Confucious say girl who spend morning lugging barrister's briefs up Collins St deserveth a hearty lunch. And since the best way to fill a cold tum is with soup and the heartiest soup is minestrone, what was I to do but obey the universal forces of logic and head to Pellegrinis.
I first went to Pellegrinis with my mother as a child on a daytrip to Melbourne. I wasn't normally allowed coffee but she allowed me a sip of her cafe latte this particular day accompanied with the solemn utterance: "this is what good coffee should taste like".
Yesterday, I wiggled myself onto a stool at the crowded bar, between a bearded man dribbling ragout on a Supreme Court transcript and a little girl slurping a granita. My order was hollered to the kitchen and within two minutes, my soup arrived.
My face fell in disappointment. The parmesan looked like supermarket sawdust, the soup was a dull brown and not the vivid tomato and bacon picture in my head, and it contained both pasta and rice which made me immediately think of my own efforts to pad out sharehouse meals.
But appearances are deceiving. The cheese tasted like the gutsiest reggiano. The pasta and rice were imbued with the flavoursome broth which tasted as though it had been slow-cooked with bacon bones or a ham hock. There were less beans and vegies than my version, but the soup itself had a meaty complexity that mine definitely lacks.
An excellent espresso finished off a perfect lunch (albeit waking me up to the fact that the afternoon was likely to be spent carting another pile of briefs back down the hill - sigh . . . eighteen months until I finish this damned degree!)
Pellegrinis, Bourke St, Melbourne VIC 3000.
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