KEY POINTS:
Souffles for breakfast, salmon for morning tea. A pig's head for lunch. That's a little over the top. It was only half a pig's head.
Saturday morning, the grand ballroom of one of the city's grander hotels has become the wining and dining room for the blue-ribbon - or perhaps white-apron - event of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.
Call this "slow food", but it wouldn't be fair: with 16 years in the casserole, now laying on 220 events at 50-plus venues across Victoria, with 300,000 people nibbling, chewing, sipping, swilling, spitting and gnawing (if you count those who wander the Yarra banks for the Great Aussie BBQ, the World's Longest Lunch at Flemington Racecourse or the Dockyards coffee expo), it's small wonder the month-long orgy proclaims itself "the world's longest running and largest food festival".
This is the first weekend of the chef's master classes. "Master" because 14 of the 16 presenters are men; "class" because they are a brimming tureen of leading chefs, here to measure out a tablespoon of their knowledge. Most will cook and the hotel staff serve three famed dishes within an hour.
Audiences have paid $A550 ($NZ625) for two days for an ovenside view of Michel Roux, the Frenchman who has held three Michelin stars for an unheard-of 22 years; David Thompson, the Aussie who elevated Thai street food to Michelin style; Oriol Balaguer, the Spaniard who did the sweets course for Ferran Adria at El Bulli; Fergus Henderson, of whom more later - don't want to spoil your appetite; and Martin Bosley, the lone Kiwi, who'll lay on the seafood platter.
It's a monocultural, monotoned, mono-classical audience: almost without exception they are European, middle-class women. The sort who watch the Food Channel, buy coffee-table cookbooks and magazines and give lie to the canard that Aussie cuisine is a barbie or a pie floater. They have tootled in from the eastern suburbs in their Toorak tractors (yes, we say "Remuera tractors" but Toorak is Remmers with real money). It must be the only Saturday morning when you can get a cappuccino in South Yarra.
It's also an audience that knows what it's eating. Melbourne is, as Jamie Oliver has noted in his current series, a town that knows about food and a restaurant has to be good to survive.
* * *
At 70-something, the studiously rumpled Michel Roux can still turn carefully coiffured heads. After 30 years in England, alongside the brother with whom he has laughed, cooked and genteelly feuded at Le Gavroche in London and the Waterside Inn at the Sussex village of Bray, his accent still bubbles and squeaks.
Classically trained, a perfectionist, he will demonstrate soufflés - eggy, frothy concoctions that he calls, tweaking the nose of contemporary gastronomy, "the original foams".
Super-sized on two video screens, he whisks, beats, whisks some more, and offers dry comments on life, food, friendly rivalry with his brother, and that most important subject in this room: which is the better food city, Melbourne or that other place.
Wistfully, he recalls, the greatest souffle he ate - "It was hot chestnut souffle. It was poetry. It was not mine" - and his signature, langoustine souffle with truffle sauce - "I pray to God each time I put it in the oven."
Curiously, Britain's leading exponents of traditional cuisine, the Roux brothers, and it's most celebrated practitioner of cutting-edge food, Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck, work in the same well-oiled, buttered and creamed village. They could not be closer or further apart. Roux: "When I see Heston in the village I am not going to tell him he is an idiot. All chefs are friends, we should be friends. It is just that his food is not my volition. That is not to say I do not respect it." He twinkles. "I even enjoy it from time to time."
And he knows how to play to a local audience. "Everyone is saying London is the best city in the world for restaurants. London is a very nice city but in my book you will eat better in New York and then Paris and London is third. Of course, the prices are three times higher than New York and Paris.
"Melbourne is the best in Australia but that does not mean it is as good as New York or Paris. Here, the people know food and love food."
Of course, this may be cupboard love: Roux's wife is Melburnian.
As the third souffle of the breakfast session is served - chocolate and mint - he riffs on the subject of flavoured mashes. Truffle mash, artichoke mash, whatever mash. Suffice to say he does not see the point.
Roux gives way to Donovan Cooke, his protégé turned local darling. The apostle of low-temperature cooking was Melbourne's Chef of the Year in 2003 and 2004 before heading to the relative humidity of the Hong Kong Jockey Club's Clubhouse.
Money and portion control is no object to Cooke these days: he casually hefts a softball-sized black truffle - worth about $3000 - out of a dish for the backroom staff to shave on to the audience's plates. He re-invents a French classic - pigeon with celery hearts, foie gras ravioli and black truffle sauce - and combines salmon with soya beans, tomato, spring onions, radish and ginger salad, both ever-so-slowly cooked in a vacuum-sealed bag. We eat, and wine-taste, impressed. None more so than M. Roux, who is at a table at the back of the room. He raises his tasting glass to his former pupil and offers a gracious vote of thanks. All this before 11.
A boy needs to walk it off. Across the river to Federation Square, where the world's biggest barbie is firing up. Everyone's getting in on the act: the masterclass here, beamed across the public space on Pavarotti-sized screens, also features salmon: cooked on the grill by the beaming Lord Mayor, John So.
* * *
Those of a delicate constitution - yes, the tofu-eaters among you - are advised to skip this chapter and come back in at the paragraph beginning The Last Supper.
