Beetroot

123 Hardware St, Melbourne; 03 9600 0695

Beetroot have assessed their market and tailored an irresistible lunch option accordingly. During the week, a good range of pre-prepared meals are available for $10 and a tumbler of their house wine for just $1. If that won't get you away from your desk and out of the office, I don't know what you're waiting for!

The pre-preparation is an indicator that your food will not only be cheap but also quick to the table, rather than a suggestion of poor quality. A bowl of chicken pesto pasta is a perfect demonstration: a drizzle of parsley and sundried tomatoes sit atop firm pasta and a sauce that wasn't excessively creamy. The serving size was spot on for lunch, and the addition of a side salad is both commendable for the price and guilt-assuaging after taking the creamy pasta option.

If it's more of a sugar hit you're after to power through the afternoon, indulge in a milk, dark or white hot chocolate with persian candy floss. You could almost consider it a dessert and, at $3.80, it could give you a two-course lunch, with a glass of wine, for less than $15!

Earlier in the year, Mellie over at tummy rumbles set herself the challenge of working through Beetroot's autumn breakfast menu. It makes for great reading!

Laksa Me

16 Liverpool St; 03 9639 9885

Laksa Me opened to great acclaim just over a year ago. It's an excellent city lunchtime option. While you can spend more, a lot of their lunch options, including the laksas, are $10 or under. One menu item definitely worth digging around to find some extra change for is their Thai chilli calamari ($14) - strips are 'flame tossed' and served with chillies, roasted peanut, red capsicum, Thai chilli paste and soybean oil, accompanied by rice. It reads as well as it looks and tastes.

The lunch menu offers three laksas - a lemak with fish cake and dumplings, prawns and tofu; the 'skinny' laksa with mushroom, spinach, tofu and eggplant; and the signature My Mum's Laksa, with pho noodles, pork, chicken and prawns. I had the latter on my last visit and I think managed to score their one off-day in the kitchen! That presented a dilemma: ordering the same meal again seemed too narrow, but I was still keen to finally sample such a well-rated dish.

Compromise won the day, by going for a different type of broth dish. The duck broth wonton noodles comes as a steaming bowl of pork and prawn wontons in duck broth with choi sum (chinese cabbage), egg noodles and a side bowl of pickled green chillies.Although broth is water-based, when it's been well done - that is, started with quality ingredients and given time to cook properly - it gives the impression of being more of a soup, thick and rich with flavour. This duck broth had that quality and was not overly salty. The wontons looked like little comets, with 'ruffled' edges and long 'tails'. They were quite hefty and hard to miss (it's always nice to find an extra wonton at the bottom of the bowl!). As the chillies were served on the side the dish itself wasn't too hot, unlike other plates at the table, which came with sweat-inducing chilli levels. That reaction was probably exacerbated by our proximity to a powerful bar heater - concrete floors and plate glass windows do not a warm restaurant make, but no one wants to eat in a sauna.

One of the big talking points about Laksa Me when it opened was that it didn't have a wine list - owner Allen Woo insisted that beer was a better match for the type of food being served. And fair enough too, but from the presence of a wine list on our table it looks like enough diners didn't agree!

If a craving for any combination of chilli, soup or dumplings hits you while you're in the city, Laksa Me is handily placed, slightly south and east of centre, and offers high quality, well-priced 'modern Asian cuisine', filled with fresh ingredients rather than MSG.

www.laksame.com

Shanghai Village

112-4 Little Bourke St, CBD; (03) 9663 1878

The glory of yum cha is the chance to say to the waiter: 'I'll have that, and that, and that, and that...' and so on, giving one a feeling of decadence that lasts until the bill comes, when it is replaced by a feeling of satisfaction for wangling so much for so little. That satisfaction can veer close to smugness if, at Shanghai Village, you've also availed yourself of enough cups of free green tea from the communal urn at the front of the restaurant.

This restaurant suits the lackadaisical approach. The waitstaff are pretty casual - both in dress and attention to service. But that's OK because you know the food will be speedy and filling. While the dining area is hardly gawdy, the colours employed - on the bright pink feature wall or the disturbingly bright orange chopsticks - are certainly not casual.


The first dish to reach us was a chinese pancake.
It fared well with the addition of soy sauce. Looking a bit like a hollow omelet, and consisting of a very straightforward, fried batter, it served as a great raging-hunger-queller before we got into the meatier dishes.

There is no yum cha without pork buns, but this restaurant's offering are not the large sweet-doughed-savoury-filled variety. They're 'mini pork buns' and are more of a dumpling to be honest. The filling is quite respectable, but it's a shame not to have that unique casing, akin to a chewier, more floury meringue texture, to go with it.

