Vue de Monde may be considered the best French restaurant in Melbourne, and one of the best restaurants in Australia. So, I had very high expectations for it when I made a booking for 2 almost seven weeks ahead- specially for SY's birthday.
Yes, you need to book really early if you want to dine at this fine French cuisine restaurant, as they are booked out almost every night of the week for at least a month.
The restaurant is located in the Melbourne CBD at 430, Little Collins Street, in the block between Queens St. and Williams St.
Now I have never been to a French restaurant before, and my impressions of French restaurants (no offense) from movies are that they can be quite stuck-up. Well let's blame Hollywood for that.
I am pleased to say that Vue de Monde is nothing like that; as after the first 15 minutes there, I discovered that I didn't even need to have put on my best clothes to go there.
Stepping into the restaurant, we were immediately shown to our table and the waitress helped us out of our coats and took them away to be kept.
A wine connoisseur assisted us in selecting our wines - a glass of French Amadieu red for me and a Bernier champagne for SY.
This is probably a good time to talk about the menu here at Vue de Monde- or rather the absence of one. Vue de Monde is the first restaurant that I have been to that does not have a food menu. The waitress explained that the restaurant has a team of chefs preparing 50 to 70 different dishes per night. What they do instead is come up with a degustation or tasting style menu that is tailored specifically to each person on the night itself.
Your waiter/waitress will ask you if you have any food allergies and if you have any preference in food. They will not divulge what food they'll be serving beforehand, so each course will be a surprise.
There are basically 2 options you can have here at Vue de monde, the Menu Gourmand which is a 5 course degustation menu for $150 a person or for the ultimate - the Gastronomes Menu which is their top level menu priced at $250 per person. Extra courses for the Menu Gourmand are available for $15 a course.
For this review, I won't be going into too much detail what the courses are called mainly because I just can't remember the long fancy names. The waiting staff presented each course as it arrives, explaining all the ingredients used and how they are infused to blend together perfectly. Our waitress told me she would email me the names of the courses, so if she remembers to do this I'll update this entry.
