A French-accented all-day wine bar with great service, grape-friendly food and an outdoor seating area with some of the best people-watching opportunities in town.
Anyone needing a little European style in their life should hot-foot it to Hardware Lane and try for a seat at one of Kirk’s Wine Bar’s outdoor tables. It’s not just the classic woven French café chairs and round pedestal tables lined up under an awning that will give you Paris flashbacks. It’s also the prime position, a brick-paved, pedestrian-only laneway that delivers some of the best people-watching opportunities in town. If the weather acts up, Kirk’s continues the theme inside. The timber-floored space is decorated with wine bottles and art and has a small curved bar with a backdrop of green tiles where the daily food and wine specials are scribbled.
The service adds to the Euro atmosphere. It’s efficient, low-key and measured, even on busy nights when the place fills up with punters ordering French cider, local craft beers on tap, Aperol Spritzes or perhaps a bottle of German riesling to match with excellent cheese, plates of cured meats, a porterhouse steak and fries or a quivering, top-notch crème brûlée. It’s the sort of place you don’t mind dropping a little extra for that special bottle of vintage Champagne – Kirk’s has already saved you the cost of a long-haul flight.
Kirk’s ebbs and flows with the beat of city life. At weekday lunchtimes and in the early evenings it fills with a well-dressed business crowd, but between those rush hours you’ll find a regular stream of tourists, city dwellers and students refueling on coffee and cannoli or getting the evening started with some spiced roasted nuts teamed with a gin and tonic or Victorian vermouth. When it comes to food and drinks, the mood here is set to comfort and familiarity, so don’t be surprised if an after-work drink turns into dinner as you spot a plate of pea and ricotta tortelloni or salt-and-pepper calamari being delivered to a neighbouring table and decide you want what they’re having. It’s all about flexibility, so go ahead and choose your own adventure.
Chef Ian Curley has been resident at wine-focused Melbourne stalwarts such as City Wine Shop and The European for many years and now brings that experience and expertise to Kirk’s. The menu reads like a bistro greatest-hits list with the likes of steak tartare, fries with aïoli, gnocchi with pecorino cheese, wine-soused mussels in moules marinières, and cured kingfish all making the grade. The daily specials written in white marker on the green tiles behind the bar are always worth checking out. There might be a hanger steak, say, or fried zucchini flowers filled with goat’s cheese. That’s where you’ll also find the cheese list, wine specials and a cocktail or two, mostly in Spritz mode.
