Epocha

It’s always a pleasure going to Epocha, great food, awesome smiley service and lovely décor.
My favs there is always the crumpets w black salt, butter and honey comb, roasted chicken and now my new fav is the gnocchi.
For the adventurous try the pig ears too, it’s amazing.

This was one of our dining highlights in Melbourne and we were so glad we booked to eat here. We visited on a Tuesday night and had a seat inside by the window so had a beautiful view of the park and CBD which was just magical.
Initially I thought the cuisine was Australian but it’s actually European and the restaurant is based in one of the nicest spaces I’ve been in a long time. It’s a terrace house and I loved how they’d transformed it into a restaurant and bar upstairs.
We had a lovely relaxing meal where we ordered a bunch of stuff to share — they do have a sharing menu option but we didn’t want to overeat, so mainly focussed on the snacks and small shares section. The highlight for me however was the main we got to share — duck with blood orange and fennel. It was absolutely exceptional.
Service was slick and smooth and the price for a meal for two was reasonable. I’d make a special visit to Epocha next time I’m in Melbourne as it was just a really lovely restaurant to dine in.

Absolutely stunning. Phenomenal. An incredible serving team and a brilliant maître d’. We were at the Carlton Gardens for an event (visiting from States) and needed a nice place nearby to have a lunch meeting. Saw the great reviews here and headed over. Wow. What an incredible surprise. The food was amazing. Thanks for such a super experience both food and dining. It was great and highly recommendable. You won’t be let down.

Epocha is located opposite Carlton Gardens in a lovely old terrace; reminiscent of Hell of the North but with a better outlook. It was one of those perfect Melbourne autumn days — on the warm side of cool — so I asked for a table on the little front balcony to take advantage of the view of the park with glimpses of the Exhibition Building through the trees.
I’ve been meaning to try the degustation here for a while now but the first time I booked myself in was a Sunday when they only serve roast, and the second time a few weeks ago was the tail end of the Food & Wine Festival so they were just offering an Express menu. Today, fortunately, the old adage «third time’s a charm» actually held true.
There are two sharing menu options for $ 68 and $ 80 respectively. I chose the $ 80 version which gives you a choice of duck or beef for main as opposed to chicken or fish. For a further $ 55 you can also match wines, which of course I did ;). My very friendly waiter seated me and returned a couple of minutes later with a bottle of Super Bock Portuguese lager and a little loaf of black bread tied in a muslin sack.
The sommelier arrived soon after, bearing generous slurps of Madeira (which he suggested would go well with the bread) and a German Trocken Riesling called 50 degrees (made by Mumm) to go with my first course; a little breadboard of snacks. These consisted of a bowl of mixed olives, crudite with white anchovy crème Fraiche, a dollop of Austrian Liptauer cheese on a rye cracker, and some chickpea fritters with red pepper Mayo. Olives are olives so no surprises there, the slightly fishy crème Fraiche worked very well with the raw vegetables, and the red pepper Mayo saved the fritters from blandness. The soft, slightly spicy cheese was the pick of the four for me.
Two salads were next; beetroot with pecan brittle and a sweet, whipped goats curd, and baked baby carrots with candied walnuts and almonds. I was a little bit sceptical about having two salad courses included in the menu, but both of these were really, really good. Interesting flavour combinations — particularly the beetroot and goat curd which worked a treat. And I could have eaten a bowl of the candied walnuts which were sugary, but beautifully balanced with a savoury finish. Both plates had a lot of sweetness, and matching them with a dry, slightly bitter Malagouzia from Greece was an excellent choice. My prior experience with Greek wine has been largely limited to cheap Retsina, but I actually quite liked this drop.
The first of the «large plates» was next; Spanish mackerel in a red pepper sauce with potato dumpling. The fish was qufirm, tasty and salty and the thin, slightly spicy sauce complemented it well. It was topped with peppers coped with paprika. The wine match for this was a liminona, also from Greece, and was a little like a Rose version of the Malagouzia I just had.
For the last course I chose the duck confit with pickled plums. This comprised two slices of duck breast and a confit leg. The breast was a little tough and would have been better served with a steak knife, and the plum a bit overpowering for my taste, but the meat was tasty and the sauce made from the meat drippings was great. This came with two French wines — a Closier Pinot and a Plan Pegau Grenache, both of which were quite nice.
Dessert followed, which I negotiated to replace with a couple of choices from the cheese trolley; a piece of Ossau-​Iraty and a nice, creamy Clarines. This came with a delicious sweet wine from the island of Stamos (if you haven’t guessed already the owners of this fine establishment are Greek). Great finish to a long and enjoyable lunch.
Epocha was worth the wait. Lovely setting, good food, generous servings and excellent service. And I may even be getting a taste for Greek wine…

