Sometimes the difficultly is deciding whether to soften the blow. It’s the new year and and heaven knows, despite being miserable now, I may as well be nice.

Climb the dodgy staircase and enter through the plain fire door to a stunning room. On a sunny evening at The Panama Dining Room (Level 3, 231 Smith Street, Fitzroy) the light is astonishing. It illuminated everything.

The plastic laundry baskets reconstituted into lamp shades are clear for all to see. I can spot the cheap Ikea lamps hanging over the bar. The second hand fittings.I’m pretty sure the high table is made from a floating floor (although I could be wrong). Most of the furniture is cheap and second hand. The fit out was a cheap as you could get. The furniture mismatches.

But despite the tat, it’s not grotty. It is superb and I love it.

No wonder Vogue Entertaining and Travel picked as a hot spot last year. It has funk, plays great music and most importantly of all has a free pool table. 

Equal to the fitout is our waitress. I fairly quickly accuse her of tricking me into ordering some kind of new fangled deep fried Camembert.It was Gruyere in a sort of brioche deep-fried shell. I now can, unembarrassed, say I enjoyed it.

But wait, it gets better. The starters are dirt cheap. A stunning chilled Yoghurt and cucumber soup (pictured below) was small but only cost $12. Calling the kingfish a ceviche, with a carrot shaved to look like smoked salmon, was stretching the point. But who cares. It was excellent and only cost $15 bucks.

The mains are dirt cheap too. That’s if you really want them, though. Tortellini  ($21) topped with a deep fried zucchini flower are bland, bland, bland.The roast chicken  ($23) is moist and okay.

But if the bread and tomato salad featured cardboard soaked in water it would be an improvement. The bread was stale-soggy and neither Jak or I really wanted to eat it. Only last week a ate a far superior version made by the M and partner of a major law firm - only hours before she gave birth.

The shame of this is that the Panama has so much going for it. The mains need to be mended, perhaps redesigned or a least tasted by chef.  

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A home made steak and kidney pie sits upon an island of mashed potato stranded in a sea of peas drowning in brown gravy at The Hotel Lincoln (91 Cardigan Street +61 3 9347 4666).

What more do you want to celebrate the cold, wet squalls on the eve of the winter solstace? Well, a log fire, possible some beer – stout I guess – and plenty of red wine.

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Witty cigars turn out to be the most substantial part of the meal.

I had hoped to escape my theme of the cost of a restaurant food per dollar. A high cost per minute is bad in that you are possibly eating to fast. A low cost per dollar and you are eating to slowly, not always by choice.
And so it was at Three, One, Two ( 312 Drummond St, Carlton Vic 3053 +61 3 9347 3312) the latest incarnation of chef Andrew McConnell’s cooking. Four people for four hours (of actual eating) at $690. That means we are eating at about $2.875 a minute, the group of us. Or as individuals we are eating at 72 cents a minute.
On arrival we are sent to what I should describe as Siberia. But I try to avoid writing in clichés and tonight the ice-cold upstairs room is more like Denmark, which can also get pretty cold. At least the fact that Tasmanian-Danish princess Mary was recently in this room helps with my Danish metaphor. And boy were we reminded that her rather slim bottom had been perched on one of the chairs.
We sit in an empty room for nearly 25 minutes until the local chapter of Weight Watchers turn up and leak over the same chairs. At least I assume this Friday was a Weight Watchers night. Everybody, apart from us, was huge. I mean really lard-arsed to the point that I was worried whether or not the furniture could handle it.
I was going to save the food for later. Although there are eight (or nine) courses depending how you count them there is so little of it you’ll want to get in before the fatties steal it off your plate. That’s because the meal is so fucking tiny. I really wish I’d bought a small set of scales in addition to my calculator, and stopwatch (which also doubles as a GPS and weather barometer).
The eight course dégustation menu ($95) starts with the obligatory chef’s joke. Chef McConnell’s is a delicate pastry cigar filled with (I think) some soft cheese, tapanade, and balsamic jelly.
Crunchy, soft, salty and sour it is not the kind of starter to be taken lightly. Little did we realise that this would be the most substantial thing we would eat this night apart from several loaves of Baker D Chirico bread.
Our next two courses are good. Claire de lune oysters, spinach, sesame salad, mirin and soy are matched with the very vogue Delgado ‘La Goya’ Manzanilla Sherry (from Spain we are reminded!).
The crab broth with cuttlefish, crispy chicken and aromatics are good and matched well to the 2003 Granbazan “amber” Albarino, Rias Baixas, Albarino being another wine that has become popular on this year’s wine lists.

