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By: Penny Modra
Date: 28th May 08
Venue: Bar
Meal: Snacktastic
What:
Von Haus
Where:
1a Crossley St, Melbourne (behind The Paperback)
When:
Mon-Fri 12-11pm, Sat 5-11pm
Contact:
9662 2756
Eugene Von Guerard was a prominent Australian colonial landscape painter who lived above The Paperback on Bourke Street. Actually, we don't know how long the Paperback's been there, but it seems like at least 118 years. Anyway, unlike other artists at the time, he actually knew what gum trees looked like. And, appropriately, the bar that has just opened in his old living room knows what a bar should look like.
The problem with Von Haus is that it is way, way too fricken awesome. So please, please, don't go there if you are in a goonbaggish mood. And don't take your friends from the office, or your bridge and tunnel buddies. This is the kind of bar that deserves Melbourne's hushed appreciation - of the wine, the colonial-meets-best-of-modernism mannish food, and the well-chosen LCD Soundsystem on the stereo.
Can you promise us this? Then tiptoe along and order a perfect 100ml wine from one of the bottles Hugh has open, get some smoked trout, cold potato and watercress salad for lunch, admire the postmodern fracturing of the Pellegrini's sign ('grini') through the window, stay for ‘elevenses', and be a man of the sort who knows a good tree when he sees one.