Photograph: Kristoffer Paulsen
Kan's take is an intensely fragrant broth of lemongrass, garlic, makrut lime, galangal and chilli, generously loaded with a mix egg and rice noodles, housemade golden tofu (Etta fans know), fresh herbs and a lusciously loud Nonya sambal. And that's not even the end of it.
Each god-level soup will be served with a stick of deep-fried dip-it-yourself school prawns, inspired by the Malaysian street-food vendors known as skewer aunties – who make the steamboat-style skewered meats and seafood known as lok-lok. Additional lok-lok of housemade fish balls and satay grilled chicken will also be available for $8 a pop.
The laksa is available for $30 and will be served from Etta's front bar every Wednesday night until the end of August. Move fast, though; there are only 20 serves available a week and your best bet is to book ahead.
- Lauren Dinse
The below review was originally written in December 2023. Please note that chef Rosheen Kaul (whom this review references) departed the restaurant in April 2024, with new head chef Lorcan Kan now steering the ship. We have since re-visited the restaurant and believe the quality of its offering continues to warrant a five-star rating.
*****
Time Out Melbourne never writes starred reviews from hosted experiences – Time Out covers restaurant and bar bills for reviews so that readers can trust our critique.
Etta has been hot on everyone's lips since it entered the Brunswick East dining scene –particularly since head chef Rosheen Kaul joined the kitchen in 2020. In the culinary world, countless awards and glowing reviews often breed scepticism but a recent Tuesday evening dinner proved the praise is just as warranted as ever.
We were seated in a cosy corner nook decked out with decorative pillows, ideal for soaking up the scene (to the left, the bar and open kitchen; the right, Lygon street passersby; and to the front, a solo diner in for an early drink and snacks followed by a couple on date night – both common finds at this venue).
Though Etta is a restaurant, strictly speaking, it's frequently mistaken as a wine bar. Perhaps because it has a list to stand up among the best of Melbourne's wine bars. Bottles range in price, region and style with a largely Victorian focus. Whether you want old-world or new-age, there's something for everyone. But it pays to look past the vino as the sake offering is equally thoughtful (albeit less extensive) with a few hard-to-find drops from around Japan.
Fitting in with a trend many restaurants and bars seem to be following as of late, the food menu is snack-heavy and designed to share. We start strong with a crab masala-stuffed zucchini flower – its thin, nearly translucent batter and bold spice putting cheese-filled numbers to shame. It's large enough to split between two while the quail egg is a one-bite wonder, served on a skewer with fried tofu, pickled radish, feferoni and a generous drizzle of Sichuan chilli oil.
Momentum is maintained as larger dishes begin to grace the table. The red curry rice and herb salad, an Etta mainstay, has been reimaged for the current menu with smoky grilled octopus and crumbled pieces of otak-otak, a spiced woodfired fish cake that's almost like goats cheese in texture and just as savoury.
The golden tofu, served under a pile of charred spring greens and wild garlic, looks deceptively simple but shows the outstanding potential of beancurd when well prepared. And the shiitake-filled wombok cabbage rolls with tempura enoki, another perennial favourite, achieves the elusive goal of meatless main that doesn't skimp on substance. Flame-licked and full of flavour, both dishes are unmissable, vegetarian or not.
The savoury dishes were faultless so we decide to try dessert – a pandan and amaretto frangipane tart with palm sugar ice cream that reads extremely well but unfortunately falls flat. It's not bad by any stretch but lacks dimension, particularly after the last few courses. A bit of citrus zest or even a touch of burnt sugar would go a long way but the pairing of sweet, nutty Kameman Shuzo Genmaishu sake means the meal ends on a high note.
In a sea of great restaurants, it's tough to be truly exceptional but Etta straddles the line. A continuous reinvention of their classics seems key to the venue's success – and if it continues on this trajectory, one can only assume great things are to come. But regardless of Etta's future, it's clear its stripes are well-deserved.
While you're in the neighbourhood, here's why Brunswick East was voted the sixth coolest neighbourhood in the world. Looking for more great restaurants?
