner Club that Nora started running on Friday nights kept selling out. Thamthanakorn and Rojanametin shut the place down, renovated the tiny open kitchen, bought some new furniture, added booze to the repertoire and reopened as a dinner joint.
It’s still uncompromising. The three sittings a night pretty much discourage all but the most well timed of walk-ins. The menu can be tweaked but Nora’s ability to cater to the swell of dietary requirements is limited. Even common or garden vegetarians have to be patient, with a meat-free menu still in the works.>