Solve the Mystery to Leave Your Table at Australia’s First Escape Room Restaurant, in Northcote

My mum is examining our dinner for clues. My sister is convinced she’s cracked the puzzle. I’m convinced she hasn’t. None of us really knows what we’re doing. This is our first escape room together and, frankly, we’re a nightmare.

Luckily, this isn’t a conventional escape room. At Frida Crouton’s Final Course, a new interactive dining experience from couple Owen Spear and Bec DiNapoli, solving puzzles and eating dinner happen simultaneously.

The premise is delightfully absurd: wealthy chef Frida Crouton has died, and across three courses we need to solve a series of puzzles to determine our share of her fictional fortune. The character is inspired by Spear’s mum, a passionate home cook and puzzle enthusiast who let him build Australia’s first escape room in her Flemington backyard.

Dinner begins with a charcuterie board – cured meats, cheeses and bread – except nothing arriving at the table can be taken entirely at face value. We’re pulling things apart, turning them over and inspecting what would ordinarily be eaten without a second thought. Later, potato skins become the subject of intense scrutiny. By the time dessert arrives, we’ve learnt our lesson: eat, certainly, but investigate first.

It turns dinner into something tactile and slightly ridiculous. At various points we’re eating, searching, debating and accusing each other of completely misunderstanding what is in front of us – sometimes all at once.

The idea came to Spear – a psychologist who brought the escape-room concept to Melbourne from Budapest in 2013, along with then-partner Ali Cheetham – after watching 2022 foodie horror-comedy The Menu. (He was specifically inspired, he tells me, by the film’s infamous second course, the breadless bread plate.) “I thought, ‘Why don’t more dining experiences do something extra?’” he says. A couple of months later came the realisation: “Hang on, I design escape rooms.” It took around three years to turn that thought into something people could actually eat.

Working alongside DiNapoli, an architect, Spear developed an experience that explicitly avoids screen-based interactions. Instead, almost everything is tactile, handmade and pleasingly weird. “There’s something more wholesome and fulfilling and connecting about really hands-on, no digital stuff,” Spear says.

The food itself comes from Northcote cafe Poke the Bear, which hosts the weekend escape room on Friday and Saturday nights. The chefs have worked the cafe’s offering – a smashed beef burger on a milk bun, tacos with tempura-battered hoki – into the experience, which is $139 per person for teams of three to eight people, or $159 a head for pairs. Spear’s original brief was surprisingly loose: “I need a charcuterie board with some weird bread and weird cheese,” followed by four dishes and ice-cream. The food needed to accommodate the game and any dietary requirements, and, importantly, still function as dinner.

There’s only one sitting each evening. Nobody is hovering nearby waiting to turn your table while you desperately attempt to decipher a potato. You can eat, drink and, in my case, spend an unreasonable amount of time arguing with your sister about an answer she’s absolutely certain is correct. That slower pace speaks to what Spear has always liked about escape rooms: getting people out of the house and doing something together. His rooms aren’t designed around competition. “We want everyone to win. We want everyone to feel good,” he says.

He initially worried that combining dining and escape rooms might appeal only to people who really loved both – a target audience of, as he puts it, “87 people in Melbourne”. Instead, it’s booked up for weeks ahead. And somehow, despite my family’s chaotic debut, we made it through Frida’s final course, too. Although I’m still not admitting my sister was right.

Frida Crouton’s Final Course

2A Mitchell Street, Northcote

Hours:

6pm–late 

escaperoom.com.au

@escaperoommelbourne