But it certainly doesn’t hurt either. In another life, front of house manager Samuel Maher ran the floors at Mama Baba, St Katherine’s and The Press Club. He made the acquaintance of his collaborator Johan van der Walle a few years back, while the latter was head chef at that other Calombaris staple, Hellenic Republic.
Two people blessed with a schooling by the country’s foremost celebrity chef, without the pathological burden of being humiliated on national television, now laying out intimate dinners for inner-north foodies, with a reel of schlocky East Asian monster films playing in the background. Short of a giant lizard being sighted off Port Phillip and laying waste to the city midway through the meal, there’s literally nothing that could go wrong with this premise.
Van der Walle’s imagination has clearly run away from him now that he’s operating outside the confines of Greek bacchanalia. 20ft Monster’s meals are like celebration rites for the joys of the global village, the loving and fruitful marriage of east and west. Previous dinners have featured pulled pork and kimchi tacos, Szechuan mackerel with Thai salad, and a modern take on Vietnamese pate and pickled salad bread rolls.
The only way to describe van der Walle’s work with any justice would be as a monumental rapprochement between cuisines, the culinary equivalent of Ronald Reagan standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate and telling Mikhail Gorbachev to reconsider the whole Berlin Wall thing.
The best meals, like van der Walle’s light and understated fare, provoke a loss of inhibition and an animated fraternity. In a restaurant environment, the table talk at the end of the mains comes to resemble a more civilised sitting down version of 4am conversations outside the Mercat Basement rave cave. Friends are made, toasts are proclaimed and the beginnings of a universal human fraternity is revealed, an atmosphere almost impossible to describe without it reading like the prelude to a swinger’s party.
It’s here where Maher’s talents seamlessly complement the back of house magic. Gliding past now and again with liberal pourings from a shrewd selection of New Zealand’s best midrange plonk, Maher and his subordinates alternate between invisible and exuberant at all the right times, never leaving their diners in want of a full glass or a friendly face.
Dining with 20ft Monster feels like a cross between holding court at a country estate, and bearing witness to low level vaudeville without the fake fangs, hammy monologues and existential dread of dinner theatre. Definitely worth getting your claws into.
