Natural History Public Bar is a great place for a night out. The food is delicious, the atmosphere is unique and you kind of feel like you’ve entered a bar in a different country.
There are some tasteful taxidermy animals in glass displays on one side of the bar.
Owner Scott mentioned the idea for the taxidermy was his son’s idea when they were watching night at the museum, which is cute.
It’s a large space, good for groups and after work dinner and drinks. On Thursdays and Fridays they have world renowned pianist Matt Ganim playing your requested songs which is a really fun night guaranteed. Good food, good wine and your favourite songs played on piano, what more could you want?
The summer tostada was a little crisp taco bowl filled with bbq eggplant, blackbean and corn salsa, summer radish and coriander. Flavoursome and fresh.
The mozzarella with Doncaster tomato, black olive crumb and basil was a good combination of flavours. I just love fresh mozzarella.
The cured salmon was sliced thinly and had a lovely flavour and was topped with sumac pickled, caper, sourcream and chives. It came with house baked sour cream and thyme crackers.
The spicy beef tartare was beautiful with cured egg yolk, fermented chilli, capers and crispy puffed tendon to eat it with. The puffed tendon was almost the texture of a big prawn cracker so the perfect vehicle to carry that beef.
All mixed up. Yum yum.
The wilderness beef flat iron was my favourite dish. The meat was super tender and perfectly pink. It had bone marrow butter melting over the top, a circle of jus and crunchy onion rings scattered around the plate. This came with three spoons of mustard: American, Wholegrain seeded and Dijon. We ate this with the crispy herb roasted potatoes which were excellent.
The buttermilk rotisserie chicken was tender and moist and served with roasted vine tomatoes, chorizo and sherry vinegar. Yum. We had this with the Somerset heritage leaf salad which had bitter leaves that complimented the meats well.
I definitely recommend to visit on a Thursday or Friday so you can enjoy listening to Matt Ganim sing and play the piano. You can request your fave songs and it’s quite remarkable that that he can play so many different songs on demand. He’s an excellent talent and we had a memorable night with everyone sitting around the piano, requesting songs, drinking bottles of red wine and singing along to the songs after our delicious feed. Such a great night out. Put it on the list.
I heart Natural History Public Bar!
Olives x
Natural History Public Bar
Address: 401 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000
Website: https://www.naturalhistorypublicbar.com
Phone: (03) 9982 1811
Trading Hours: Mon-Fri: 7.30am-11pm, Sat-Sun: closed
