Melbourne Food Review: Il Posto Nostro, Hardware La, CBD

Nic and I ended up there for lunch one work day to catch up since I left my last work. We decided on Hardware Lane (Seriously, why would anyone decide on Hardware Lane if their intention is good food and good value? My bad.) because it was half way between our work places.

We went straight into a cosy dining space – which I suppose could be charming but for the fact that we ended way way too close to the next table when there are other seats in the restaurant, I’m not too sure that was the best go.

My personal rule of thumb: the space between the tables need to be proportional to the food price. This place unfortunately charged Hardware Lane price and gave us Chinatown space.

(Baked baby snapper with vegetables – $34?)

I’m Thai and Nic is Greek. So we naturally ordered seafood. We didn’t have too much more than an hour for lunch so we skipped out on entree. Good choice because food did take a while to arrive (I suppose cooking the whole fish would take a while. Bad choice, Nic!)

My second personal rule of thumb: if you are an Italian restaurant and you charge more than $20 for pasta at lunch, you need to serve bread. No bread here. We were asked repeatedly whether we wanted some garlic bread or bruschetta though.

Don’t get me wrong, both our dishes were lovely. My tagliatelle was good with lots of chunky fish and well seasoned, garlic and olive oil sauce and Nic’s fish and vegetables were perfectly cooked. But for lunch, it was way over-priced. You can get an equivalent food somewhere else in the city at lunch for much better value than this.

Il Nostro Posto
Address: 60 Hardware Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000
Phone: (03) 9670 9939