My dinner companion and I meet in the damp concrete passageway that runs beside and behind a suburban corner store. We’re opposite the street from the blonde brick vat that is Melbourne’s 3RRR radio studio and there’s more than a little of the teenage drug deal aesthetic about the way Jess and I stand in front of a locked back door, sure we’ve followed the directions but not confident we’re in the right place, awkward and clutching our handbags. Seven o’clock, we were told – and exactly on seven the door swings open and a black-clad, red-haired girl welcomes us inside.
I am still partly expecting to spend the next hour waiting on a rotting couch for someone called Johnno, Fred Flintstone or the King to show up “with the gear” but instead we’re led into a cream room, warm with low light, where smooth timber booths, tables and chairs ache with suburban 1950s Danish minimalism. Jess and I sit down and the redhead proffers a drinks menu while a crowd that definitely wasn’t in the passageway earlier pours through the door and fills every seat.
This, friends, is how Melbourne does dinner. Except, it’s also not quite dinner – unless dinner is a four-course meal made almost entirely of sugar, soft fats and tea.
Jess and I and the sudden crowd are visiting the temporary East Brunswick home of a pop-up dessert palace. Our near-secret, low-light dining experience is the creation of chef Pierre Roelofs, who has spent seven years inventing sweet treats for the sugar inclined.
Testament to his restless creativity is that his fascination with dessert experimentation is approaching an end. “Dessert evenings with Pierre Roelofs” may always sell out but Jess and I are attending one of the final few sittings before the pop-up closes in December and Pierre himself pops off to do (the waitress tells me) “something else”.
Jess and I commit to savouring the experience. The appeal of a tasting menu consisting entirely of surprise desserts somewhat exceeds that of an ordinary sweet tooth – we have mouths full of them and think of ourselves more as “sucrosiers” than mere aspirants to late-life type 2 diabetes. The chef, of course, knows us better than we do; the drinks menu consists of teas and juices that complement the syrups, puddings and caramels to come.
I note the only accompaniment to tea is soy or almond milk. No squeezed cow? No; tonight in hipster East Brunswick the chef has erred on the side of bolder vegetarianism. I order a soy milk chai that’s so sweet and fresh it doesn’t need honey – but I add some anyway because I’m in a dessert restaurant. It’s delicious.
Our first course is delicious too and it arrives in a plastic tube next to a glass of warm water. This is Roelofs’ answer to the question: what would it be like to drink a lamington? He’s deconstructed the quintessential Australian cake to its component parts; the tube contains cakey crumbs, coconut gel and raspberry jus with a chocolate end that you soak for four seconds in hot water to melt before inhaling the whole thing like a choc-coconut-flavoured lover you haven’t seen in six months. It lasts less than second, yet the body hums with remembered pleasure for minutes. Jess and I agree: we should like to eat 10.
Second course is something like a salad, only that it’s a jumble of a more saccharine kind: pieces of watermelon jostle with tiny balsamic meringues, candied nuts, millet and orange crumble. It washes the lingering chocolate, chai and honey from my mouth so the next course – a mango foam pudding – works entirely on its own terms.
This third dessert is a progression of summer flavours from childhood. Fresh mango sinks into lemon curd and yoghurt and the effect is like wallowing in holiday twilight.
I’m in a sugar reverie when the final dessert is served: a deconstructed cheesecake. “It’s inspired by the work of this weaver – and New York,” explains the waitress, pointing to a textile artwork on the wall. Of course it is. Still, every morsel of biscuit, strawberry crumble and jelly that I swallow makes me think of Melbourne and its culture of casual pop-ups, careless food and fashion trends, and its city-wide, playful appreciation of the most precious, fleeting pleasures.
There’s little ceremony once our plates are cleared: we’re ushered out of the room and back into the passageway with strawberry still on our lips. The meal is over and soon the restaurant will disappear as well. But the chef knows – oh, how he knows – that we will always remember it.
• Dessert evenings with Pierre Roelofs are running at Milkwood Cafe in East Brunswick until 30 December
