I donned my Melbourne uniform of gumboots and puffer jacket and went looking for Anthony Bourdain in Melbourne, which is a strange sentence until you know where I was going.
Queen Victoria Market ran a limited edition tour called The TONY Trail. Two days only, to mark the release of Tony, the A24 film about Bourdain’s early years. I am seeing it next week. It is set in the summer he was nineteen, when he fell into a restaurant kitchen in Provincetown and never really got out.
Anthony Bourdain in Melbourne, 2009
The market angle is not a marketing stretch. Bourdain actually came to Queen Vic in 2009 to film the Melbourne episode of No Reservations. Same halls, same traders in some cases, sixteen years later.
Our guide is Italian. She grew up with a father who kept a fully self-sustaining garden at home, then lived overseas for years before coming back and finally noticing what Australia had all along.
There is something very Bourdain about that. Going all the way around the world in order to look properly at your own street. I want to hold onto it for the next time I am in Jakarta or Singapore, where I have a bad habit of moving through places I know too well to actually see.
Mussels Bourdain would actually have eaten
First tasting, and Bourdain has a say here. In Kitchen Confidential, he admits he loves mussels but will not order them in a restaurant unless he knows the chef personally or has seen with his own eyes how they are stored. In his experience, most kitchens were careless with them. One bad mussel is all it takes.
Well. Our mussel cooks were standing a few feet away, and the mussels themselves came from Portarlington, down on the Bellarine. Even Tony would have eaten these.
Two versions. Grilled with garlic crumbs, which was excellent, and the steamed version with coconut curry, which was better. I mopped mine with ciabatta from Andrew’s Bread Shop, realising that after all these years I have finally found a bread in Melbourne I actually like.
QVM Meat and Fish Hall
One small architectural fact of QVM that I have heard a few times: the hall was built with south-facing windows so it never cooks in the afternoon sun, and the counters are marble to hold the cold. The building itself is the refrigeration. It has been quietly doing that job for nearly a century.
At 2 am, the temperature in there drops to four degrees. At 4 am the local abattoir comes through to clean.
It is not a cheerful fact. But there is a kind of respect in it, and Bourdain was insistent about this. If you are going to eat the animal, you do not get to look away from the rest of it. His whole career started with a 1999 New Yorker essay called “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which became Kitchen Confidential. The entire premise was that you deserve to know what actually happens back there.
Then, oysters.
The oyster that made Anthony Bourdain
In Kitchen Confidential, almost the first thing he tells you is that a single oyster rearranged his entire life.
He was a kid on a family summer in southwest France. Their neighbour was an oyster fisherman, and he took the family out on his boat. He pulled out one silt-covered oyster, cracked it open with a rusty knife, and handed it to the young Tony.
He wrote that it tasted “of brine and flesh, and somehow, of the future.”
Everything after that- the kitchens, the shows, the being professionally curious for a living- he traced back to that one swallow.
I get it. More so here. Australian oysters are absurdly good, and today was repeated proof.
Also at this hall, the fattest slab of bluefin tuna I have ever seen and some fresh prawns, because you cannot do Australian seafood anything without prawns.
In the corner sits Alec Watson and Son, shop 41, famous for their cotechino. That is the fatty northern Italian pork sausage the Italians eat on New Year’s Eve with lentils, because lentils look like little coins and coins mean money coming.
The Dairy Produce Hall
There are around 650 businesses at Queen Vic, and plenty of them are families three and four generations deep.
The owner of Big Vic Deli welcomed us with a story about surviving as a business in a busy market like QVM. You work out what makes you stand out, and then you go hard at exactly that. He was talking about smallgoods. I took it completely personally. Sometimes the universe sends you a message, and sometimes it is just a man explaining his salami, and I don’t always know the difference.
Worth noting, incidentally, that Bourdain was in his forties before any of the fame arrived. Decades of line work first. Nobody was waiting for him.
Then he fed us, not Tony, but the owner of BVD.
Rich duck salami, squid ink and truffle salami, New York-style pastrami. Pickled octopus from Fremantle, a nod to Melbourne’s Greek side and exactly the sort of thing Bourdain would have gone straight for.
Deeper into the hall we passed Fiona at The Epicurean, who sells antipasti and runs the stall with her whole family. Curds and Whey, the butter specialists, where Warrnambool butter gets carved straight off the slab. Fay at Queen Vic Deli.
Kangaroo: The Australian Delicacy
We stopped at The Chicken Pantry for the freshly char-grilled peppered kangaroo and kangaroo sausage. Did you know kangaroo is the leanest, highest-protein meat going? And it’s actually a sustainable food source in Australia.
This is the “someone else’s yuck is someone else’s yum” part of the day, which is really the whole Bourdain thesis compressed into a single line. He built a career on cheerfully eating the thing the person beside him was pulling a face at, and on treating other people’s delicacies as delicacies rather than dares.
Saying Cheese in QVM!
Next stop was Ripe, where I once had a truffle sandwich I still think about.
Today we were handed triple cream brie from the Hunter Valley, a smoked cheddar, and Banksia, the Castlemaine cheese from Long Paddock. It was named Best Australian Cheese at the International Cheese and Dairy Awards in England last month, and took gold in France before that, the only Australian cheese recognised.
Ripe belongs to Hakim, who is a National Cheese Judge, and it is the only all-Australian artisanal cheese shop in the world.
Not Anthony Bourdain but the man from Ripe gave me the one lesson I am taking home: let cheese breathe for at least two hours out of the fridge before you serve it. Like wine. I have been serving cold cheese to people I love, and I would like to apologise to all of them.
Before we left the hall, I picked up freshly made mushroom ravioli and a box of mushroom truffle sauce for tomorrow’s easy lunch.
Queen Harvest Sweet Citrus and White Strawberry
Back up into the Upper Market for citrus and apples, which peak here in July and August.
The Dolci navel oranges were so good I bought them for us and for the neighbourhood. I also bought one single white Japanese strawberry, which was a decision. Next time I want the Cara Cara, the pink-fleshed one.
Final stop: a hot jam doughnut from the American Doughnut Kitchen, which is the only correct way to finish anything at this market.
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