First Look: Fitzroy’s El Columpio Opens a Seaside Kiosk

This week’s we’re adding El Columpio St Kilda to The Hot List , the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences.

Ricardo Garcia Flores’s restaurant El Columpio in Fitzroy serves some of Melbourne’s best Mexican food. On Friday, he opened a second location in the former Claw & Tail beachside kiosk at South Beach Reserve in St Kilda.

Growing up in landlocked Mexico City, Garcia Flores’s trips to the coast were infrequent. Most of his exposure to seafood came from Mexico City’s restaurants, serving their own takes on the dishes they’d find in ports and resort towns such as Veracruz and Acapulco.

On a recent trip home, Flores says the city was in the middle of a mariscos craze – particularly Sinaloan style (“marisco” literally means shellfish, but it’s used to describe all seafood).
Buoyed by the seafood success he saw, and the public’s willingness to shell out for it, Garcia Flores had the seed of his next venture. After winning the lease to operate in the beachside St Kilda kiosk, El Columpio’s oceanic offshoot was ready.

Some of El Columpio’s best-known dishes include steak for breakfast and pozole (a Mexican soup). But only a handful of bestsellers, like the suadero beef brisket tacos, have come down from the Fitzroy mothership.

The takeaway-focused El Columpio St Kilda is all about seafood. There’s the torre de mariscos seafood tower, which sees a mix of cooked and raw seafood combined with piquin and chiltepin chillies, arrive in a steel tube that’s removed tableside – like the dramatic first unveiling of a fresh game of Jenga. The mar y tierra (sea and land) taco combines porterhouse steak with prawns on a taco loaded with Oaxacan cheese.

The burrito stars beans cooked in Garcia Flores’s lard – which he says has been cooking continuously for over 18 months – as well as a flour tortilla and fresh totopos (tortilla chips). There’ll be plenty of filling options, but seafood including fish and calamari will be a big focus.

It would have been easy to just copy-paste El Columpio from Fitzroy to St Kilda. But rather than repeat himself, Garcia Flores has set himself a much greater challenge.

“I consider El Columpio a present to Melbourne – the opportunity to try all the things that are hot in Mexico,” he says. “I could have copied Columpio from Fitzroy and put it in St Kilda, but that’s not my plan.
“If I have the opportunity to do a different concept, I want to show that to the people.”

The Hot List is proudly sponsored by Square.

El Columpio St Kilda
20 Jacka Boulevard, St Kilda
No phone

Hours:
Wed to Fri midday–9pm
Sat & Sun 10am–9pm

elcolumpio.com
@elcolumpiomelbourne