Three spring rolls are suitably crisp, but their accompanying sauce - perhaps plum - is quite bland, and without a killer filling it leaves the dish as a bit rudimentary.
More exciting are the steamed beef dumplings. There's just so much meat and dough goodness on the plate! They are utterly impossible to eat with chopsticks: the dough slipping around and the globe of meat inside inevitably escaping to be eaten solo.

Overall the meal was entirely satisfying, particularly as we'd brought voracious appetites to the table. I left with a fairly voracious thirst however, which I doubt was entirely due to my liberal splashings of soy sauce, but rather to some heavy-handed salting in the kitchen.

Brunetti

194-204 Faraday St, Carlton; 03 9347 2801

First it was Stalactites, now Brunetti: I'm hitting the classic Melbourne destinations this week. The reasons have been a little different. With Stalactites, it was to introduce interstate friends to 24-hours-a-day-accessible Greek food in the city. With Brunetti, it was in order to find a cheap but varied lunch option, and to celebrate a friend's impending transition from Carltonian to Fitzroyite.

I hadn't previously investigated the savoury offerings from Brunetti. It is rather difficult to get past the pastry counter, after all. But venture further and you are rewarded with a stocked display case of piadinas, sfogliati and tramezzini. The filled sandwiches make no pretence to be anywhere other than the centre of Melbourne's Italian community: popular fillings include proscuitto, eggplant and parmesan.

The sfogliati are similar to the Greek spanakopita: pastry sandwiches. A spinach and cheese option is available, however I went with the melanzane, zucchini, mozzarella and feta ($8.80).The pastry isn't as flaky, or in as many layers, as on a spanakopita. The filling is simply delicious: each of the vegetables contributes strong flavour, so it has obviously been made with fresh ingredients. Cheese and pastry is always a wonderful combination and the mozzarella wraps everything in its gooey care and holds the whole together. The saltiness from the feta lingered a bit longer than I would have liked, though maybe only because I found it so enjoyable that I scoffed the whole slab.

www.brunetti.com.au

Lounge Bar

243 Swanston St, CBD; 03 9663 2916

Lounge is an excellent value stop-off in the middle of the city, particularly if you're after something other than noodles. Every day they offer a $10 lunch special, featuring a set dish and a glass of beer, wine or soft drink. During the week their lunch menu is augmented by various other $10 plates (sans drink).

Lounge is a well-integrated space, with the quirkily kitted-out bar and cafe downstairs - spherical drop lights weave through tree branches and 'flocked' isn't a strong enough adjective for the wallpaper - and a club upstairs. It also offers exhibition space and supports a record label and literary journal.

Our special of the day was a spicy beef salad.It came served on a mound of fresh and tangy vegetables, with olive tapenade dotted around the plate. It performed above expectation. For $10 I had no high hopes from the meat, but it was in fact quite tender and had been handled well to retain its tenderness in the warm salad. It was an amply sized serve as well.

SG's choice of chicken of chargrilled chicken breast didn't come off the specials menu.The serving was hefty, but the chicken meat was delicate. As if three chunks of chicken weren't enough, they rested upon a rosemary rosti. The carbohydrates were offset by a refreshing apple and avocado salsa. I agree, there are a lot of flavours going on here, but there are yet more to come. The white blob in the middle is a chorizo marscapone. It didn't compute for me on the menu, and it didn't blend well for me as a flavour combination either. That huge plate of meat, textures and taste experimentation was $17.50.

www.lounge.com.au

Land of Siam

121 Lygon St, Carlton; 03 9349 1999

It's always nice to go to Lygon St for something other than Italian. Land of Siam provides an authentic Asian taste experience and on this Thursday was buzzing with three separate Christmas party groups as well as a handful of dining duos.

The restaurant fitout draws strongly on stone: the walls are a dark grey, the floor is bare and with a large urn water feature there's almost a cave-like effect. A bigger effect of all those exposed hard surfaces, however, was a problematic noise level. Some wall hangings or other soft furnishings could go a long way to helping facilitate lunchtime conversation.

Lunch is fabulous value at Land of Siam. 15 or so dishes from their more extensive dinner menu are offered at the bargain price of $9.90 including jasmine rice. I was thrilled, as it meant I didn't have to limit myself to a noodle dish. Happily my dining partner opted nonetheless for the Pad Thai: the yardstick of Thai dining and the quickest way to determine restaurant quality.

In this case the verdict was better than average. The dish came liberally sprinkled with nuts and the peanut sauce was not too cloying. Most importantly there was some subtly of flavour - lime, tamarind and onion all came through.

My choice was the Wok Basil Beef, with snake beans, red capsicum, chilli-garlic puree and Thai basil sauce.

It was hot! Luckily I had a Singha beer to quench some of the heat. The chilli didn't overpower the dish, however, as all the ingredients had been well-prepared and made a contribution to the overall effect. There was ample sauce, its dark colour mirroring the aniseed flavour from the basil, the vegies were fresh and al dente and the beef was tender.

An excellent value, satisfying lunchtime meal.