PAST / PORT
Sarawak laksa, Balinese crispy fried duck and spanner crab pad thai anchor a 160-seat menu that runs from Malaysia and Singapore to Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia — all built on Australian produce.
Overview
Sarawak laksa isn't on the printed menu at PAST / PORT — you have to know to ask. Executive chef Sarah Chan (former head chef of Mya Tiger, the Cantonese diner at The Espy) runs her hometown laksa as a weekday off-menu lunch special, served until it sells out, and it is the most personal thing she cooks. That instinct — to bury the dish closest to her heart in the lunch run rather than headline it — tells you most of what you need to know about the 160-seat restaurant she has built on level two of The Waterside Hotel.
Chan oversees the entire food program across the reborn seven-level pub, but PAST / PORT is the room that carries her name. The brief here is wider than one cuisine: every dish is pitched as an ode to tradition, drawing on Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, and built on Australian produce.
The menu rewards grazing. Snacks open with Nyonya pie tee filled with crab and salmon caviar, tom yum prawn dumplings and crying tiger steak tartare. Signature mains run to Balinese crispy fried duck, chicken curry Kapitan, spanner crab pad thai, som tum and chilli caramel eggplant. Then there are the showstoppers — pre-order dishes built for theatre, from lobster with salted egg yolk popcorn and Singapore chilli mud crab with fried mantou to a 600-gram O'Connor ribeye with house condiments. Dessert keeps the nostalgia going with banana fritters in palm sugar caramel and choc mint mochi.
"Growing up around slow-simmered curries, sambals pounded by hand, and family feasts prepared with painstaking detail, I learned early that food is memory, love, and tradition on a plate," says Chan. The drinks list reads as locally as the produce: wines from Victorian growers Mac Forbes, Mulline and Yarra Yering, picked to stand up to spice, plus cocktails like the Jungle Bird, Pandan Fizz and PP Ranch Water.
Images: Michael Pham
