Longrain Restaurant & Bar
40–44 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000
w
www.longrain.com.au
e
melbourneinfo@longrain.com.au
t+61 3 9671 3151
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+61 3 9671 3152
open Lunch Tuesday to Friday 122 noon till 2.30 pm, dinner 7 days 5.30 pm kitchen cooks late business depending but usually until around 10.00 pm
FOOD This barn of a restaurant delivers inexpensive generously
portioned South East Asian cuisine that is basically Thai. If only other franchise
restaurants where half this good the world might be a better place.
At first glance with some dishes around the $30 mark Longrain might seem expensive.
It is not. Portions are enormous and meant for sharing and the fact that the
majority of tables seat 8 to 10 people makes this even more evident. Singles
are accommodated at the bar or there is also community seating in the restaurant
proper.
Food is fresh and delicious with the right amount of crunch when required and does have something of a contemporary Australian feel with dishes such as Grilled duck & spiced quince salad with ginger & black vinegar $39.00. Starters include oysters in season and betel leaf dishes are priced per one and range from $4.50 to $5.50, so it is very easy to order one, or many, per person. It was the Eggnet filled with pork prawn peanuts bean sprouts & sweet vinegar $27.50 that really took our fancy and epitomised the heart of Longrain. Generous (in fact huge) it was crunchy and soft, hot, sweet and sour and all mysteriously concealed under the lacy eggnet. Salt & pepper silken tofu with stir fried Chinese broccoli &snow peas $22.50 was wonderful. What so many westerners do not get when they are cooking this food is the various stages of tofu from the fresh, almost junket like warm tofu served at breakfast with the ginger syrup, to the silken tofu, with barely a day’s life at this stage, through to firm and finally fermented which is not to everyone’s taste. In other words the tofu must be very fresh and this dish was exactly that and each piece of fried tofu had the correct almost liquid centre that defines silken tofu.
Longrain is a well–oiled machine that keeps pumping along whatever the hour of the night or day. More than that Longrain is proof that big can work when properly managed. Singles should be aware that ordering more than one dish from the larger dishes will mean even the heartiest eater will return at least 75% of their food to the kitchen. We admired greatly a young woman dining next to us who had ordered several dishes and in her determination to explore their menu clearly didn’t feel obliged to eat everything on her plate.
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WINE We are starting to wonder where the bad wine lists in Melbourne are and whilst we love and support Australian wine lists that boldly exhibit great choices from the old and new world are very invigorating. We especially like the selections of wines by the glass having some intelligence and interest rather than ’popular’ with less probability of them languishing to be drunk by the staff. Wines by the glass are risky business when it comes to serving them in their best condition but in a big busy restaurant like Longrain that risk is lessened. Regardless wines by the glass have to be priced for a percentage of waste which makes any good wine at around the $10 mark per glass very generous.
A very good small list with plenty of interest.
OWNER — Martin Boetz
EXECUTIVE CHEF — Sam Christie
