Spanish and Basque food in Melbourne: what it is, and where to eat it in Fitzroy
Melbourne is having a Basque moment. Every food publication in the city has spent the last month on wood fire, Atlantic seafood and the northern coast where Spain meets France. If you have read those pieces and wondered where you can eat like that tonight, without a six week wait, this is for you.
Basque is Spanish. Spanish is not only Basque.
The Basque Country sits in the top left corner of Spain on the Bay of Biscay. Its cooking is famous for restraint: a single fish or a rib of beef over coals, salt, good oil, nothing else. It is also the home of pintxos, the small bar snacks pinned with a toothpick that San Sebastián does better than anywhere on earth.
Drive south for ten hours and the food changes completely. Andalusia, in the far south, is where tapas started. It is fried fish and sherry, cold soups, jamón sliced thin enough to see through, and long lunches that become dinners. The two regions share a language of sharing plates and a habit of drinking well with them. They share less than you would think.
Anada cooks from the south, mostly. Gertrude Street has had a Spanish restaurant at number 197 for a long time, and the kitchen still works the Andalusian way: tapas to start, paella for the table, a la carte if you want to settle in. But the north is on the menu too, and it always has been. You just have to know what you are looking at.
The Basque things already on the menu
Gilda, $6. The original pintxo. An anchovy, a Sevillano olive and a pickled guindilla pepper on one skewer, invented in a San Sebastián bar in the 1940s and named after the Rita Hayworth film because it was, like her, salty, green and a little spicy. Order two. Then order a Txakolina to go with them, which is what it was made for.
The pintxos. Spiced lamb with mojo verde and pickled onion ($14.50) and roasted chorizo with a padrón pepper ($14). Bar food from the north, served in the south of the city.
Baked scallop with sobrasada, $14.50. Shellfish is the Basque coast's whole argument. Sobrasada is Mallorcan, but the idea of a scallop under something rich and pork-fat red is as Biscayan as it gets.
Basque cheesecake, $18. The burnt-top, custard-centre cheesecake from La Viña in San Sebastián that half the world has copied. This one comes with poached rhubarb.
Sardines and mussels escabeche, $27. Oily fish and vinegar, the way the whole Atlantic coast preserves its catch.
What to order because you are in the south
Paella de marisco, $70. King prawns, white fish, calamari and pipis. Not Basque, Valencian, and the reason to come to a southern kitchen instead of a northern one. Order it for the table and give it the time it needs.
Jamón serrano, 18 months, $26 for 45g. Or the full cured meats tabla with olives, pickles and queso for $45.
Morcilla with Jerez caramelised onion, $18. Blood sausage with onions cooked down in sherry. The most Andalusian plate on the list.
Octopus, $27. Kabayaki glaze, potato dauphinois, carrot. Gertrude Street's own idea.
Sherry. The most under-ordered drink in Melbourne. A cold fino or manzanilla alongside tapas is the pairing the whole cuisine was built on. Anada keeps sherry, Pedro Ximénez and vermut by the glass. Ask.
If deciding is the problem, the set menu is a seasonal chef's selection at $90 a head.
The wine list is the point
Start with Txakolina, pronounced roughly chock-oh-LEE-nah. The white wine of the Basque coast, slightly spritzy, bone dry, made from a grape called Hondarrabi Zuri that grows almost nowhere else. Poured from height in San Sebastián bars to wake it up. Anada pours Aizpurua Txakolina by the glass. It is the single most Basque thing you can order anywhere in Fitzroy.
Then the bottles. Sixty-nine Spanish wines across twenty-three regions, from $65. Eighteen from Rioja alone, seven from Rías Baixas on the Galician coast next door to the Basque Country, and single bottles from places most Melbourne lists have never heard of: Cebreros, Manchuela, Tenerife.
Every wine has its own tasting note, a comparison to what you probably already drink if you drink Australian or French, a food match from the actual menu, and a pronunciation line so you can order it without pointing. There is a glossary of seventy-eight grapes and label terms and a primer on each region. The full list is at anada.com.au/wine-list and the by-the-glass board is at /by-the-glass.
The list is not long because long is impressive. It is long because Spain makes more distinct, interesting wine at fair prices than almost any country, and very few places in this city bother to show it.
Practical
- 197 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. Tram 86 stops outside.
- Open Monday to Friday 5pm to 10pm, Saturday and Sunday 12pm to 10pm.
- Happy hour daily 5pm to 6pm, $9 wines.
- Oyster Tuesday, $3 each.
- BYO Tuesday to Thursday, $30 a bottle corkage.
- Date Night menu, $49 a head.
- Walk-ins welcome. For a table on Friday or Saturday, book ahead.
A short answer to the question in the title
If you want a Basque grill, Melbourne now has one in the CBD and you should go. If you want to eat and drink Spanish tonight, in a room that has been doing it for years, with a gilda on the bar, the deepest Spanish wine list in the inner north and a Txakolina on pour, come to Gertrude Street. The two are not competing. They are the same country, six hundred kilometres apart.