Pre-Covid, restaurant reinventions were often a sign that a business was in struggle town. However, in today’s new normal, they speak more to survival and resourcefulness than a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant.
Case in point: Collingwood’s Mono-XO. In the beforetimes, it was dark and neon and served food on sticks. Today, it’s much brighter and more restaurant-y – although owner-operator Sam Stafford, who renovated the space himself over successive lockdowns, doesn’t like pigeonholes.
“I consider [the venue] to be evolving, it’ll never be ‘finished’,” he says, adamant that Mono-XO isn’t a Japanese restaurant despite the Japanese-leaning menu (“I reckon the actual Japanese restaurant around the corner would have a problem with that,” he says). It’s not a wine bar either, despite the long list of natural-ish wines. Fair enough. What even is a “restaurant” these days?
Post-refurb, the walls are “painfully white”, so named because they’re annoying to clean, and the plates and stemware have been upgraded, but the original “do as you please” ethos remains. Stafford, who worked back-of-house in Sydney at Momofuku Seiobo and Nomad, and more recently in West Melbourne at Clever Polly’s, says with 20 seats and two staff members there’s plenty of flexibility. “Be loud, talk to the other tables... we don’t care.”
The revised menu is focused on larger share-style plates, although a couple of classics remain, namely the pork jowl skewer and the katsu scallop sando. “I’d say we sell one, maybe two of those for every guest who comes in the door,” Stafford says. “Australians love anything between two slices of white bread.”
Korean, European and Middle Eastern touches sit alongside the aforementioned Japanese influence. A spanner crab curry, made with S&B curry powder, is paired with dauphin potato – "fancy hash browns" – and dusted with powdered kimchi. There’s harissa paste in the thousand island dressing and an American green goddess dressing on the corn. “I’m not going to say this is an ‘authentic’ version of anything,” Stafford says. “That’s not my story to tell.”