Two of us had a series of great meals in Melbourne when on vacation last month. The meal at Epocha was wonderful. Great service, terrific food — overall a really wonderful experience. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

A-​MA-​ZING. A group of 4 of us started with drinks and oysters at the bar upstairs, then got the chef’s menu with matching wines, and it was all fantastic. The service was fantastic, the food was fantastic, the wine was fantastic. I’m not great at writing reviews, but I can’t say enough how much I enjoyed my experience at Epocha.

It’s a testament to the quality of the food and service of a restaurant when you regularly find yourself fantasising about being there again. This is what keeps happening to me with Epocha.
I’d been once before for late night glasses of wine and nibbles at the upstairs bar and rather liked it, but it was when I was taken there for a long lunch fuelled by great wine, many plates and great conversation that I fell in love proper.
In a multi-​storied old home opposite Carlton gardens Epocha isn’t flashy but rather quietly beautiful. The service is confident and clever — staff will guide your ordering and suggest wines that will match particular dishes.
We ate many dishes on that particular long lunch but I keep dreaming about the grilled pork skewers with peach. They were juicy and sweet with a lick of charred flavour from the grill. The orecchiette with house made sugo was also a standout — it came to the table, hot and steaming with sugo and was then poured in to a giant wheel of parmesan table-​side. The staff then scraped and turned over the pasta, coating it in the cheese before plating it individually for the three of us. It’s so rare to get table service like this these days, and the theatre of it made the pasta taste extra delicious.
It was these memories that kept drawing my mind back to Epocha and so this week I was stoked when friends and I went for dinner. We went for the $ 68 per head sharing menu because none of us felt like making decisions, though we did request those juicy pork skewers and they were as delicious as I remembered them.
For late night snacks in the bar, family dinners or long leisurely lunches I highly recommend Epocha. My only word of warning — wear your stretchy pants and don’t drive. You’re going to want to eat and drink everything.

This restaurant is the new kid on the block at the the bottom end of Rathdowne Street, set in a terrace house overlooking the Carlton Gardens. Somewhat hidden away, this place ticks all the right boxes to become one of the big hits in Melbourne dining for summer 2013.
Friendly, young wait staff in tailored aprons provide attentive, genuine service without pretension. If you’ve been to Press Club or the early days of Hellenic Republic, you will see some familiar, welcoming faces in the house staff.
The food is somewhat pan-​southern European with clear references to Spanish and Portuguese dishes. The food is all about sharing, with the menu set out by dish size (snacks, small plates and large plates). Fresh, clean ingredients abound, generally presented in a rustic manner with attention to detail.
The Barilla bay oysters will not disappoint! There are some dishes that will challenge the perceptions of some diners (e.g. pigs ears, sweetbreads) but everything we tried was delicious.
The wine list is reasonably long, with a wide selection of European wines set out by region. There is a good variety of Aperitifs and Digestifs to bookend your meal.
The atmosphere is intimate with low level lighting and plenty of tables for two as well as larger tables which would be well suited to groups of up to 8 people.
One star lost for the dessert, which was the only thing we didn’t enjoy. We had a wild strawberry jelly, which was a little too jam-​like. With no accompaniments to off-​set the sweetness, it was a little too much. Next time, I think we’ll avoid dessert. But otherwise, the meal was delicious.

Whenever you yearn for a sense of escapism, Epocha is one of those places — «we could be in Europe, Toto!».
Adventurous and authentic in crafting the menu — tasty apéritif, Spanish wine, fried pig ears, salt cod croquettes, platter of pork done three ways, orange and cardamon crème brûlée, and a palate cleansing digestivé to end the meal. Friendly and helpful staff without coming across as overbearing. Comforting lighting and ambience allows one to just forget about the grind of reality and enjoy the night as it is.
Must-​haves: Pork platter, asparagus (seasonal), oysters with the vinaigrette dressing, friend pig ears, and the dark bread with tones of expresso and caraway seeds!
Epocha does lunch Wed-​Sat with a $ 45 Sunday roast lunch with the promise of «feasting like a king».