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Out
an hour ago
- Time Out
London's biggest West End theatre sale is back for the summer
Over 80 of London's biggest shows have cut their prices if you book before the end of the month Of all the many, many London West End ticket sales, none is as big as London Theatre Week. Or as long: a novice might think it might last a solitary week, but that's absolutely not the case: there are two of them annually (one in March, one in August), they're each two weeks long, and they almost invariably extend by a week or two. But you don't care about that! You care about reduced price theatre tickets! And that is where London Theatre Week definitely does live up to the promise of its name. Here's the basics. It is now London Theatre Week. It will be London Theatre Week until Sunday August 31. Probably a couple of weeks more if we're honest, but that's TBA. During London Theatre Week please go here (note, Time Out is a partner) to book your theatre tickets, as for over 80 of London's biggest shows there will be a substantial discount. Score some discounts for well established West End smashes like The Lion King, Wicked, Stranger Things, Book of Mormon, Mamma Mia!, Matilda, MJ The Musical, Hamilton or My Neighbour Totoro, with tickets starting at £19. Some of the summer's biggest short run shows are participating too if you get in quick: see Secret Cinema's Grease for just £25 a pop, immersive dinosaur show Prehistoric Planet at the Lightroom for £15, and the Open Air Theatre's revival of classic musical romance Brigadoon for £15. Or get smart and book ahead for the most exciting shows of the autumn season – get a discount on the hits of the future that'll hopefully sell out when the reviews roll in: great offers include £13 tickets to Dracula at the Lyric Hammersmith, £32 to the National Theatre's Hamlet and Bacchae, and £15 for the Young Vic's hotly tipped Orton revival Entertaining Mr Sloane. In short: it's a the best time of the year there is to buy theatre tickets. At least until the next London Theatre Week. London Theatre Week is currently running from now until August 31. Book discounted tickets here. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025. 'It's high stakes, high adrenaline' – Punchdrunk are back with new show Lander 23.
Top Gear
4 hours ago
- Top Gear
For a game set in 1904, Mafia: The Old Country is a surprisingly good driving sim
Gaming Bombing around Sicily in Victorian machinery? Yes please Skip 5 photos in the image carousel and continue reading The Mafia games have always committed to their historical settings. Despite never troubling the licensing departments of any real-world manufacturers, their fictional rosters of automobiles have grounded each title in a time and a place. Driving a big motorised cigar on bicycle wheels between missions really reminds you you're in pre-war America, and over the years that's been key to discerning them from the GTA series, which casts a shadow over all who dare to release open world games with cars and shooting in them. Out now for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, Mafia: The Old Country takes the series back further than ever before, to the lush vineyards and sulphur mines of 1900s Sicily. We were a bit surprised, then, to find that it's absolutely full of cars. Advertisement - Page continues below Driving around the titular old country in this game feels like launching an Impreza around The Witcher III' s Velen, or bombing around a Center Parcs – the space just isn't designed for such raucous machinery. If rattling along in a Bolt Model 1 in the original 2002 Mafia: City of Lost Heaven felt precarious, operating The Old Country' s steel horses feels downright maniacal. These roads are meant for the quant clip-clop of horses, to be taken at speeds at which you can enjoy the pleasant views, like citrus trees in blossom and rolling volcanic topography. The tracks are simply too small for Scandinavian flicks or J-turns. Believe us, we've tried. You might like And in a funny way, that's what makes this game worth playing. Developer Hangar 13 may not have reinvented the cover shooter with this one, but there's something inherently preposterous in trying to run and gun like a Grand Theft Auto protagonist in this setting that elevates the Cosa Nostra action. You're a young miner, a Carusu in the Sicilian dialect, who makes an enemy of the local Don by getting a little bit knife fighty with him. Sensing that your next performance review may not go well, you flee to the local farmland, where you're rather fortuitously taken in by rival Don (this one with far more lustrous hair and a better waistcoat, so you know he's a good one). Advertisement - Page continues below So begins a rise up through the ranks of organised crime in its earliest form, back when extortion was conducted on horseback and enemies could leave the country in the time it would take you to reload your gun. There's romance, betrayal, the breaking of various Omertàs, and a plot arc that you've already mentally seen two beats ahead at any given time. But that's fine. No, honestly, it is. The story isn't groundbreaking here despite some strong performances from its central cast, and the way the missions are plotted out feels well-trodden to say the least. But this is a game that's had its nose in so many history books, it can really sell you on the idea that you're inhabiting 1900s Sicily. There are incidental details all over this game world that make it feel that tiny bit more alive, like recipes on kitchen counters, authentically dressed rooms in period-authentic furnishings down to the smallest detail, and smatterings of Sicilian vernacular throughout. Even the cars, fictitious though they are, and incongruous with the unsullied bucolic splendour of the place, feel of a piece with the game world. Their manufacturers, like Bolt, DuFort and Trautenberg, have been present across the series so it feels like you're driving the origins of each company. This certainly doesn't represent a high tide mark for a series that once lit the way industry-wide for linear storytelling in an open-world setting. Where there were once imaginative, expectation-shattering mission narratives, now there's A-to-B treks from shootouts to knife fights to horse rides to drives. But with such a scarcity of decent story-led single-player games lately, and the sharply drawn setting of historical Sicily, it feels easy to turn a blind eye to the prosaic bits and just enjoy the drive. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.
