Ammachis Table, Melbourne: where the bain-marie is a choose-your-own-curry adventure

In this modest suburban eatery, diners – many from the city’s Malaysian community – come for the thali, roti and Kerala lamb curry. On the weekends, the biryani is a must order

Sandwiched between a tobacconist and a bottle shop on a suburban Melbourne shopping strip, an hour’s tram ride east of the CBD, there is nothing exceptional about the location of the former Rich Mahal eatery. But it is a special place for Ashvin Khorana. After she arrived from Malaysia as a student about 20 years ago, it was the first Malaysian-Indian restaurant Khorana dined at with her best friend, Michelle Pereira.

The pair went on to work in telecommunications but the kitchen was calling. “We wanted to own a place where we could showcase the south Indian [and] Malaysian food of our childhood,” Khorana says.

In 2022 they did just that, buying Rich Mahal with Khorana’s husband, Dominic George, and changing the business name to Ammachi’s Table this year.

“‘Ammachi’ means ‘grandmother’ in Malayalam,” says Khorana. “We chose it to reflect the style of our food but also where it came from: many of our recipes have been passed down from our mums, aunties and grandmothers.”

And word has spread. On a Sunday lunchtime, diners – many from Melbourne’s Malaysian community – crowd the small eatery in Vermont South. They politely nab spare chairs and push together tables; which are quickly covered with thali (mixed curry plates) , dosa and murtabak.

The bain-marie, loaded with curries and fried snacks, is the starting point to a build-your-own thali. Will it be the varutha kozhi muringa, deep-fried spiced chicken drumsticks topped with crunchy fried onion slivers; or perhaps the vazhuthana masala, a velvety eggplant number, red with slow-cooked tomatoes? The Kerala lamb curry is a 150-year-old recipe from Pereira’s family: it is a rich, dry-style curry thickened with grated coconut, with fall-apart lamb on the bone (a word of warning: it is quite fiery).

A highlight is the arivulla Malabaar mattan kari, a sweet, peppery goat curry of pale colour, disguising its pleasing heat. “People kept asking for goat,” Khorana says. “So we decided to introduce Michelle’s grandmother’s. It’s a real labour of love and takes hours to cook.”

The thali come with rice or roti, and if you choose the latter, it’s made fresh and flaky to order – so be prepared to wait.

On the weekend, more labour-intensive a la carte specials are available, like the chicken biryani. It arrives as a mound of basmati rice, studded with chicken, fragrant with cloves and cinnamon, and tinged a sunny saffron yellow. Push through the rice mountain to reveal – spoiler alert – a hidden boiled egg.

“There’s 25 different roasted and ground spices in this dish,” Khorana says. “The rice and meat are layered like a lasagne and cooked slowly in a dum [an Indian pot]. In India, they traditionally seal the lid with flour to keep the moisture in. We improvise and put a heavy brick on top.”

Pasember, a Muslim Malaysian Indian salad, is another weekend special. It’s a substantial and splendidly textured dish: fresh, crunchy and smooth with sliced bean curd, torn-up turmeric and coconut fritters, and matchsticks of cucumber, yam bean and carrot (carrot is not traditional, but Khorana says yam bean is harder to come by in Australia).

Ammachi’s Table is the sort of eatery that becomes a fixture of the community for all the right reasons. The food is affordable and flavour-rich; and the operators are fuelled by passion and a love of family-style cooking. Khorana and Pereira’s career change may be telecommunications’ loss, but it is Melbourne’s gain.

Ammachi’s Table, 3/499 Burwood Highway, Vermont South, Victoria, ammachistable.com.au

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