Our next guest is an Englishman, round of face, of frame, of glasses, who brings to mind the fat boy in the Famous Five and Secret Seven books. (Why is there not one in Harry Potter? Our politically and literally correct times). Enter Fergus Henderson, of St John's restaurant in London.
In his heart of hearts, this lover of livers and other internal organs is an emotional, lyrical soul: "Half a head is a perfect romantic supper for two.
"Imagine gazing into the eyes of your loved one over a golden pig's cheek, ear and snout," reads the introduction to his signature recipe, pot-roast half pig's head.
His loved one, Margot, his wife whose restaurant neighbours his, oversees the session.
Chef's speciality is nose-to-tail cuisine. "If you're going to kill the animal it seems polite to use the whole thing," he opines, and if you've got this far, I shall leave the logical extensions and intentions to your boundless imagination.
Since we are Downunder, Henderson begins, he will demonstrate tail-to-nose cooking, and begins with that all-too-rare delicacy, crispy pigs' tails. "I have often sung the praises of how the pig's snout and belly have a special lip-sticking quality of fat and flesh merging, but this occurs in no part of the animal as wonderfully as on the tail. You must ask your butcher for long tails." With the bone in, naturally.
There is a nervous twittering among the Toorakians as the breadcrumbed and roasted canapés are passed around.
Now the chef is in full cry, a Southern Baptist preacher in St Fergus' Unholy Church of the Living Carnivore. His sermon is like his recipe book, which resounds with un-cheffy phrases like "shuggle the tin occasionally to prevent any burning" and "what we are looking for is the half pig's head to lurk in the stock in a not too dissimilar fashion to an alligator in a swamp".
Servers bring the beasts - well, the formerly seeing, hearing, thinking, tasting remains of them - to each table. With a sharp knife. I've note there aren't too many males at this event.
Which means that at the press table, the dinner time question, "Who'll be father?" is redundant. Just in time, one of Henderson's acolytes appears at my side. "Shall I carve, sir?" he mutters.
* * *
The Last Supper may sound a downer theme for the festival's official banquet but there's a reason. American photographer Melanie Dunea had the whimsical idea of approaching 50 leading chefs and asking, "What would you eat for your final meal?"
She photographed them and a book has been published and the shots are on display at the Crown Casino.
I share the lift down with a now-familiar face: Michel Roux.
Mr Roux, as Cooke stills calls him 20 years after leaving his employ, is dressed for the evening in a powder-blue linen suit, as elegantly rumpled as his face.
He carries one carmine carnation and presents it to his wife when they meet in the lobby.
The table setting couldn't be better chosen.
The century-old Melbourne Meat Market has long since hung its last carcase, been gutted and filleted into a craft centre.
Long linen-clothed tables line its cobbles; blood-red candles and ribbons hang from rafters and the occasional left-over meat hook; the famous knives circulate among the crowd, rather obvious in their kitchen whites.
As a scarlet-robed, jacketed, turbaned, be-tighted troupe of jesters, jugglers and acrobats roils among the diners in spectacular confusion, waiters bring the first of eight courses with matched wines. Guillaume Brahimi, much-awarded chef-patron of the Opera House eatery, has knocked up his basil-infused tuna with mustard seed and soy vinaigrette. To be followed by Jonathan Waxman's prawns, Neil Perry's roast beef, Henderson's pork belly, Philippe Mouchel's croque-en-bouche and fraisier desserts.
As a piece of event management, the evening is a memorable tour de force. The tour de courses has to fight to make itself heard, tasted: the standout dish is perhaps a surprise.
By common consent at our table, it's Indian supremo Vimal Dhar's subtle and gorgeous lamb rogan josh with saffron rice. Coldstream Hills reserve cabernet sauvignon 2005 from the Yarra down the road, since you ask.
* * *
Suday morning, coming downstairs. Damien Pignolet on chacuterie? Oriol Balageur on chocolate? Cuisine Quebecois or A Modern Hellenic Odyssey?
Melbourne is baking in the second week of a heatwave. I opt for real air and a tram to Docklands for the coffee expo.
It's my first experience of the waterside city - rather like the Viaduct on steroids, especially when crowded by several thousand highly caffeinated humans. Too hot. Too much. Too hard to decide whether one should support the impoverished Colombians or the struggling Ecuadoreans or the suburban-savvy Kenyans who've realised it makes more economic sense to get themselves Fairtrade-certified and cash in on middle-class guilt. Opt for the cooling, quenching Italians. Limonata and gelato.
Back at the riverside, 70 Victorian wineries have augmented the traditional Sunday craft market with their goodies.
Thousands have taken the opportunity to sample.
* * *
As they wash up after the Food Show, Fashion Week begins.
There's barely time for locals to savour headlines that You-Know-Where is well on its way to becoming a bigger city than That Other Town at the far end of the Hume Highway. In Melbourne, it's pleasure as usual.
Ewan McDonald was a guest of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and The Langham, Melbourne.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Tickets for the 17th annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, March 17-23, are now on sale.
Next year's programme includes starlit evenings set in Melbourne's most iconic rooftops and lanes, 25 of the world's longest lunch tables in the most surprising of places, a celebration of the great Aussie barbecue with Australia's best chefs and a bustling riverside wine market at Cellar Door at Southgate.
Once again the world's top chefs and winemakers will share their secrets at the Langham Melbourne Masterclass.
Tickets for are available at www.melbournefoodandwine.com.au.