The National
5 hours ago
- The National
John Purser on a very strange week in Monaco
For me it has been a joy. But I did encounter it at its very worst at a James Joyce Symposium, though I was there on account of Jack Yeats. Yeats. It's a name to conjure with. WB Yeats, Nobel Prize-winning poet, mystic (in Sligo he is still known as Spooky Willy), and latterly alarmingly right-wing, almost war-mongering. There are many hundreds of theses and academic articles about him and his work. It's great work but it just doesn't need that amount of attention. His brother, Jack, is held by many to be Ireland's greatest painter. He was a left-wing republican and is my favourite. Their sisters, Lily and Lolly, ran the influential Cuala printing press and publishing company and were also artists. READ MORE: Parents face £10k childcare bills as council blocks cross-authority funding And there was their father, John Butler Yeats, who was a fine portrait painter, a voluminous talker and letter-writer. and hopeless at bringing things to fruition. I have a particular reason for liking Jack as it was on account of him that I was paid to spend a week in Monte Carlo – all travel and hotel covered – to launch my first venture into academe: The Literary Works of Jack B Yeats. So far, so conventional. But Jack's writings were so unconventional that not only were they scarcely written about, they were scarcely available. I only knew they existed because he had given some to my great-aunt, the artist Sarah Purser, and were in our sitting-room bookcase. The unconventionality of Jack's writings nearly cost me my PhD. I had handed in my thesis to Professor Peter Butter and was now, in some trepidation, knocking on his study door in Glasgow University. His study was a large Victorian one in Sir Gilbert Scott's Gothic masterpiece. Peter was in an armchair behind a huge desk, armed with my thesis. The walls were dark and book-lined. The tall windows looked out through their Gothic arches on to a quadrangle enclosed by soot-blackened sandstone walls tall enough to cut out much of the sky. 'It's very good, John. You've done a lot of work. Most interesting. But it lacks a proper conclusion.' 'Jack wasn't a man for conclusions.' 'Nevertheless, John, a conclusion is called for.' 'It wouldn't be right. I don't really think I need to add to what I've written.' 'You know John, when one writes a thesis one gathers the evidence and adduces the reasoning and one comes to a conclusion.' 'But that's not how Jack Yeats works. It's not a schoolboy essay, it's a reflection of his work as a whole. He thought and wrote by association.' 'Well John, a conclusion would be very useful.' By which I was emphatically given to understand that, without one, there would be no PhD. To be fair to Peter, he was perfectly satisfied with the conclusion when it arrived. It started with the words 'Conclusions are foolish things ...' He was really very patient with me. I got my PhD and, thanks to Derry Jeffares and the Princess Grace of Monaco Memorial Irish Library, it was published. I was duly invited to Monte Carlo to launch said book at the Twelfth International James Joyce Symposium. But when I reached the Irish Library in the palace at Monte Carlo, nobody would touch the Jack Yeats painting I had brought and I had to hang it myself. READ MORE: Bringing legend to life: John Purser on JD Fergusson and the Celtic Revival Why? Only when I went to the harbour and looked down on an assemblage of hideous vessels, parked by pontoons, sleek super-yachts with their helipads, uniformed guards, protective gates, shiny everything and attendant aquatic toys (lilos, speedboats, jet-skis) and the occasional oiled human body if you got tired of playing with steel and plastic, did I understand the caution. This was international mafia territory. Theft, masquerading under the name of investment, was the basic mechanism, vanity, exploitation and greed the fuel oils which kept it all functioning. It turned out much the same applied to the world of literary academe which was there in its hundreds, the majority American. A week in Monte Carlo is, however, not to be sniffed at and I was also able to enjoy the company of Anne Yeats, WB's daughter, an artist herself and a real lady of great character and humour. She had opened her house and her uncle Jack's papers to me. We got on and she, inundated with books about her father and her uncle's paintings, liked what I wrote about his writings. Images of Joyce was the symposium topic but Joyce's living image was also there – his grandson, Stephen James, who launched into the biographer Brenda Maddox, furious at what he felt was her inaccurate invasion of family privacies. His wife tugged in vain at his trousers to get him to sit down. I felt for him. The place must have seemed full of vultures plucking at the carcasses of his grandparents and, with a few fine exceptions, showing little feeling of love for the text (which text? – choose your weapons). In some cases Joyce was ignored altogether. One leading speaker, passionate for Virginia Woolf, succeeded in avoiding Joyce for more than an hour. A session chairman from Philadelphia spoke entirely about himself. A lady from Delaware spoke up for DH Lawrence and rubbished