New Hire: Ciara Woodside Is Turning St Kilda’s Hottest Wine Bar Into St Kilda’s Hottest Restaurant

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A venue is a dialogue, not a monologue. Owners make a statement by opening a place, then people come in, spend some time there and respond to it. If the owners are willing to listen to what their customers are telling them and answer accordingly, that’s how you can go from promising new spot to local favourite.

The people of St Kilda were telling The Walrus to start serving more food. And The Walrus heard them loud and clear.

The little wine and oyster bar, with its fun selection of wines and fastidious fixation on thoughtful touches and little details, decided to get serious about its food offering, bumping it up to co-star status with a new menu and a late-night offering. Owners Amy McGouldrick and Marty Webster enlisted New Zealand-born chef Ciara Woodside to lead the kitchen. Woodside trained in London before heading back to her home town, Wellington, to cook. Six years ago she crossed the ditch, working at Baia Di Vino in Sandringham before spending a few years at Rocco’s Bologna Discoteca in Fitzroy, including as its head chef.

We caught up with Woodside to hear about what she’s got in store for the menu, how to be creative in a crammed kitchen, and why you might want to make a late-night visit to The Walrus for a glass of wine and a Kiwi onion dip cheese toastie.

How long have you been at The Walrus, and what’s your official job title?

I started there casually in December last year. After leaving Rocco’s last May, I went travelling for about six months. I went to the Cook Islands, then Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. Once I got back, because I knew Marty from a previous job, I started working there casually – just one shift a week. And then I loved it so much I kind of begged them to let me stay on permanently. I’ve been head chef since January.

Whose idea was it to make the food a bigger part of the equation?

Initially we were a wine bar and an oyster bar, so it was just snacks. Last summer Marty and Amy started to notice how much food was being sold, and a lot more people were coming in for makeshift meals. A lot of people would come in for wine and oysters before dinner, but once they realised we had a food menu they started saying ‘Why don’t we just eat here?’

People would actually come in, then start eating and then cancel their plans to go somewhere else for dinner. We realised that we probably needed to put on some bigger options and expand the menu.

Was it a steady evolution or did it happen all at once?

Steady evolution. We changed the layout of the menu from it being set-in-stone snacks and pintxos – now we just have the wine menu and we reprint the food menu every day. There’s usually about four or five small snacks that we change every day or every two days. And then a couple of standard things that will usually stay on. We’ve probably doubled the size of the menu since January, I’d say.

Are some favourites from the old menu still available?

We still do our oyster pâté, which I make probably twice a week with different oyster types depending on what we’re delivered. I use some of the whole fish that I break down for other dishes in the pâté, too. As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing else like it in Melbourne.

What’s new that you’re excited about?

So a thing I’ve been doing recently is ika mata, a dish I learned about when I was in the Cook Islands. It’s kind of like a ceviche, but with coconut milk. We take some of whatever the whole fish we have from that week and do it with coconut milk, pickled onions, tomato and cucumber, with some nice crunchy bits on the side.

We’re still doing our uni pasta, and I’m making all our pastas in-house. We also usually have another pasta on, too. This week we had one with lemon myrtle and crayfish.

Because it’s a small venue, we don’t have an industrial kitchen – there’s no fancy technology, just induction and plug-in stovetops. I’ve had to get really creative, which is really fun. The constraint makes you so much more creative.

What about the new late-night menu?

We’re using some of my New Zealand-ness on the late-night menu. I did a Kiwi onion dip and cheese toastie, which was really good. We started doing the late nights because we heard from locals that there was nowhere to go nearby for a glass of wine after 10pm. So we’ve also got a few things to eat around that time, too.

Anything exciting coming up?

In winter I’m excited to get into heartier meals like bouillabaisse and maybe some lamb shanks. And I’m excited to pair more foods with wines. It’s a new step for me, having the front and back of house being connected so cohesively, working together to make things fun. In June we’ll be doing a five-course Italian lunch, paired with Italian wines. And I want to keep focusing on local producers and local foraging.

How have locals responded to the changes so far?

It’s been really great. Some nights over the last couple of months, on Fridays and Saturdays, it looks like a fully-fledged restaurant, not a wine bar – but it’s still definitely a great place to have just a glass of wine or a cocktail.

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