Bar Spontana – Introduction

Bar Spontana is a wonderful restaurant hiden away behind the main drag of Sydney Road in Brunswick. The Thai chefs are highly skilled in this complex cuisine and the waiting staff here are anxious for everyone to have a good time both as a result of choosing the right dishes and also in choosing the right wines to match to the food.

We have been to Thailand many times and enjoyed the range of food styles in Bangkok on the streets and in the restaurants. We have also been influenced by the excellent food highlighted in Sydney by chef David Thompson both when he opened Daley Street Thai.

When we first arrived at Darley Street Thai restaurant a few weeks after it had opened in an unprepossessing hotel in a Sydney suburb we knew immediately that we were at the beginning of something special.

Here, there were no major compromises for Australian palates. You ate food as it was served in Thailand or not at all.

We had been lucky enough to work in Sydney for three or four years in the nineteen nineties and his Sailor’s Thai Canteen became our canteen.

Every week, on arriving in Sydney, we would make the Canteen our first dinner stop. We would love the sensation of walking through the door of the building in the Rocks and seeing the array of happy diners at the long, gleaming stainless steel table that stretched the length of the restaurant. A seat would soon be found for us and we would then happily peruse the menu to see what corners of Thai cuisine were being explored that week.

When we sat and perused the menu at Bar Spontana we had a similar feeling. Many of the dishes that we saw here reminded us of similar dishes we have tried in Bangkok over the years so we were anxious to try as many as possible.

It is sometimes difficult choosing wine to drink with Thai food, but the selection here is carefully considered. There werea number of wines that we would have been comfortable drinking with such spicy food (including some we import), but we spied a wine we like and we thought would stand up to the food, namely a Savagnin from Borachio wines which is owned and operated by Alicia Basa and Mark Warner. They don’t add any preservative to their wines or anything else for that matter!

The bottle is also quite noticeable!

Now to the food.

We started with a couple of smaller dishes including a tasty watermelon salad as shown in the photo below.

Another salad consisted of rice and pork with various accompaniments such as onion and peanuts and cucumber as seen below.

A simpler dish of beautiful scallops came next. This was beautifully done and the flavour was intense.

The main dish that we ordered or the one that corresponded closest to a Western main course was the appropriately named “fish in the garden”. A spectacular deep fried fish that had been wrapped around a mound of vegetables.

The options for larger dishes are shown on the menu segment below:

As you can see above it was a difficult choice as we really wanted each of these dishes, but had no chance of eating more than the Pla Lui Suan. You can see the dish in the photo below.

You can check the opening hours for any changes on the Spontana Web site here.

We have included this venue in our story about where we eat in Melbourne here.