In a city packed to the brim with cafes and restaurants, it is naturally difficult to find somewhere that stands out from the rest and does something different. Meet Persillade. It’s a cafe that does breakfast and lunch. It’s a restaurant that does dinner. It’s also a wine bar and shop
Located unassumingly at the foot of an apartment complex in the seldom visited East Melbourne, it’s easily missed. Persillade is split level and divided into two areas; the upper kitchen and bar with communal tables and booth seating and the lower table seating. The dark timber furnishings, white-tiled bar and kitchen and hanging exposed light bulbs present a modern but homely atmosphere. Open wine racks filled with bottles span the whole length of the interior.
The food menu is quite extravagant with French influences and the quality of the dishes could be described as casual fine dining. Breakfast highlights including ricotta dumplings, saffron pickled eggs and spanner crab. The lunch menu is a condensed version of the dinner menu, so many would treat the breakfast menu as a lunch menu. Dinner options cover nearly every form of meat dish and include squid, veal, lamb, suckling pig and steak. There are of course vegetarian options.
What was originally going to be “just a snack” quickly turned into a whirlwind six course dinner. Dishes included fried polenta with goats cheese and corn, bresaola with pickled vegetables, poached squid with chorizo and piquillo peppers, veal sweetbread with peas and broad beans, venison topside with sweet potato, turnip and dates and chocolate cake with hazelnut mousse and raspberries. The veal sweetbread was the highlight with the flavoursome veal just melting in your mouth.
The menu changes monthly and many of these dishes are no longer available, although this does give a perfect excuse to return.
The wine selection has a focus on quality natural and organic wines. We were lucky enough to try a bottle of 2014 Domaine L’Anglore Terre d’Ombre from the Rhône Valley, a completely organic wine with no artificial yeasts, enzymes or sulphites used that sells out every year and is hard to acquire.
Persillade sets itself from the masses with its all day dining options and quality wine. Although located away from the major precincts, it is definitely worth the short hike.
Persillade
150 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne
03 9078 4056