Coastal cool: Milk Beach Soho
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Chief among my questionable life choices while at university — which include the house share with a hole cut in the toilet door and a little sparkly earring — was the period when my friends and I became mildly obsessed with Outback Steakhouse. For the uninitiated, this was a strange, vaguely Antipodean US restaurant chain that emerged amid the post-Crocodile Dundee, boganmania of the late Eighties and burned briefly in a handful of glamorous outer London locations (Basildon, Romford, Staines) before ceasing UK operations in 2011. My main memories are of oddly mealy steak, the ‘Bloomin’ Onion’, and the kind of semi-offensive, flamin’ galah theming that made Walkabout look nuanced.
I say all this not just to exorcise the memory of that earring, but to note how far the popular notion of an ‘Australian restaurant’ has come. Where once, internationally at least, that phrase might have conjured cork-hatted cliche and ‘roo-burgers’, now it is synonymous with atmospheric cool, relaxed but fanatically passionate service, and food with a specific streak of brunch-adjacent vibrancy and ambition.
