Gallery: Broadsheet’s One-Off Dinner With Christine Manfield and Melissa Leong at Hopper Joint

When Hopper Joint opened in March, restaurateur Jason Jones promised it would be “a party every night”. And on Wednesday November 20, Broadsheet crashed the party and took over as party hosts, inviting legendary chef Christine Manfield into the kitchen for a one-night-only dinner hosted by food critic and TV regular Melissa Leong and Cat Amongst the Pigeons.

Manfield was a pioneer of the border-hopping style that came to define Australian dining in the ’90s – and she was once an important mentor to Leong. “Christine Manfield is a trailblazer, no two ways about it,” Leong told Broadsheet last month. “She put South Asian spice on a whole new level back in the day, celebrating ancient, diverse and nuanced flavours that the dining scene had in many ways overlooked.”

Jones opened Hopper Joint with interior designer Brahman Perera earlier this year, diagonally across the street from the couple’s French restaurant Entrecote. Inspired by co-owner Perera’s Sri Lankan family meals, the convivial space typically turns out pan rolls and hoppers with curries and sambols by head chef Ronith Arlikatti.

Leong masterminded the collaboration between Manfield and Arlikatti, encouraging the old-guard chef to venture into the exciting new Greville Street kitchen. The result is a “truly integrative collaboration” celebrating the best of South Asian cuisine, enlivened with Cat Amongst the Pigeons’s Fat Cat range.

With help from his mother, Perera welcomed guests with bindis and encouraged everybody to make the most of the communal sink because food “just tastes better” eaten with your hands.

A welcome speech by Leong kicked off the night, introducing the first round of snacks: pan rolls filled with curried beef brisket and tomato chutney; crab on idli toast topped with spanner crab sambol and Yarra Valley salmon roe; and barbequed jackfruit cutlets with green pol sambol, coriander and mint chutney, plus pickled chillies. A glass of Cat Amongst the Pigeons riesling cut through, rounding off the first course.

For the entree, a Spencer Gulf kingfish crudo with nectarine acharu and curry leaf kosho and fennel thoran and curry leaf oil was matched with Fat Cat Rosé.

The main event featured a hopper set with capretto Jaffna, a spicy goat curry made with milk-raised kid goats donated by Meredith Dairy; a mild heirloom cucumber curry; pol sambol and seeni sambol; and tamarind eggplant. Guests selected their preference between Cat Amongst the Pigeons’s Fat Cat Chardonnay or Grenache-Shiraz- Mataro. Leong returned to the microphone, this time with Perera’s mother, to talk about the history of hoppers and how best to eat them (with no cutlery, of course).

And before dessert, Manfield and house chef Ronith Arlikatti participated in a Q&A before introducing their closing act: a coconut blancmange topped with mango and cashews. The creamy, cooling dessert rounded off the spice-forward menu, with Sparkling Chardonnay Pinot Noir bringing it to a fruity finish.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Cat Amongst the Pigeons.