A restaurant in downtown Melbourne that in addition to regular tables offers the opportunity to enjoy a sixteen meter long counter facing the brigade, where you can eat while being enchanted by the fascinating cuts and preparations of the chefs. Presiding over the kitchen is Nico Koevoets, who seeks bold flavors through primal embers and live flames.
Photo of the chef on the cover: Credit Harvard Wang
The restaurant
Aru is named after the group of islands that ancient navigators visited along the Indonesian-Australian route. It is the perfect restaurant for those who love barbecue, smoking and curing. Aru is a fine interpretation of the primal nature of a cuisine that ranges from East Asia to northern Australia, with dishes such as earthen rice and the now-famous 14-day dry-cured duck (inspired by Peking duck ) paired with native Australian ingredients.
At the helm is Chef Nico Koevoets, originally from Richmond, Canada, who moved to Australia in 2017 and immediately began to focus on the country's biodiversity in the kitchen, starting with his first job at the well-known Vue de Monde sign. It was there that he remembers first tasting desert lime and developing a soft spot for citrus and native berries. Consolidating this love of specific products from his new home, Nico joined Ezard and Amaru, where he pursued an in-depth study of Asian flavors and intensified his knowledge of native bush ingredients.
Four years after he arrived in Melbourne where he began working at Sunda restaurant, known as one of the first establishments to combine Australia's native ingredients with Southeast Asian flavors. Aru, Sunda's sister restaurant, opened shortly thereafter with Koevoets as head chef. Despite his Canadian roots, he counts Japanese and Vietnamese cuisine as his comfort foods, all of which he says began when he worked at Annalena, a starred restaurant in Vancouver.
As a matter of fact, he likes to experiment with bold combinations and use bold flavors through primal embers and live flames. The restaurant is in the center of town and in addition to the normal tables offers the opportunity to enjoy a long sixteen-meter counter facing the brigade where one can observe and eat while being enchanted by the fascinating cuts and preparations of the chefs.
The dishes
The dishes are generous, designed to be mixed, matched and shared at the table. You have to start with black rice sourdough bread glazed with soy sauce and palm sugar, possibly along with some good pâté. Bunnings-style duck sausage, earthen pot broken rice with braised pork cheek, mushrooms and egg yolk, the miso soup with pork belly, soy sauce, fried eggplant and roasted dashi, the aforementioned wonderful duck that draws hundreds of people, dry-roasted for 14 days and served with red cabbage, grilled onion and muntries, known as emu apples, berries about 1 centimeter in diameter that are green in color, turn red when ripe and taste like apples.
Plus the burnt pavlova cake with strawberry, black currant and grapefruit or the spiced pumpkin cake with Indonesian long pepper diplomatic cream, quince and raspberries. There are over 400 wines to choose from, and the cocktail pairing is also interesting, I recommend the Umami Martini with Four Pillars Olive Leaf gin and a tomato instead of olive.
Contact
Aru
268 Little Collins Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000, Australia
Phone: +61399398113
