“This isn’t a French restaurant,” Chris Lucas insists of Maison Batard, the four-storey Bourke Street venue he’s opening next Tuesday November 26. “I’m a Melbourne restaurateur. I’m not a French restaurateur. It has been important to me to take the history of the site and the Australian sensibility and then overlay it with that beautiful French joie de vivre.”
Inspired largely by Montmartre’s Hotel Particulier, the maison has a different concept on every floor – Restaurant Batard, Le Salon, rooftop spot Le Terrace and basement-level Le Club – each with its own character.
When Lucas started working on Maison Batard, it was supposed to be a small wine bar on the corner of Bourke Street and Windsor Place. But when the adjoining building, which housed The Italian Society restaurant from 1932 to 2016, became available during Covid, Lucas snapped it up and the house grew.
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SIGN UPMaison Batard, in the form it will open next week, took “eight years of hard work, but a lifetime of dreaming,” Lucas, the larger-than-life restaurateur behind flashy venues Society, Yakimono and Grill Americano, tells Broadsheet.
Designing Maison Batard was personal for Lucas and his wife, creative consultant Sarah Lucas, who sourced pieces from their travels abroad.
Their flair for grand restaurant design and decor is evident throughout the venue. In the basement Le Club (due to open on New Year’s Eve), you’ll find red velvet curtains, a baby grand piano and a stage for cabaret. On the first floor, the centrepiece of Le Salon is a Milanese chandelier that took three years to restore. Works by feminist Parisian conceptual artist Claire Fontaine are dotted throughout the venue.
Restaurant Batard, which covers the ground and first floors of the site, exudes French bistro charm with its oyster bar, curved open kitchen and Parisian smoked mirrors. Anyone sitting in the dining room can witness the organised chaos of the kitchen, where ducks and chickens turn hypnotically on rotisseries and hanger steaks are seared on the jospers.
Green beans, cheese soufflé, veal escalopes, côte du boeuf with bordelaise sauce and other recognisable French dishes fill the menu. But the team has gone to great lengths to point out that the dishes do not adhere strictly to tradition – heavy cream and butter are replaced with oil where possible. With the welcome exception of the baskets of house-made bread, served with mini cigars of La Conviette butter from Charentes-Poitou.
“The lightened-up approach has always been my philosophy from working in Michelin restaurants in Denmark – very clean, flavourful and produce-driven,” executive chef Adam Sanderson (Ten Minutes by Tractor, The Fat Duck) tells Broadsheet.
Michaela Kang, the pastry chef responsible for Grill Americano’s viral tiramisu, puts up four desserts including the fruits rouges, which will only be on the menu for a hot minute while berries are at their best, vanilla flan (Lucas’s “number one food in the world”), and a chocolate mousse with Flake-like shards of chocolate and fresh cream that’s scooped and served tableside.
The most surprising space is Le Terrace, a breezy rooftop with an atrium at its centre. Though you could easily imagine Sinatra and string quartets filling the space, DJ sets and electronic music aimed at a younger crowd will be the vibe here.
Maison Batard’s name reflects Lucas’s reverence for wine, particularly white burgundy and wine from his favourite vineyard, Batard Montrachet. The 2600-strong collection is overseen by head of wine, Loic Avril. The list features French and Australian wines, with over 200 wines by the glass, including French small producers exclusive to Batard. “You will not find these wines anywhere else in Australian restaurants,” says Avril.
Maison Batard
23 Bourke Street, Melbourne
(03) 8616 7905
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Mon to Sun midday–late
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