Trust the Chefs at South Melbourne's New Lume Restaurant
Take a gamble on a colossal 18- to 20-course gastronomic degustation — with no physical menu in sight.
If you're keen to eat food that looks more like abstract modern art, Lume is the place for you. The restaurant, which is the brainchild of chefs Shaun Quade and John-Paul Fiechtner, opens tonight in South Melbourne and the menu is a doozy.
The restaurant will be divided into two areas: a speakeasy style bar with a set menu and, for the brave at heart, an ambient restaurant with an 18- to 20-course tasting menu. And here’s the kicker: you won’t know what you’ve eaten until after you’ve eaten it. The unique tasting menu won’t be made available until after the meal. Yeowch.
“We are creating an atmosphere for a completely interactive," says Fiechtner. "The tasting menu will be unpredictable — we want to play around with the palate, ensuring the meal ebbs and flows between size, appearance and flavour." Think of it as extreme gastronomic fine dining, a mystery for your tastebuds to work out.
Quade and Fiechtner say they don’t want to courses to proceed in the traditional rhythm, with canapés leading to the protein main and rounding off with dessert and coffee. They want to surprise you and shake it up — what this means, we can only guess, but hopefully it will fulfil our childhood dreams of dessert coming out first. You can also put your detective skills to the test with the blind wine list, composed by maître’d Sally Humble and sommelier Brodie Comer.
Find Lume at 226 Coventry Street, South Melbourne. Book your experience at Lume's website, 18-course tasting menu $140 per person.
Images: Tom Ross, Brilliant Creek.
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