The Melbourne Dinner That Made Me Want To Go Out Again

There is an irritating stage of a breakup nobody really warns you about. Not the operatic bit, when everything hurts and your friends are checking you have eaten, but the bit afterwards, when life has technically resumed. You are replying to work emails, buying groceries, getting through the day, yet some small valve has been turned off.

Mine was connection.

After a difficult breakup earlier this year, I stopped wanting almost any active human contact. I didn’t want to see my friends. I didn’t want to message them. I didn’t particularly want to speak to my family. Dating was completely out of the question, but so, for a while, was anything that asked me to show up emotionally for another person. I wanted to disappear into the most functional version of myself I could manage, do my job, go home, shut the door and wait until I felt like myself again. Or at least more human.

Even going out, something I have built much of my life and now much of my career around, had lost some of its electricity. I could sit in a restaurant and admire the lighting, interrogate a menu, tell you precisely what I thought of the sauce, then go home without ever feeling as though I had fully entered the evening.

Then I went to Table Nineteen at Atria.

It is an unlikely place to remember that being around people can actually be quite wonderful: 80 floors above Melbourne inside The Ritz-Carlton, at a 19-metre stretch of Victorian ash, with only 10 people seated for an evening of chefs, wine, conversation and an almost indecent amount of food. Head chef David Green created Table Nineteen after arriving at Atria this year, using that extraordinary table as the stage for a five-course experience in which much of the preparation and finishing happens directly in front of you. You are not simply there to watch; the chefs talk, explain, pass ingredients around and answer questions, dissolving the little invisible wall that usually separates diner from kitchen.

Atria could so easily be one of those rarefied dining rooms that makes you sit straighter. The view alone could do it. Melbourne is spread beneath the windows in almost comical scale, Port Phillip Bay in one direction, the ranges in another, headlights beginning their tiny red crawl through the streets below. Many of the Victorian regions feeding the menu can actually be seen from the dining room, which makes all that talk of provenance feel unusually real when the places themselves are sitting somewhere beyond the glass.

But the beauty of Table Nineteen is that nobody seems especially interested in making you behave.

Chefs appear at your elbow. Conversations start. Someone tells you about a farmer, someone else explains what has been smoked, fermented, dry-aged or foraged, and head sommelier Felix Eralde keeps the glasses moving. People who arrived as strangers begin commenting on one another’s plates. Questions bounce across the counter. There is concentration, certainly, but there is also laughter and interruption and that lovely creeping phenomenon of a room becoming less self-conscious as dinner goes on.

A warm laminated brioche arrived first, all crisp edges and buttery layers, closely followed by the dish that immediately told me how good this dinner was going to be: a farmhouse egg served in its shell with potato, black-truffle hollandaise, truffled egg white, a poached quail egg hidden somewhere in the middle and black truffle shaved over the top. Every spoonful turned up something else: silk, earth, butter, potato, yolk, the deep perfume of truffle moving through all of it. Fine dining can sometimes become so preoccupied with cleverness that pleasure gets misplaced somewhere near the pass; this was the opposite. Technically intricate, yes, but first and foremost outrageously delicious.

Then came the Port Fairy tuna, and somehow the evening climbed again. Thick, almost jewel-red slices of cured fish arrived against citrus, shiitake oil and a smoky cream made from tuna bone. Written down, it sounds cerebral. Eating it was immediate: smoke, salt, acid, richness, then the clean sweetness of the tuna itself. It was one of those plates that hushes a table for a moment, before everyone looks up at once with the same slightly disbelieving expression and the conversation starts all over again, now almost entirely about the tuna.

The rest of the menu barely lets up. Murray cod with Portarlington mussel and smoked ham hock; Atria’s dry-aged Moorabool Valley duck; wood-fired venison with bread-and-butter pudding and cherry Grand Veneur; then pavlova hidden beneath a cloche with citrus caviar, finger lime, Victorian honey and lemon ice cream. This is a tasting menu that actually feeds you, rather than sending you home later to investigate the emergency toast situation.

What struck me most, though, was Green himself. Born in Mount Macedon, he spent more than a decade at Lake House in Daylesford, worked for Michel Roux at The Waterside Inn in England, cooked across Scotland and later opened his own restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City. At Atria, all that experience seems to have sharpened rather than complicated his relationship with Victorian produce. The stories behind the ingredients matter to him, and because Table Nineteen puts the chefs within conversation distance, that affection reaches the diner without requiring a paragraph of menu copy to explain it.

Somewhere among the courses, the wine, the stories and the enormous Melbourne night spread beneath us, I realised I was having a genuinely excellent time. Not performing it, not standing slightly outside myself taking notes on the room, but actually there. And for once I wasn’t thinking about the person I used to come home to and debrief every dinner with, down to the best dish, the strange garnish, the wine I wanted him to try next time. There is a peculiar grief in losing the person who knew what you would have ordered before you ordered it, and an even stranger one in discovering how many tiny parts of your life had become a conversation with them. That night, somewhere between one plate and the next, I noticed I had stopped having that conversation in my head.

I was asking questions, wanting to know what the people beside me thought of each dish, reaching for another sip of wine, watching hands plate dinner three feet away and listening as people talked about recent trips, meals and moments they were still thinking about. I was laughing at something happening farther down this enormous piece of Victorian timber. More than anything, I noticed that being around people no longer felt like something I needed to protect myself from.

That may sound like an unreasonable amount of emotional responsibility to place on an egg with truffle hollandaise, and I promise I am not suggesting The Ritz-Carlton has developed a degustation-based treatment for heartbreak. What I had forgotten, though, was how much restaurants have always meant to me beyond the food itself, and how much of that meaning lives in the people around the table.

Maybe this is what I love most about restaurants: they make it very easy to talk to people. You sit beside someone you may not know, something excellent lands in front of you, somebody asks what you think and before long you are talking about where they have been, what they have eaten, where they are going next. The food starts it, but the best nights become about everything happening around it.

Table Nineteen reminded me how much I had missed being part of that. I went 80 floors above Melbourne expecting an exceptional dinner and came back down wanting, for the first time in a long while, to be out in the world again.

And yes, I would go back tomorrow for that tuna.

If this has you craving a serious dinner, read our guide to the best fine dining restaurants in Melbourne, then turn dinner into a staycation with the best hotels in Melbourne.