Yiaga Melbourne Review. Hugh Allen's Three Hat Fitzroy Gardens Restaurant

The Fitzroy Gardens pavilion has been a lot of things over the past hundred odd years. A tearoom when it opened in 1908. A dining room a decade or so later. A kiosk of variable usefulness for much of what followed. Then, for nearly a decade before Hugh Allen got his hands on it, largely nothing, a heritage-listed shell with good bones and a spectacular address that nobody had quite worked out what to do with. Allen worked it out. What he and architect John Wardle have done to the building is, frankly, arresting.

Thirteen thousand ochre tiles, extruded in Melbourne, line the interior walls in ridged custom formations meant to echo the bark of the surrounding elm trees. The concrete floor is tinted with iron oxide to the colour of outback earth. The Jon Goulder blackwood tables came from Tasmania. The water glasses were blown by hand. The branding was designed to evoke local Australian flora. The whole thing cost somewhere north of ten million dollars and looks like every cent of it was argued over carefully. You notice all of this before you've sat down.

Hugh Allen is thirty years old. This fact becomes increasingly difficult to hold onto as the evening progresses. He grew up in Melbourne, left to work at Noma in Copenhagen under René Redzepi, who he counts as a mentor and friend, and returned to run the kitchen at Vue de Monde, where he spent years refining a very particular kind of cooking. Precise, Australian in its bones, obsessively considered. Then he opened Yiaga, his first restaurant, and became the first Australian chef to simultaneously hold three hat ratings at two separate venues. He has not shown any obvious signs of slowing down. The word prodigy gets used about young chefs so often it's lost most of its force, but Allen is a reasonable candidate for the real version of it.

Yiaga seats forty four people across a single dining room and a small semi private area. The kitchen is entirely open, taking up a significant portion of the space, which means the room is organised around the act of cooking in a way that is practical rather than theatrical. Tables radiate out towards floor to ceiling glass looking onto the gardens. On the evening I visited the elm canopy was lit from beneath in a way that looked completely accidental and was almost certainly not. The room is not warm in the conventional sense. It is calm. There is a controlled quality to the atmosphere that you feel before you've identified what's producing it, and once you identify it you realise the whole environment has been designed to focus your attention on what's arriving at the table. It works. You stop looking around fairly quickly.

The tasting menu runs to fourteen courses over approximately four hours, priced at $320 per head before drinks. There are matched wine pairings available at $195 and $395 for premium, and there is a matched non alc pairing at $120 for those who want it, all assembled by sommelier Dorian Guillon and a team who operate with the same controlled attention as the kitchen. Bookings open on the first of each month for three months in advance and disappear with the sort of speed that suggests demand has significantly outpaced the forty four seat capacity. None of this is a surprise once you've eaten here.

The menu reads like a producer's roll call. Blackmore Wagyu from retired breeding cows; coral trout from Queensland, dive foraged wakame from Victoria's coast, dairy from Gippsland, native botanicals sourced with the obsessive specificity of someone who has been building those relationships for years. Allen's cooking at Yiaga has deliberately severed its ties with the French foundations that still run underneath Vue de Monde's menu. The reference points here are more in line with what Noma spent a decade teaching the world about cooking with a sense of place. Playful in parts, seriously structured in others, and always more interested in what an ingredient actually is than in what it can be made to look like.

A one bite Wagyu bun arrives early in the proceedings. A joke about a steak sandwich that is also one of the better things you'll eat all year. Retired breeding cow, which gives the beef a depth and complexity the feedlot stuff simply cannot manufacture, in a soft steamed bun with what tastes like a very concentrated version of everything good about a great burger. It is gone in a moment and you find yourself thinking about it for several courses afterwards. The coral trout with mango and lime is the dish that has appeared in most of the year end best-of lists. Clean, bright, precise, a piece of fish handled with such economy of means the quality of the raw ingredient does almost all the work. The squid with Thai basil and desert lime is a study in light, refreshing counterpoint after the richness that precedes it. A coconut, caviar and macadamia oil course is the kind of thing that sounds like showing off on paper and tastes, in the mouth, like someone has thought very hard about what they actually want these three things to do together.

The wagyu course proper is a more substantial plate built around the same retired Blackmore beef, and arrives in the second half of the menu with native greens and fermented elements and the kind of structural seriousness that earns Allen's reputation for cooking that rewards attention rather than just delivering pleasure. It is rich and dark and quietly demanding. You sit up slightly when it arrives. There is a kangaroo chops and maitake mushroom dish that does something similar, earthy, layered, simultaneously unfamiliar and completely legible. A wakame dessert, foraged from the Victorian coast, is the moment that stops the table not because it's strange but because it is quietly extraordinary. Sweet braised seaweed, strawberries, cream and a finish that should not work as well as it does and will leave you thinking about it in the shower on Thursday morning.

The wine pairings deserve separate mention. Dorian Guillon has built a list that runs seventy per cent local, with Victorian producers leading and the pairings feel calibrated rather than suggested. Nothing lands by accident. A barrel aged mandarin saison brewed with La Sirène opens the evening with a hop and a wink before giving way to things considerably more serious. By the time you reach the mid menu, you have stopped wondering whether the pairing is right and started simply accepting it is, which is the highest possible endorsement of a sommelier's judgement. The list itself, for those who wish to order independently, is serious without being punitive, and the team delivers bottles without fanfare, which is exactly the right approach in a room this focused.

Allen circulates. Not in the glad handing, working the room fashion of someone performing graciousness, but with the quiet attentiveness of a person who is still curious about whether the thing they made is landing the way they intended. He stopped at the table between courses, said little, listened more. It was not a performance. It felt like someone checking in on a conversation they care about.

Is $320 a head before drinks a reasonable thing to spend on dinner? That question answers itself differently depending on who you are and what you earn. What I can say is that Yiaga earns the number without apology, and that the Good Food Guide's three hat rating, making Allen the first Australian to run two three hat restaurants simultaneously, is the correct assessment of what is happening in this room. It is not a comfortable evening in the sense of being easy or unchallenging. The food asks something of you. The room asks something of you. But the experience is the kind that recalibrates your sense of what a meal can be, which is a rarer thing than the price of any tasting menu.

Price With standard wine pairing, its bye bye to a grand

Bookings Essential, released 1st of the month for 3 months in advance

Good for real foodies who want an ultimate dining experience

Not for the parma lovers.

Parking Take the tram.

Felix Marrow eats on his own dime. No restaurant reviewed here was contacted in advance.

Yiaga is in the Fitzroy Gardens, East Melbourne VIC

https://www.yiaga.au/

Open for dinner Thurs - Sat. Lunch Fri-Sun

Images supplied by Yiaga / Photography: Kristoffer Paulson, Hilary Walker, Vue de Monde