How I found a table a Collingwood’s Gigibaba

It was an epic journey from St Kilda up to Gertrude St and then down to Gigibaba at Smith St followed by an epic meal. We left at 5.30 in the evening to ensure we would find two seats in this hot Turkish joint, arriving at the working class tea time of 6.15pm. Along the way we bumped into various well known food characters on Gertrude St. I even considered moving nearby.
My paternal grandfather made a similar epic journey to Turkey in 1915. On the way he met and helped bury on Skyros the poet Rupert Brooke.
Edward Charles finally made it to Turkey. But as is often the case when our family go abroad he quickly returned home with a tummy bug, to be precise dysentery.
My last trip to Istanbul was enjoyable but not for the food, despite the Lonely Planet Guide declaring:

“It is well worth travelling to Turkey just to eat. Turkish cuisine is thought by many to rank with French and Chinese as one of the world’s great basic cuisines.”

Luckily nothing awful happened with the preparation or as a consequence of the food at Gigibaba (102 Smith Street, Collingwood
+61 9486 0345) . But we left waddling and with sore tummies.
I may have lost count but for $55 each we were served 22 savoury courses, three sweet and a coffee – to top off our liquid refreshment, selected from a compact list of Australian and European wines.

At several points I began panicking. First because I was faced with about a dozen small plates on the table and I was overwhelmed by the onslaught as more arrived. Then it was because I’d reached the Mr Creosote point. If one more small second-hand plate of food was sent out I was very likely to explode and leave a nasty mess on the oriental carpet that is cut to fit the far wall of the room.
That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the food. It is good and most savoury courses are one of those Mediterranean variations of olive oil, tomato, peppers, oily fish, lamb, olive, eggplant and so on.

If anything we ordered wisely choosing the $55 degustation. On the journey up on the 96 Tram I twittered my intentions, and later that there were some spaces available, with the following responses:

“Good Luck!!! Always difficult, even for us locals. Enjoy the worlds most expensive hommos.”
“Watch your jacket, I had mine stolen from the coat rack by the front door.”
“Maybe all the orange-t-shirts who used to go there were scared off when Larissa Dubecki muscled them out of the queue…”
“Perhaps they’re scared off by the prices.”

The food we were sent could have fed three or four instead of two which makes it great value.
The wine is too and I especially like their attitude to it. Everything is available by the glass up through various carafe sizes to a whole bottle. This means to my twitter widow’s surprise – and mine – I drank less than usual.

And so it was time to return to St Kilda. After the first short leg of the journey home I laid the twidow in the recovery position in the courtyard of the Gertrude St Enoteca smoking a whole pack of Matt Prestons aka Peter Stuyvesant. My own resuscitation was attempted with the good part of a case of Averna.

Still early, we trekked on across the city and eventually down Hosier Lane beneath the foul smelling extractor fan from Movida Next Door.
And as in the custom in these situations, we bumped into Dani Valent plus one, fresh from her own epic with the altogether much more expensive Greg Malouf at Momo.
DoI wish I’d been there? Yes. But Gigibaba is less than half the price.

Tagged as: Collingwood, Gigababa, Smith St, turkey, turkish