Smoked eel carpaccio: a single slice cut so thin that you can see through it.

The strange thing is that there appears to be more substance to the wine in our glasses than the delicious but teeny weeny portions of food on our plates. And because of that we are feeling a bit pissed and again filling up on bread.
The smoked eel carpaccio is the size of and almost as thin as a bank-note. It is delicious, finished by 9pm and leaves me and my three (slim) friends hungry for more.
At 21.32, as I ask for more while I discretely start my stopwatch. We are starving now. Jak (who is becoming cranky with hunger) and Carolyn, both petite souls, start to panic that the bread may run out.
We are told that our duck was just being plated.
21.36 Duck petit sale with foie gras parfait and green bean salad matched with 2005 Peregrine pinot noir from Central Otago in New Zealand. I too am now cranky and gobble these tiny morsels in two minutes flat. We were all hoping for something more filling.
21:47 Plates cleared away
21:56 Grain fed striploin, anchovy fritters and salsa verde arrive. I note there are almost two whole potato chips on the plate. Carolyn notes that the marzipan flavours of the 2005 Tardieu Laurent “les Bec fins” Cote du Rhone complement the food.
22:03 Steak finished. Honest, I was trying to take my time.
22:09 Plates go and we anticipate the arrival of the cheese. Perhaps now we can fill up on something other than bread.
22:13 The 2005 Max Ferdinand Richter Estate Riesling, Mosel, Germany arrives.

“Bollocks everything is so small”
22:23 St Marcellin, a soft surface ripened French Cow’s Milk cheese, with Fig, pistachio & Pomegranate arrive. “Bollocks! It’s so tiny,” says the birdlike Jak.
It really is cold now. Though our waitress is knowledgeable, personable and helpful, the fact that she is running up the narrow stairs of this inner city terrace means that she is hot and quite unaware how cold it is for those of us without the extra layers of fat.
22:43 Air conditioning switched off. Sorbet arrives. Again tiny. Gone!
I lose track of time but I have a feint memory of enjoying a small Chocolate terrine with cherries (not many!), blackberries & Créme fraiche ice cream. Drink: 2002 Castano Dulce Monastrell Yecla, Spain.
Coffee is complimentary. The room is empty but for ourselves.
12.05 Taxi finally arrives and we leave the restaurant to the staff.
Food Fascist

1. We were first in the room and first to order, I believe. How come everybody else in the room was fed and left, a long time, before us?
2. The portions are absolutely tiny. Too small. It is a joke to charge $95.
3. With tiny degustation dishes being served 20 minutes is far too long between dishes. 20 minutes is the maximum any “main course” size dish should take to arrive (unless otherwise specified on the menu).
4. December last year we ate at Circa The Prince when Andrew McConnell was still executive chef there. It was a truly excellent and well- executed meal. The portion sizes were perfect.
5. This is another case of well-recognised reviewers being treated differently to ordinary punters. Although what food we were served was delicious, and the selection of six wines at $55 excellent, we were disappointed.
6. Often I drink with my left hand. because the table was squashed in beside a lamp the only way to pour my drinks was from right to left across my body. Although there was no alternative this is intrusive and fairly poor form in a restaurant of this calibre.
7. It must be something about this building. In it’s previous incarnation as Mrs Jones I was served what should have been a warm fish dish stone cold.
8. Why the fucking hell can’t restaurants make an effort for all comers. I spend tens of thousands of dollars eating out each year and demand value for money.