Joyce as a nature writer – but, thankfully, David Norris's brilliant rendering of a breaking Joycean wave caused her to withdraw with good humour. As for the Women's Caucus (Shirley Conran among them, no men admitted), they fell out among themselves and that was the sum total of their report. In the midst of Stephen Joyce's more formal address (mostly a vindication of his own life and recent involvement in the Joyce circus), a traduced American shouted across the auditorium: 'What the fuck is going on here?' and stormed out. At the end, Anne Yeats, stately and dignified, quietly defended herself and her brother from Stephen's accusations that they were profiteering from WB's estate. The accusation was totally false, never mind astonishingly ill mannered. Anne spoke calmly, but I was sitting with her and could tell her normal serenity and good humour were sorely tried. She was there for the same reason as I was – her uncle Jack, whom she recalled for us with modest, discerning and disarming affection. The same words could be used of Jack Yeats's menu card he made for Sarah Purser's 90th birthday. He has depicted her as a girl above Dungarven Harbour, where she spent her childhood days. She holds a bouquet of flowers in her hand, reflected in a mirror. The mirror itself has her artist's palette and brushes at the base, and the masks of comedy and tragedy at the top. Above her outstretched arms, a little bird flies up into the sky, singing; and the wind in her skirt and in her hair suggest the fresh air of an early spring day. Just lovely. READ MORE: John Purser on his friendship with sculptor and etcher Charles Wells Images of Jack were there in the form of a stunning exhibition of his paintings gathered by Hilary Pyle. The Princess Grace of Monaco Memorial Irish Library was patient host to the symposium, but the Joyce circus kept mostly within its own little ring of sand, few visiting the library, few looking at the pictures. Vibrant with colour and symbolic resonance, they outdid the exotic plants, the visual dramas of Monte Carlo and the filthy Med, with images more lively and lovely than anything else the conference had to offer. Images of Joyce? Echoes, rather. A recital of Joyce songs and fine settings of chamber music by Geoffrey Molyneux, deserving of Joyce's own preference for them, was lovingly presented. It stole into even the stoniest of academic hearts as though Bartell D'Arcy had shed his cold and sang for us the songs from The Dead – Joyce's masterpiece of a short story, made into a masterpiece of film by John Huston. One American who knew what he was doing. There was also a virtuosic rendering of Finnegans Wake by two actors, a pianist and five geometric props from the Dublin Festival Company – at last the sound of Dublin and of Dublin's voices restoring to Joyce his native coherence. I say 'restoring' because most of the papers given were desperately ambitious and hopelessly entangled in webs of too much meaning. Many were incoherent, not only in their content but in their presentation. Some had not even been edited or timed to fit the slot available but were delivered in a relentless monotone from a heap of disordered papers for twice the allowed length. These people were teachers of English literature. On the evidence of such performances, better if the subject were banned by law. The ghost of Joyce, I trust, remained indifferent, paring its fingernails if it had any left. Jack loved the circus, but had there been a good old-fashioned ringmaster at the Monaco Symposium he would have had to crack his whip pretty frequently and there would have been threads of blood on more than one cheek. Nonetheless, there were good things to remember: the two Irish professors David Norris and Gus Martin, entertaining as well as knowledgeable; and Claude Gaignebet from Nice, opening up a world of significance in the Joycean calendar in a few succinct French sentences. As far as I could make out, only the French were at the French language session, it being delivered in the language of our hosts. Ah well. Chiefly I remember Jack Yeats's painting Defiance. A man from the sea breasting the top of a cliff, confronted by a sunlit cormorant, bravely defending its own – yellow and blue struggling to a compromise in the midst of a wild canvas. The battles over the territory of James Joyce had their dramas too, but poetic imagery such as that seemed largely to have gone out of them. A condition of my visit was that I write up the event in a leading newspaper. The Glasgow Herald did me proud. I sent it off to the then director of the library, Georges Sandulescu (below). He telephoned me from Monte Carlo to Skye. His voice was intimidating. 'I have just read your piece about the symposium.' The tone of menace was unmistakable. 'I wrote what I thought.' What I wrote is pretty much what you have just read. I was, I need hardly say, once more in a state of trepidation, having castigated most of the presentations. 'What do you suppose I made of it?' 'I have no idea.' As it turned out, I didn't. 'It was wonderful! The best bit of writing to come out of the symposium! I have had six copies made for the palace.' The bastard! He knew he had me and he played me like a fish. Truth 6, Academic Mafiosi 0
