Côte Basque: A Melbourne Restaurant Defined by Everything Left Untouched.

Andrew McConnell with head chef Allan Eccles.

Twenty-five Crossley Street has housed just three businesses in seven decades. It opened in 1954 as Pellegrini’s Tavola Freddo Cantina, run by brothers Leo and Vildo Pellegrini, before passing to Nino Pangrazio and Sisto Malaspina in the 1970s. From 1996 it was Becco, one of the city’s definitive fine diners and the setting for a generation of proposals, deals and long, ruinous lunches. Now Andrew McConnell and Jo McGann have taken it on as Côte Basque, a European grill built around flame and embers.

Sites carrying this much collective memory are a trap. The temptation to make a mark—to prove the new custodian has arrived—is enormous, and Melbourne is littered with the evidence. Acme went the other way.

The original 1950s green terrazzo has been restored rather than ripped out. The cherrywood wall panelling stays. So do the stainless-steel framed windows angled onto Crossley Street, a mid-century flourish that most renovations would have quietly straightened. Most significantly, the tiered dining room remains—the room’s defining spatial gesture, and the thing that made Becco feel like a stage set rather than a floor plan.

“This is one of the most important heritage restaurant sites in the city,” McConnell said when Trader House took on the lease. “The dining room has a beautiful soul that reflects its history and the incredible hospitality that has been offered here for over 70 years.”

The new work is confined and confident. A leather-lined bar anchors the entry, backed by a 12-metre mural by artist Magnus Reid, an Australian-born painter who spent years working as a chef in London. An open wood-fired grill sits at the centre of the plan, its heat and theatre now the room’s organising principle. The uppermost tier curtains off as the Galleon Room, while 24 seats spill continental-style onto the laneway—a small, smart reinforcement of Melbourne’s laneway culture.

Côte Basque is the fifth collaboration between Acme and McConnell and McGann, after Gimlet, Apollo Inn, Bar Miette and Supernormal Brisbane. That fluency shows. Restraint of this kind reads as modesty, but it’s the harder discipline by a wide margin—knowing precisely which fragments carry the story, and having the nerve to let them keep telling it.

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[Images courtesy of Trader House. Photography by Sharyn Cairns.]