Bella Vedere - Yarra Valley

So I have been away for a while... Since moving to Canberra I haven't been excited to eat out and photograph food as much as I had in Sydney. There are some great places in Canberra, but there are a lot more places that aren't great as well.. It is also so much more expensive to eat out here than Sydney as well, which means I have been cooking a lot more than going out.

So my blog now will probably have more entries of my cooking than my eating out. So lets see how we go this time!

Firstly I will take you back to a couple of months ago when Frankie and I went on a week's trip to the Yarra Valley. I had never been there before, so wasn't sure which place to book for a nice dinner. I had a booking at Mt Rael, but they were doing some renovations so I had to change our venue. So I looked at what had Chef's hats in the region and Bella Vedere was close to where we were staying and had some good reviews, so I booked us in there.

They have an a la carte menu, but on Friday and Saturday nights they have a set menu of 5 courses for $95. Everyone is asked to be seated by 7:30pm so they can get everyone's drinks underway in preparation for the announcement of the menu!

Tonight's menu is heavily based on cheese and ends up being too rich for me in the end and didn't get to try the dessert. We also got matching wines with each course, and they give you very full glasses!!

We started off with an amuse bouche of risotto balls. Can't remember exactly what was in it besides rice and cheese, but it was very tasty.


This was a smoked trout soup which had a quinelle of marscapone or some type of cheese. This was so beautiful. Although the serving bowls weren't the easiest to eat soup out of being wide and shallow.

The second course was a three cheese risotto with a hazelnut and rocket salad. The risotto was cooked perfectly and very satisfying. I shouldn't have eaten all of it, maybe then I could have fit in a bit of dessert...


Next up was slow cooked lamb. I think it was cooked for 24 hours or something and then rested it by the open fire. It was so good. I love roasted lamb and this was melt in your mouth. I would have preferred a bit more salad though..

The final savoury dish of the evening was a grapefruit, mandarin, Persian feta and hazelnuts. This was a combination I hadn't had before, but it all worked so well together. I was doing well up until this point and then I had a bit more of the feta and it just pushed me over the edge.

The dessert was a bombe alaska type dessert and when they brought the dessert to the table, they poured over some type of liqueur and lit it up. It was very cool.

All the wines were from around the region and were perfectly matched. We hadn't done much wine tasting yet, so it was good to get a taste of the wines before we tried to visit every winery in the yarra valley!

Frankie

Me

Bella Vedere Cucina
Badgers Brook Estate
874 Maroondah Highway
Coldstream VIC

Ph: 03 5962 6161

Breakfast and Lunch served Wed - Sun from 8:30am
Dinner Friday and Saturday from 7:30pm