MELBOURNE | Down the relatively quiet city end of Smith Street, you’ll find one of Melbourne’s newest Greek restaurants, The Pontian Club. It’s an evolution of a pop-up run by two mates who never planned on opening their own restaurant. Despite only being open for a couple of months, it feels like it’s been around for much longer.
Landscaper Alessandro Brunetti, and butcher Bertie Pavlidis were inspired to start the Pontian Club after enjoying fun and delicious times with good food and drink in Athens. They started cooking for friends at Brunswick’s Pontian Club, and refined the pop-ups with the help of friend and Gimlet chef, Oscar Tan. One thing led to another, and now they have their own restaurant.
The menu is a short and simple one, centred around top quality fresh produce, and dishes enjoyed by Greece’s Pontian community. That is, the food of Anatolian Greeks, who either fled their homeland during the Greek genocide of the early 1900s, or were forced from it during the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Türkiye. Many of their descendants ended up settling in Australia.
One of two words are used to describe each of the 12 or so dishes. To start, there’s dips like roasted eggplant, fava bean, and taramasalata, best enjoyed with a serve of the crusty house bread. Larger dishes include things like tender grilled octopus, spanakopita, and moreish bites of grilled lamb. Fire, olive oil, and lemon feature heavily.
Youvetsi is another winner, with different protein additions depending on when you visit. The menu listed prawn when I visited, but instead it was a generous, and well suited serve of pipis that were mixed through the pasta. For sides, its classics like Greek salad, roast potatoes, and green beans.
Dessert is a choice between olive-oil pound cake or bay leaf and ricotta cake, made by Bertie and Al’s mum’s respectively. Most of the herbs used in the kitchen also come from the mums’ gardens. To drink, its a small list of Greek and Victorian wines, beers, and spirits. And of course, there’s ouzo.
With decent serving sizes, keen pricing, and a lively, honest atmosphere that doesn’t take itself to seriously, but nails all of the important things, The Pontian Club does all that it needs to do to make it a welcome addition to the neighbourhood.
The Pontian Club
8 Smith Street
Collingwood
Victoria 3066
Australia
Telephone: n/a
E-mail: n/a
Website
Open
Thu – Fri: 5:00pm to 10:00pm
Sat – Sun: 12:30pm to 10:00pm