Melbourne Patron

Kisumé Japanese Restaurant The new fine-dining venture on Flinders Lane by the Lucas Group Any Melburnian foodie worth their salt is aware of the Lucas Group and its portfolio of very successful restaurants: Chin Chin , a loud hall of colourful South-East Asian food and cocktails on Flinders Lane that still attracts queues of several hours' wait, some six years after its opening Hawker Hall , a similar style venue to Chin Chin but on South Yarra's Chapel Street and with more of a focus on street food, that once infamously proffered a wait time equal to a return drive to Torquay with a beer stop in the middle Baby Pizza , quiet stalwart of the group, churning out delectable, fresh Italian food on Church Street, and  Kong , offering Japanese-Korean BBQ fusion also on Church Street, and perhaps the most casual venue of the lot.  And if you have read any of my posts before, you will know that I am utterly fed up with the 'Americana' craze, whereby every...

I am an absolute sucker for pretty lights. So when I saw the Dandenong Festival of Lights advertised, I was pretty keen to go. Basically it looked like a big bunch of colourful, lit-up sculptures with a Chinese twist, in a park. The website more classily described it as celebrating "Chinese culture through a display of hundreds of beautiful and unique silk light displays". We chose a night to go - Friday, 2 October 2015 - and rocked up to Greaves Reserve (Dandenong Showgrounds) around 7pm. There was ample parking, and it was needed: there was a queue of people lining up for tickets probably 300 metres long. An usher said it would be the busiest night of the event's duration (why, I'm not sure). The queue moved quickly though - we probably reached the gate within ten minutes - but I did make a mental note for next time, to buy tickets online beforehand. The entrance was promising: a huge, intricate, colourful archway, lit up against the night sky, framed b...

I'd never heard of SummerSalt Festival or Exxopolis until a friend suggested we go. I'm a sucker for anything to do with light and colour, so of course I said yes. Turns out SummerSalt is an outdoor arts festival, held between 23 January and 21 February this year, comprising music, art, theatre, dance and art events, in and around the Arts Precinct . It is a collaboration between a number of arts bodies, including the ABC , Arts Centre , ACCA , Chunky Move , Malthouse Theatre , Recital Centre , MSO , MTC , NGV , Australian Ballet and Victorian College of the Arts . (Phew!) Exxopolis is a luminarium (another thing I'd never heard of, but I sure as hell am going to research more on these things now) created by Architects of Air in Nottingham, UK. AoA is headed up by Alan Parkinson , who has been experimenting with ' luminaria ' since the 1980s. Essentially, they are carefully designed, inflatable, tent-like structures, creating internal burro...