I haven’t reviewed restaurants professionally for almost a decade. But I’d like to comment a little on a new restaurant called lene, its first letter fashionably lower-case.
Owner-chef Cameron Williams is 25 and has an impressive background in cooking. Apprenticed at 17 to Jacques Reymond, whose comprehensive and rigorous culinary skills I’ve admired and written about for decades, he went on to work in Michelin-starred restaurants in London and Copenhagen before returning to his home town Melbourne with a dream of running his own bistro.
A friend invited me to lene to sample a few of its offerings on one of two ‘opening’ nights. What I ate was perfectly cooked, flavours full, clean and light. We had oblongs of toast lightly soused with an XO sauce and topped with poached mussels and shreds of pickled shallots, plates of a new version of beef tartare, the meat in small cubes in an emulsion highlighted by fermented chilli, thin crisp discs of fried artichoke the size of 10-cent pieces strewn over all. And the half-roasted ‘chook’, as the menu describes it, was as good if not better than any farmed poultry I’ve eaten — succulent and very tasty and served with a subtle ‘roasted yeast’ sauce.
Jacques Reymond dropped in, telling me that Williams was among the best apprentices he’d hired, a guy who was dedicated to the profession, loved the rigour, and was happy to work towards excellence, in many ways a very unAustralian thing to do. So the best of luck to him — not enough Australians who aren’t sportspersons have the stick to pursue excellence.
I wish him well. lene is at 360 Bridge Road, Richmond, 9428 3162.