Low-waste, high-taste: how this East Freo favourite reworked the bar and restaurant playbook

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You don’t see lobster legs on too many menus. Largely because of the work required to shell those straw-like limbs. But if the chance presents itself, prying the meat out of the extremities of a lobster – or crab or marron – is a worthwhile mission.

Some people use rolling pins for the job. Some reach for skewers. Others, weirdly, place their faith in microwaves.

Chef Melissa Palinkas, meanwhile, likes using scissors to snip open the legs after they’ve been boiled and cooled in iced water.
Palinkas doesn’t just stop there. She then adds this meat to an Eastern European-style potato salad: the ’taters cubed and cooked to a crunchy-springy texture, the vinegary dressing more sharp than creamy.

She then kicks tradition to the kerb by spiking the salad with a spicy house-made sambal olek (an Indonesian chilli) and beads of crunchy bright orange tobiko before serving the lot alongside crisp rice crackers dyed black with squid ink.

There are many reasons why a restaurant cook would go to so much trouble for a
dish. For some, extracting every gram of meat from a lobster is about saving the
planet. For others, it’s about saving money and turning trash into treasure. Or at least profit.

In Palinkas’s case, both the above hold true, as does one other vital kitchen mantra: resourceful cooking often translates to delicious cooking. So those lobster leg shells become a bisque that anchors vodka rigatoni: a pasta special that might feature on great value weekday BYO prix fixe lunch menus.

Skewers of beef tongue are among the items that get a turn in the wood-fired oven. Also a hunk of Mottainai lamb neck, well-charred to offset the fattiness within, sliced and fanned across a bed of sweet and sour eggplant preserved in the Italian agrodolce manner.

Thoughtful upcycling and green thinking are also constants in the story of Young
George, the East Fremantle bar and restaurant that Palinkas and her business and life partner Susan Whelan opened 11 years ago in a historic 121-year-old building.

The kitchen broke up with single-use plastic almost a decade ago, while its surplus fruit, excess bread and other leftovers were turned into sodas and even booze that were served up the road at Ethos, Young George’s brilliant but now-shuttered deli spin-off.

But if I’m painting a picture that suggests Young George is only about serving
leftovers to guests, I apologise.

In their pursuit of tasty, Palinkas and sous chef Luka Vrajic will frequently apply assured, unshowy technique to great ingredients. Raw beef fillet is sliced to order and blended with the Mexican tomato salsa pico de gallo and spooned on to corn chips. They call it Chop Chop beef tartare. You’ll call it the bounciest, finest (raw) beef nachos you’ve ever tried.

If you weren’t across Palinkas’s reputation for smallgoods sorcery, the bitey nduja in slender fried cigars should rectify that. I don’t have the column centimetres to detail her entire brisket pastrami curing and smoking process, but if the pastrami sandwich is available, order it.

Yet for all this talk of animal flesh, the most memorable dish on the current Young George roster might well be the vegetarian onion “fries”: strands of finely shaved onion, brined in buttermilk and fried to a blonde crispness. For anyone else saddened by the decline of Hungry Jack’s once glorious onion rings, these salty pleasures – the allium equivalent of pommes paille – go some ways to easing that ring sting.

Like all of us, Young George isn’t infallible. Wood-fired cabbage needed more char and crunch; the tres leches was drier than other renditions of the Latin American soaked sponge that I’ve enjoyed; plus the low lumen count in some pockets of the spacious, timber-rich restaurant made reading menus tough.

Thankfully, warm, unforced service from Whelan and the rest of the floor team brighten up the dining experience while reinforcing Young George’s credentials as both a place for locals wanting an approachable midweek meal and also being slick enough to be a destination for celebratory catch-ups.

This sort of versatility isn’t something that every suburban eatery can pull off, but luckily for the good people of East Freo – and those willing to travel – Palinkas and Whelan et al continue to put in the work, remain agile in these challenging times, and look after and feed their brood. And what mission could be more worthwhile than that? A model, versatile neighbourhood eatery that emphasises the importance of independent hospitality operators.

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