Something in the vicinity of $10-plus million dollars for the build, 13,000 tiles made by hand for the interior wall, a 120-year-heritage and a chef who has just turned 30, all providing in turn for 44 guests to enjoy 14 courses over four hours for $295 a head – plus drinks. Those are the numbers, but they don’t quite capture the ambition. Hugh Allen, after years of leading the good ship Vue de Monde, is here to make his mark with food and a restaurant entirely made to his vision. And that vision is Yiaga.
Ask him about the restaurant, which opens today on the former kiosk site in the heart of Fitzroy Gardens just above the Melbourne CBD, and he’ll be as likely to wax lyrical about the custom dining chairs, the blackwood cellar and the glass-art pendants as he is about the (very good) produce he’s cooking with. The texture of the bricks and grout of the feature wall by the entrance, he says, echoes the bark of the elms lining the path opposite.
So what are you eating? If you’ve eaten at Vue de Monde in the last couple of years, you’ve seen suggestions of what was to come in its focus on Australiana. At Yiaga, though, Hugh Allen appears to have severed ties with all the past iterations and echoes of Vue de Monde, from its Carlton days to Normanby Chambers, that show up in Vue’s menus to this day. His inspiration here seems very much more in line with dining with a sense of place celebrated by Noma (where he worked) and René Redzepi (whom he counts as a friend and mentor) than with the chocolate souffles and French underpinnings of the Vue of old.
It’s playful, too, so while there’s a serious-sounding kangaroo chops and maitake mushroom main course, there’s also Blackmore wagyu on a bun that reads like a play on a steak sandwich. Caviar meets coconut and macadamia at one end of the menu, a dessert featuring “dive-foraged” Victorian wakame seaweed appears at the other.
The room is, frankly, gorgeous. John Wardle designed it in close collaboration with Allen, and it’s very much a chef’s restaurant. Walk through the space, and what you feel is a cool, pleasant calm – if we can get a little bit woo-woo for a moment, it has great energy. The tables radiate out from a very beautiful, very open kitchen, all looking out through floor-to-ceiling glass onto the gardens. You might be thinking Vue de Monde goes to Fitzroy Gardens, but overall what Yiaga is giving is, again, Noma Melbourne.
Drinks? The list is 70 per cent local, with Victorian producers leading the charge, as they should. If you do the pairing, you may well start with a barrel-aged mandarin saison Allen made with local brewing legends La Sirène.
“It has been a lifelong dream of mine to open a restaurant from scratch, a place that truly reflects me, my team, and our journeys,” says Allen. “There’s no better feeling than being able to do it right here in my hometown, surrounded by one of Melbourne’s greatest landscapes. We’re both nervous and excited to get underway! While we have bigger long-term plans, right now we’re just thrilled to start welcoming locals and visitors to Yiaga.”
Yiaga, Fitzroy Gardens, East Melbourne, open 6pm-11pm Thu, noon-4pm and 6pm-11pm Fri-Sat, noon-4pm Sun, yiaga.au, @yiaga.au.