Everything Cooked in Olive Oil

At Large: Denny Baring on eating, drinking, and smoking in Melbourne’s DIY restaurants

This week, we are excited to bring you the first edition of At Large, our new column, sporadically published, which will feature commissioned guest writers who have special expertise and élan.

First up is Denny Baring. Baring is a chef, econometrician, and food critic who also goes by the pseudonym “Big Farmer.” We first became aware of him via his short-form commentary on Instagram, where he riffs on everything from tea leaves to small plates to the southside Açai renaissance. Baring is clever and funny, with a good nose for what’s happening with Melbourne food culture beneath the shiny Broadsheet surface.

Your editors sent him to investigate the Pontian Club, a former pop-up turned restaurant that everyone is talking about. Baring took time out from his busy schedule running an anti-capitalist food co-op in the old Beatrix Bakery spot and came back with this report on the city’s Greek cuisine, ethnic community centres, backyard galleries, illegal tobacco, Synagogue diners, Korean fermentation, and the unlikely connections between all of them. Yia Mas!

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Walking down the streets of Collingwood, those of us born pre-millennium no doubt wonder what happened. Owner-operated businesses, artist studios, and non-commercial galleries that for years popped up in the excrement of past industry have been replaced by capital-directed enterprises operating in perpetuity. The rough claddings are now translucent, with the pretence peeling away. This is Collingwood now; it’s fresh, it’s clean, it’s refined; it’s the coolest suburb in Australia (according to Time Out).

I step into one of the many tobacconists to purchase a pack of brightly-coloured, non-plain-packaged imported Chinese cigarettes. I’m offered the illegal tobacco without having to request it. The pretence is completely gone. It’s all out in the open now; some establishments don’t even offer any compliant alternatives. The legislated price hikes and exorbitant taxes were never enough to snuff the flame, perhaps only making the desire rise with new vigour—and that’s why ciggies are back. We’re rejecting the modern plastic oral fixations for the old-school, the analogue, where we’re staring at death directly. And that’s why maybe we are sooo back.

Wandering further down Smith Strasse towards the city, crossing over Gertrude Street, I enter that strange hodgepodge section of the street that always feels on the precipice of coming up. Just nearby, the previous global headquarters of Aesop (sold to L’Oreal in 2023 for $3.7b) there’s progressive community radio staple 3CR. A few doors down from the Gertrude-street-type-beat, The Melbourne Apothecary, and across the road, the words “Pontian Club [...] coming soon” are scrawled roughly on a large glass window. The window is covered by a dirty sheet, which conceals an overflowing worksite inside. It’s fitting that the chefs and founders of the Pontian Club, a new Greek restaurant and bar, have zero carpentry experience. They are doing this renovation themselves, with a flair borne of Melbourne’s acclaimed legally grey (black) zone DIY public space artistry.

The Pontian Club first opened in 2024 for weekly, Athens-inspired lunches in an old Brunswick Greek cultural club, after which it is named. It scratched a certain itch for many Melburnians. Hellenic culture has had a long and important history in the largest Greek-speaking metro outside of Greece, but for decades, restaurant offerings have taken a backseat to Italian cuisine. Icons like Stalactites have held on tight, and Jim’s Greek Tavern is as vibrant as ever. After the collapse of the Calombaris empire due to some minor problems—stealing millions in staff wages—the larger mainstream representatives of Greek cuisine diminished in our collective consciousness.

Still, interest remained, and perhaps even grew amongst the globe-trotting youth. The explosion of Athens as a tourist destination post-financial-collapse saw many Melburnians introduced to the Athenian lifestyle. They came to know the pleasures of simply-plated, well-seasoned food; of smoking inside; of drinking tin pitchers of retsina in latte glasses. This style of dining offered a respite from the overly designed inner-north winebar we had become accustomed to. The market bubble of chef reverence had caused many people to Noma-fy their practice and strive for the kind of specialisation that loses the Human and the Hand along the way. A return to “real” food is a widespread desire that has emerged partly in response to this development.

