Alejandro Saravia’s Morena Has Closed, Making Way for a New Farmer’s Daughters Wine Bar

Chef Alejandro Saravia closed his Little Collins Street Latin American restaurant Morena last week after just over a year of trade. But Saravia insists it’s not goodbye. “We decided to look for another house for Morena, another venue,” he tells Broadsheet. Sibling venue Barra , a casual cantina-style venue at 73 Little Collins Street, will remain open.

Saravia, who is also behind Farmer’s Daughters and Victoria by Farmer’s Daughters at Fed Square, is flipping the former Morena space into Wine House, a new bar and bottle shop that will sit under the Farmer’s Daughters umbrella.

At Wine House, the team, led by sommelier Stephen Amman, will open up the Farmer’s Daughters cellar, which has been built up over the past three years.

“We have beautiful and very interesting wines from Victoria. There are museum wines, but also small producers that usually don’t reach the bottle shop shelves – not even bottle shop boutiques – because of the small allocations that they have, or because they focus on delivering to restaurants,” Saravia says.

In keeping with the ethos of the other Farmer’s Daughters venues, which showcase the best food and drink from Gippsland and across the state, Saravia says the wine list will be 95 per cent Victorian. A short section of the list will also highlight what members of the Wine House team and local winemakers such as William Downie and Patrick Sullivan are drinking at the moment. That’s where it might branch out to include glasses and bottles from the rest of Australia and the world.

The largely snacky menu will be made up of mostly new dishes, but will include a few Farmer’s Daughters favourites such as the terrine with preserved figs. There’ll be oysters, a selection of cheese and some more substantial dishes, including a charcoal chicken with spring onion hollandaise and Lakes Entrance fish served in a mussel sauce.

On Thursdays, there’ll be a $25 lunchtime burger and on Fridays, a changing $25 counter meal which could be a minute steak or chicken parma.

Wine House is expected to open at 71 Little Collins Street, Melbourne on Wednesday October 15.

www.farmersdaughters.com.au/wine-house