Your retro favourites are back on the menu (and here’s where to find them)

Dining at the top of a skyscraper, in one of the city’s most expensive restaurants, you’d expect to eat lobster, caviar, foie gras. A hot jam doughnut? Not so much.

But that’s one of three desserts that Vue de Monde, perhaps Melbourne’s best-known fine diner, serves as part of its $360 tasting menu, and it’s inspired by the Queen Victoria Market doughnut van. It’s one of the boldest statements – but certainly not the only one – that nostalgia is the most sought-after flavour among diners today.

At Glory-Us cafe’s two locations in Fitzroy North and Strathmore, a chip butty is stacked high with fries and spread with butter and homemade HP sauce. Goldy’s pub in Collingwood and South Melbourne brewery Pirate Life both serve a take on a Chiko roll. Goldy’s incorporates savoury mince and creamed corn, while Pirate Life uses braised goat and salted cabbage. And at Argentinian grill restaurant, Asado in Southbank, the menu is flipping to an Australian theme for a day next month. Tickets for the six-course lunch sold out in 48 hours.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty with the economy at the moment,” says Victor Liong, chef at Lee Ho Fook, another upscale restaurant in the city that’s looking to the past, in its case through prawn toast.

“In these kinds of times people look towards things that are comforting. Classic cooking is one of the things that people hold on to.”

Lee Ho Fook casts the suburban staple of prawn toast in a new, albeit far more luxurious, light by adding raw seafood as a garnish to crisp rectangles of white bread smeared with prawn mousse. It’s so popular, Liong had to make an emergency dash to a fish shop on Monday night because he’d run out of ingredients.

“Prawn toast is very relatable to people, and it’s relevant in an Australian Chinese [restaurant] context,” says Liong.

Updating the dish, he says, “still gives us an opportunity to be creative and do it in our style”.

Prawn toast joins soft serve, potato cakes, cream buns and more old-school dishes getting a contemporary makeover, as chefs give people food that will tug at their heartstrings, as well as appeal to their tastebuds.

“What’s happening right now with economic uncertainty and a lot of global uncertainty is that we seek comfort via familiarity,” says Dr Meg Elkins, a behavioural economist in RMIT’s School of Economics, Finance and Marketing.

Research shows strong links between nostalgia and food, Elkins says, because food is so sensory and this triggers memories of people and places.

“Both my business partner and I ate chip butties regularly growing up, every time we had fish and chips,” says Glory-Us co-owner Tori Bicknell. “It’s a given we want it on our menu.”

In the years after the GFC, Melbourne menus were filled with mac and cheese, banana fritters, Country Women’s Association-like cakes and spiders, all put through a 21st-century lens where ingredient quality and provenance are paramount.

“When we return to comfort in times of uncertainty, that’s called the nostalgia bias,” says Elkins.

“To some degree, it’s about social identity and belonging,”

Right now, there’s a strong Australiana thread running through the nostalgic food chefs are celebrating, perhaps a sign of our country’s recently discovered pride in First Nations ingredients and even more recent culinary history, regardless of daggy labels.

As Elkins points out, things like Chiko rolls and prawn toast are associated with “fun and life not being complicated”.

The food that triggers feelings of nostalgia varies from person to person and culture to culture. But that hasn’t stopped Colombian-born chef Camilo Guzman from creating updated versions of beloved Australian snacks, like the dim sim. In fact, it’s made his dishes more interesting.

The emu dim sim that he’ll serve at Asado restaurant’s special Australiana event in May combines two street-foods from two different cultures.

A dim sim, he says, “is just a filled, fried pastry…that you can only find in Australia. But it’s very similar to a street-food of Latin America: you find empanadas on nearly every corner in every city.”

Dessert – a lamington with strawberry consomme – is another double-whammy of nostalgia, depending on where you grew up. For Guzman, it reminds him of a packaged ice-cream served in Colombia around Halloween that was named after Count Dracula because it had strawberry jam oozing out of vanilla ice-cream.

With nostalgic food looking so different for different people, the only thing that’s certain is that restaurants have plenty more dishes up their sleeve.

Five old-but-new bites of nostalgia to try

Hashbrowns and potato cakes

Fried spuds get a glow-up at Wally’s wine bar (Albert Park), where hashbrowns come topped with cured bonito fish, and at the Sporting Club Hotel (Brunswick), where smoked trout is the fancy finish. Potato cakes are powering snack time at Saint George (St Kilda), Kirk’s Wine Bar (Melbourne) and Stokehouse (St Kilda). If you like your carbs with a side of carbs, get yourself to Glory-Us cafe (Fitzroy North, Stanmore) for a chip butty that’s dense with pencils of fried potato.

Sundaes or soft serve

Swirly, creamy bowls of soft serve cap off dinner at restaurants including Rocco’s Bologna Discoteca (Fitzroy) and Di Stasio (Carlton and CBD). Rocco’s regularly changing flavours have included Iced Vovo for an extra dose of the good old days. Step it up to a sundae at Johnny’s Green Room (Carlton), featuring strawberry and pepper granita along with the usual ice-cream and fudge sauce.

Prawn toast

An Aussie Chinese favourite gets a new lease on life at Lee Ho Fook (Melbourne), where it’s topped with either raw sea urchin or ama ebi, a premium type of prawn. Yugen Dining (St Kilda) combines the filling with China’s own bready treat, youtiao (long cylindrical doughnuts), for a visually stunning result. Try a Spanish twist at MoVida Aqui (Melbourne), where the toast is topped with a gentle chilli sauce from the Basque region, or the version at Peruvian-Chinese restaurant Casa Chino (Brunswick).

Chiko rolls

The snack of choice in Puberty Blues gets a glow-up at Goldy’s pub (Collingwood) where it comes with its own Goldy Roll wrapper; Pirate Life’s beer hall (South Melbourne), although the filling is braised goat instead of the traditional mutton; and the East Handy General Store (Bairnsdale), which makes a chop suey from a Women’s Weekly recipe and adds Keen’s Curry Powder.