A Love Letter to Zareh
I eat out for a living, and I very rarely come across cooking this good.
Sometimes I think about restaurants as though they're outfits in a wardrobe. You keep a whole bunch of them in your mental closet, and select the exact right one for your needs and wants for that particular day and occasion. In Melbourne, Gimlet is your favourite suit; it fits perfectly, works with every shoe, you can throw it on without thinking and know that you will always own the room. Geralds Bar is a thick, faintly musty velvet robe and slippers: familiar, comforting, and just a little bit luxe (and yes I know it's just moved to new premises; let's think of it as a trip to the drycleaners). Tipo 00 is your Sunday evening slacks and slides. Vue de Monde is a crisp tux or LBD. You get the idea.
For me, Zareh – which opened last year in Collingwood, the culinary offspring of Tom Sarafian (ex Bar Saracen) and his partner Jinane Bou-Assi as a love letter to their Armenian and Lebanese heritage – is that magical, one-off, vintage treasure that no one else owns and that floors everyone who sees it.
Every dish feels like a confection of jewels and trinkets that are so layered and handcrafted that you want to reach onto your plate and touch them. The servingware is textured and tarnished as though it's been gathered up from somewhere deeply meaningful (in fact it has; much of it was salvaged from Sydney's much-missed Turkish restaurant Stanbuli). The vinyl is spun through the world's greatest speakers (Pitt & Giblin from Tasmania). Your fellow diners look like the kind of people who feel easily settled and comfortable in any restaurant globally, probably because they are. If you saw this place in a designer consignment store – Decades in LA, or Moji Farhat in Paris – you'd grab it before Molly Dickson or Julia Restoin Roitfeld could snatch it up first.
