With degustations booked at Vue de Monde and Attica for our Easter Melbourne trip, a visit to Cutler & Co. - or any other expensive fine diner for that matter - was not originally part of the plan. While the $130 asking price for their dinner degustation (excluding the inevitable wine and tea) is far and away the cheapest of the three, I was thinking a more upper-middle priced restaurant like Hell of the North's $65 'Let Us Feed You' would be more economically sensible as a third premium meal for the trip. That was before Melbourne resident friends Tash and Lloyd hipped us to Cutler & Co's Sunday Lunch - a casual four course meal, with the first two courses consisting of multiple share plates and a selection of main and dessert options for $75. Convinced that this was a great opportunity for us to fit a Cutler & Co. meal into our schedule without totally blowing the budget, the initial plan was for all four of us to share the meal together, however with Tash busy with the tail end of Melbourne Comedy Festival, I ended up making a Sunday Lunch reservation for two.
The flagship restaurant of chef and prolific restaurateur Andrew McConnell's restaurant empire that includes the wildly popular and successful Cumulus Inc, Cutler & Co's adamantly non-descript exterior belies its interior's elegant mise en scene by McConnell's wife Pascale Gomes-McNabb, whose design aesthetic is very sympathetic to the unfussy but refined quality that is the hallmark of McConnell's cooking.
