DOUBLE RAINBOW
If you google “Double Rainbow” the first thing that comes up is that viral video from 2010, in which a man of ambiguous levels of herbal inebriation joyously extolls the wondrous virtue of two rainbows that have appeared in the sky above his backyard just outside Yosemite National Park. It’s only when you add the word “Perth” to the search-bar that you begin to find hits for the eatery at the revamped Rechabites Hall on William Street in Northbridge, creatively named The Rechabite. It’s uncertain whether Double Rainbow is a reference to the seminal internet meme, but it is clear that the restaurant has biggish shoes to fill if it wants to knock a clip once declared by Jimmy Kimmel as “the funniest video in the world” from the top of Google’s algorithm. It even has biggish shoes to fill here at home, where as part of the Rechabite it shares four walls with a rooftop bar, an underground dive bar, and a middle level theatre space which has recently played host to a Fringe-esque cabaret-style show with a name so utterly ridiculous it does not bear repeating here.
The Double Rainbow space on the ground floor is large but busy, filled with pan-Asian knickknacks and loud, colourful graffiti. There’s high tables with stools, long share tables, bar seating and more intimate spots spread around the dining room. Smart black and white metro tiling behind the bar and the open kitchen, as well as dim fluorescent lamps hung above tables, add a touch of chic-ness to balance the visual potpourri. Surrounding all this, the designers have maintained intricate heritage elements echoing the building’s former life. The menu is comprehensive, covering snacks, small plates, salads, things from the wood charcoal grill, wok dishes, larger dishes and sides, plus a number of dessert dishes. It’s one of those paper jobs where you write how many of each dish you want in the box next to it, and then hand it to the waiter to decode at the POS machine. We all had fun with this concept at Pinchos in Leederville, where due to the bite-sized presentation of most of the food (pinchos – surprise!), writing down different numbers made sense. Here, it feels kinda perfunctory, like you’re filling in a multi-choice test. Maybe that’s because unless you’re in a big group, you’re unlikely to be getting more than one of each dish (at least from roughly half the menu). Even the set menu options – feed me a little or feed me a lot – are tick-box options, to save you the sheer inconvenience of having to utter the words aloud.
“sticky and sweet and slightly salty all at the same time.’
In reality, the staff are young and chatty and seem genuinely enthusiastic, if a little distracted. It would be hard not to be in a space of this size. And I’m told the kitchen stays open until 2am, to feed the late-night Northbridge crowd. At that time, it’s maybe a good idea to limit customer interaction to receiving a piece of penciled paper with all the sincerity of a twenty-dollar bill through a McDonald’s drive-through window. I’m also imagining the hilarity of seven kangaroo curries arriving at a table of drunk 20-somethings who’ll then insist that the scrawled number on their slip is actually a lopsided “1”.
We decided to try and sample things from across the vast menu, which takes cues from basically the entire Asian discourse – Thai, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Chinese, you name it. From the snacks section, crispy rice cakes with red dragon aioli and sesame ($5.50) came out as little soft pudgy fingers, sticky and sweet and slightly salty all at the same time. They were covered with a red seasoning, sesame seeds, chopped green onions and seaweed flakes. It wasn’t clear what or where the red dragon aioli was – a little disappointing for a condiment with such an exciting name, but some sort of sauce would have improved the dish as a whole. The rice cakes weren’t bad; they just had the texture of oven-roasted playdough, and begged for something dragon-esque in flavor to slather them.
“…it's a no brainer.”
The next dish was something of a hero - smoked raw beef, enoki mushrooms, betel leaves and shallot ($13.5). The rough-cut meat was creamy on the tongue, singing with rich smokiness, and mulched up with shallot, garlic and peppery betel leaves and topped with a quail egg yolk for supreme slipperiness. Glassy enoki mushrooms were strewn on top, and slices of cucumber on the side acted as little palate cleansers. Each mouthful revealed deep, complex flavours; a brilliant Asian-inspired spin on the classic tartare. This is a must-have plate. XO butter clams with French fries and dried shrimp ($24) was less successful. The dish was a heap of shoestring fries studded with butter clams in shell, limp greens, and spring onions, all resting in a pool of watery, garlicky broth. The fries were unsalted and unremarkable, the clams were chewy and the broth tasted thinly of garlic and not much else. The banging umami hit expected of XO sauce, a spicy seafood relish of Hong Kong origin, was MIA. On the menu, a dish like this reads with great anticipation; unfortunately it failed to deliver.
“ This is a must-have plate”
Speaking of exciting reads, red curry of kangaroo tail, bamboo shoots and eggplant ($16.5) was another clever twist on a classic. Kudos to executive chef Jesse Blake, of Petition Kitchen fame, for using an atypical cut from an atypical animal; this will challenge Perth’s conservative diners. The dark meat, which comes with the central tailbone still intact (no hiding from the truth here), is tender and gamey, pulling away from the bone with the gentle scrape of a fork. The curry was appropriately coconutty, sweet and sour. You may dislike the idea of eating a national animal, but kangaroo is both environmentally sustainable and healthy. We should be seeing more of this sort of thing on menus everywhere.
“…reads with great anticipation”
Greens with nam jim, oyster sauce, lap cheong and crisp shallots ($15) was also good – your ubiquitous misc Asian veg, swimming in salty, tangy sauce (nam jim is a Thai word which just means "dipping sauce", and can refer to a multitude of different preparations), dotted with little rounds of lap cheong, which is a spicy Chinese sausage, and topped off with fried shallots for texture. Here, the sauce was moreish, the veg still fresh and crunchy and the lap cheong, although scarce, provided bursts of spice and sweetness to round things out.
“…shout "fun!" in a loud voice.”
There's a lot going on at Double Rainbow. The décor, the vast menu, the order form style of service and the mish-mash of culinary influences all shout "fun!" in a loud voice. It's loose. Plates come out willy-nilly and not in the order you might expect. You might spend twenty minutes with one dish on the table only for three more to appear at the same time, sending you into a chopstick frenzy. We like that the food is inventive and a bit off-beat. It might not always hit the mark, but it doesn’t cost the earth and with a bit of fine-tuning the kitchen will sharpen the edges of its offering. But we can't forget that Double Rainbow exists to serve many crowds – including the late night reveller set. What imperfections are apparent to a sober mind will likely fade once the clock strikes midnight - eating here after-hours surely beats a dripping kebab on the way home.
*Edit: A subsequent visit to DR has revealed that they’ve done away with the tick-box menu in favour of human interaction, and the XO butter clams have been shelved - really pleasing to see a venue embrace adaptation so early on. For me, this cements that, at the very least, DR is invested in the customer experience.