Katarina Zrinski

host posted on May 07, 2008 00:21

The Croatian club had a facelift last year and has a modern new restaurant which serves hearty food.

Katarina Zrinski was a poet, diplomat and translator of foreign texts into her native Croatian . With her husband and brother, she was also influential in the failed 17th-century Croatian rebellion against their Habsburg rulers. With this pedigree, it's no surprise that Croatian women's associations around the world have named themselves after her. In fact, the kitchens at Melbourne's Croatian Club have been largely run by members, so it was logical when the club had a facelift last year that its modern new restaurant should carry Zrinski's name.

The Croatian club had a facelift last year and has a modern new restaurant which serves hearty food.

Katarina Zrinski Croatian Club.

Address: 72 Whitehall Street, Footscray
Phone: (03) 9689 5866
Style: Restaurants
Cuisine: Other European
Hours: daily noon-3pm, Thurs and Sun noon-8.30pm, Fri-Sat noon-9.30pm
Details: Licensed
Payment: Visa, EFTPOS, AMEX, Mastercard
Price Guide: entrees $13-$18; mains $17-$26.90; crepes $3-$4.50
Footscray's Hrvatski Dom, as the Croatian Club is also called, used to look like a monolithic bunker until most of the red brick was replaced with glass. The result is a large, airy downstairs dining room crowded with big-clothed tables - perfect for large, extended family groups. There's also a new glassed-in children's play area and a long, marble-fronted bar that runs along one side of the building.

Outside is a deck for smokers where you might be lucky enough to hear blokes with thrash-metal haircuts discussing the relative merits of Ozzy Osborne and Iron Maiden in Croatian. These new clubrooms are a clean, contemporary design that lives up to one half of the club's motto "embrace the future".

The menu, however, reflects the other half of that motto "remember the past". Croatian food is hearty stuff served in prodigious portions - such as gulas, a rich beef stew served on Fridays, or the mixed grill that combines little skinless pork and beef sausages with hunks of grilled pork.

Best here are the excellent sarma. These cabbage rolls stuffed with a mix of minced beef, pork and rice come in a slightly spicy sauce and are surprisingly light. Also impressive is a rough scroop of mashed potato that tastes well-seasoned rather than having been flavoured by an overload of cream and butter.

Even lighter is the very plain, homemade chicken noodle soup that, like a quietly sung love song, gets better the further in you get.

Less alluring are two pinky-grey slabs of moist-warm roast pork that are strictly for the pig lovers out there, or the lignje that arrives as a vast expanse of chewy and rather bland whole grilled squid. Avoid this in favour of specials such as chicken paprikas loaded with dried red-pepper powders, the Thursday special of grah, which is a Croatian winter bean stew with pickles and smoked meats, or a sort of Croatian choucroute called kiseli kupus with sauerkraut and more smoked meats.

If you don't want to go Croatian, there are steaks, schnitzels and a seafood basket. And like all mains, these are served with chips or mash, and a fresh little shredded cabbage salad.

To finish, there are Croatian pancakes with rosehip jam or crushed walnuts, which benefit from an optional dollop of ice-cream.

The most serious issue facing the club is that there have been problems with the supply of Karlovacka Croatian beer. But if this unfortunate situation has not been rectified, there are local ales, big-name local wines from a short list, or Croatian liqueurs to drown your sorrows. There are enough of these concoctions, loosely classed as fruit brandies, to make for an interesting evening. The plum sljivovica and the rich, almost muscat-like walnut orahovac would be our picks.

Matt Preston
The Age, Epicure
April 8, 2008

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Katarina Zrinski

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