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Con Christopoulos’ restaurant, Kafeneion, came onto the scene abruptly in 2023, taking on a short-term lease on Bourke Street. The venture reminded locals that Greek cuisine and hospitality isn’t only a historical outcome of post-war migration, but a culture continually evolving in its place of origin. Unfortunately, Christopoulos’ choice to move the ephemeral pop-up from Bourke Street to be amongst his four other businesses on Spring Street left it somewhat diminished. Then, in further evidence of Greek cuisine’s ascendence, Tzaki, a self-described Athenian locale in the westside’s blue-chip Yarraville, opened to great fanfare. It has great (good) food, great (expensive) prices, and great (intense) orange branding. Tzaki slotted itself into the greater Melbourne wine bar landscape with modern small plate execution matched with technical expertise. Their woodfire oven control creates the most photogenic blistered flatbreads, and they are open 7 days, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Today, in the era of the 4-day-wine-bar hegemony, there’s something old-school about that.

The Pontian Club began as the opposite. Founders Bertie Pavlidis and Al Brunetti began with a barebones, DIY approach, throwing together deliciously simple and affordable classic Greek plates accented by $5 Alfa beers and ouzos, opening only on Sunday afternoons. This was made possible by the fact that the original Pontian Club, as with many of the incorporated associations tied to Melbourne’s various migrant communities, was ready to go with an existing liquor license and food service certificate, meaning that the venue could be brought to life by Bertie and Al’s venture at short notice and on a shoestring budget.

Each Sunday saw the old Greek centre in Brunswick transformed. The club’s walls were three shades of purple/burgundy and the parquetry flooring was covered by a series of overlapping grey carpets. The disco ball, dangling in the centre of bright LED downlights illuminating the windowless hall, felt symbolic of the celebrative tension in the air, held at bay by expansive gaps between tables. The afternoon feast served up to punters made the room feel reminiscent of a wedding or wake. Outside, innumerable smokers gathered behind iron bars, which protected the backstreets of Brunswick from overflow. The space felt nostalgic for many, even for those from outside the Greek community, as it was a reminder of the communal engagement and spatial excess of pasts lost to us post-internet—a feeling heightened post-Covid.

Also, the food was good. “EVERYTHING COOKED IN OLIVE OIL” was chalked up in a Melbourne handstyle underneath the small menu. There were simple entrées: fried sardines and lemon, roughly-smashed fava, topped with spring onions, capers, and olive oil and dumped in an ellipse on large, round, white plates. There was classic horiatiki, written only as “Greek salad,” with a big slab of feta and a sprinkling of dried oregano. There were chicken, lamb, or pork skewers, all coming in for $10 dollars or less—the prices were Athenian, too. A few weeks in, chef Oscar Tan joined the team, bringing a wealth of experience and expertise to the kitchen. Tan had worked at a number of Andrew McConnell’s Trader House venues (Gimlet, Cutler, Apollo Inn), and soon his small-plate sensibility crept into the menu. Eventually, the offerings rose by a dollar here or there. But it was anyone’s guess how they were able to sustain the venture financially, let alone grow it.

To me, the success of the Pontian Club suggested something about what’s possible when we negate the factors that make restaurants so expensive to start and run—surplus lost to extractive landlords and wasteful corporate structures, with internal marketing teams inflating sandwiches to $20 apiece. The service was without HR structuring. The waiters had essentially no experience serving customers, but this was part of the Pontian Club’s charm. It allowed for moments of improvisational human gesture to arise in the gaps, similar to that of a familial context (after all, Sundays, when the Pontian Club opened, is traditionally the day of the Christian Sabbath and its family lunch).

The barriers separating customers disintegrated one Sunday, halfway through a meal, like when you’re half-cut at a wedding or family get-together. The hosts started joining tables of friends and I jumped ship from mine to drink and be merry with another.