L’Espresso, Ballarat
The highlight of my recent weekend in Ballarat was dinner at L’Espresso, a compact cafe / restaurant / CD shop. By day you can buy from a diverse selection of blues and jazz and have breakfast, lunch and coffee. At night it becomes a serious restaurant that serves wonderful food.
My girlfriend started with the anchovy tart with caramelised onion, then had the scallop risotto, which was divinely creamy and flavoursome.
I chose the Italian white bean soup, followed by the slow cooked beef, which was probably the most tender beef I have ever had.
There were some good regional wines available by the glass, including the Mount Langi Billi Billi Shiraz, which suited the beef perfectly.
My only criticisms are slight. Their website has not been updated in about 7 years and has no current menus or wine lists. Given that many tourists do most of their research online, this means we did not even have L’Espresso on our shortlist to visit, and only saw it on the main street because our hotel was around the corner. Regional restaurants and cafes like those we enjoyed in Ballarat need to update their online marketing if they want to increase their patronage from tourists.
Second, there were no desert wines on the menu. My girlfriend asked and they had some lovely Rutherglen tokay and muscat, but given the popularity of desert wines right now, including sherry and port, this is an oversight for an otherwise excellent restaurant, particularly as they had them behind the bar.
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