A Story of Four Sets in Melbourne (Part One ft. Ondo & Kobum QVM)
A soup, a set, a city — and the soft spiral in between.
I didn’t plan to eat my way through Melbourne in four perfectly composed set menus.
But then again, I didn’t plan to sprint through the airport either.
This trip began in chaos: delayed flights that became early flights, iced long blacks clutched like stress balls, and my Brisbane-trained body flinching at Melbourne’s cold, damp refusal to get it together. All I wanted was to be warm, fed, and emotionally stabilised — ideally at the same time.
What followed was a gentle unfolding.
Four meals.
Four restaurants that didn’t just feed me, but quietly held me.
🥣 Bowl I: The Broth That Brought Me Back to Life ft. Ondo
This was not just soup. This was a full-body system reset.
It started with a sprint through Brisbane Airport.
Not because I was late — well, not really. I had received a text saying my flight was delayed 25 minutes, and naturally took that as divine permission to dilly-dally through security with zero urgency.
By the time I cleared the scanners, that delay had vanished. My flight? Now early. Already boarding.
What followed was a caffeine-deprived, bladder-full dash through the terminal — and by the time I landed in Melbourne, the chaos had fully caught up to me. The weather was rude. The wind slapped. The energy was grey. My body was cold and vaguely vibrating from multiple long blacks and emotional whiplash.
All I wanted was broth.
Which brings me to Ondo — the first stop on my Melbourne set meal spiral, and maybe the most emotionally stabilising bowl of anything I’ve had all year.
I had bookmarked it ages ago. The name ondo means “temperature” in Korean, and something about that word — not just heat, but warmth — had stuck with me. Their website was sleek, minimal, and most importantly: clearly labelled with gluten-free and dairy-free icons. No side-eyes. No shouting across the kitchen. No mystery sauces.
Just calm, confident transparency — and for someone who’s been gluten-free long enough to develop trust issues with soup, this felt huge.
I ordered the gogiguksu set: a clear pork broth with thin slices of pork and soft somyeon noodles. It came with banchan (side dishes), and as a long-time set menu enthusiast, I was already emotionally invested.
The bowl arrived and I just stared.
Thinly sliced pork covered the entire surface — legit like a pork blanket. Lean meat in the middle, edged with the tiniest halo of fat, like someone had traced the cut with a paintbrush dipped in indulgence. A nest of soft white noodles curled underneath, and a generous dusting of spring onion sat on top like confetti.
The first sip was immediate relief.
I could feel blood returning to my purple fingertips, still frozen from the iced long black I’d been clutching like a stress ball all morning. The broth was clear but deep, gentle but full-bodied — the kind that slides down your throat and whispers, you’re safe now.
At one point, I shoved all the spring onion in to coax out more flavour and accidentally hit a little pocket of black pepper oil underneath. The flavour exploded. And in an instant, I was back in childhood, tasting the peppery spring onion oil from my favourite scallion flatbread — the flaky kind stuffed to the brim, where every bite was oily and crisp and perfectly layered. This broth had that memory embedded in it.
The somyeon noodles reminded me of Taiwanese rice noodles — not chewy, not bouncy, but soft in that perfect, soul-soothing way. Mushy in theory, melting in practice. Like they’d given up resistance and surrendered to the broth entirely. It was the kind of bowl you’d crave on a grey night when you feel homesick for something you can’t quite name.
But what elevated the whole experience was the banchan — a lineup of side dishes that weren’t just decorative but genuinely dynamic. Little edible pauses to reset the palate and sharpen the joy of the soup.
A steamed egg “cake” that looked impossibly upright — like it had defied gravity and self-doubt. It jiggled gently as I cut into it, the inside smooth like a slice of air. And it tasted like egg. Not diluted, not disguised — just pure, rich eggy goodness, silky and slightly custardy. It slid down like savoury pudding, warming me in a completely different way from the broth.
A squid kimchi, which sounds terrifying but tasted like nostalgia in disguise. Chewy and sweet-spicy, like konjac had snuck into a party and landed in chili paste and sugar, then balanced by crisp radish. Not fishy. Just textural brilliance.
And then the white-based kimchi — wombok and radish, cut thick and juicy, soaked in vinegar and a little magic. Bright, sharp, cleansing. I was given two portions (one of the other sides wasn’t gluten-free), and I was not mad. It was the kind of crunchy, cooling contrast that resets your taste buds after too many rich sips of broth.
They weren’t just sides — they were balance.
A little spice here, a little tang there, a moment of eggy softness to cushion it all. Each bite redirected the narrative of the meal, gave the soup more space to land. And by the end, as I drained the last of the broth, I wasn’t just full — I was restored.
The result?
A broth-based ballet.
A 10/10 dish.
A reintroduction to warmth, temperature, and the feeling of being full — not just in your stomach, but in your chest.
🍵 Bowl II: The One Without Fish ft. Kobum QVM
When you’ve admired ochazuke from afar, only to find the one bowl you can finally eat.
You know when you want something so badly that you start negotiating with your principles? That was me, standing in front of every ochazuke photo on Instagram, quietly wondering if maybe, just maybe, I could be someone who eats salmon. Someone who embraces the smoky flake, the glistening sheen, the health benefits, the content opportunities. Someone who doesn’t flinch at seafood gently dissolving in broth.
But alas. My heart has boundaries.
I am gluten-free. I am dairy-free.
And I am, with no medical basis, philosophically anti-fish.
It’s not an allergy. Just a firm, lifelong preference built on texture, trauma, and trust issues with the ocean.
Which means that for years, ochazuke — that gentle, tea-poured-over-rice comfort dish that everyone describes as “restorative” and “soul-warming” — has existed entirely outside my realm of possibility. An elegant meal I admired from afar while munching on whatever beige thing I could actually eat.
Until I found myself in Melbourne at 8:30AM, four iced long blacks in, fully alert and emotionally unraveling while the city continued to sleep. I wasn’t jetlagged. Just a Brisbane girl up too early, waiting for this lazy southern city to open her doors. And there it was: Kumo QVM.
More importantly: YASAI OCHAZUKE.
Yasai, meaning vegetables.
No grilled mackerel. No flakes of bonito. No fear. Just a bowl — a real, full, beautiful ochazuke bowl — that I could finally eat.
I walked in fast, the kind of fast reserved for both hunger and the fear of being wrong. The fear that maybe I misread something. That maybe “yasai” was code for “salmon-infused disappointment.” But no — it was real. The space was small, clean, quietly buzzing. Two tables over, people were speaking Japanese, and I immediately decided this was a good omen. A sign. An affirmation from the food gods.
The menu was minimal — respectful, really. For the gluten-free: two types of grilled fish… and then, the hero of my story, the vegetable set.
I didn’t even mourn the others. This was not a meal of compromises. It was a full-hearted “yes.”
The yasai ochazuke arrived in a beautiful ceramic bowl, served with a separate cup of mushroom dashi — hot, fragrant, and scalding my iced-long-black hands in a way I honestly welcomed. Inside the bowl:
Two pieces of lightly blistered okra, smoky and soft
A bed of glistening exotic mushrooms, earthy and layered
A portion of rice just waiting to absorb everything
Pickled cucumbers that were inexplicably red and visually alarming
A tray of sides that felt more like a chorus than a garnish:
Umeboshi — aggressively sour, unapologetically salty. The kind of thing that puckers your whole soul.
Cucumber and wombok pickled in yuzu — crisp, citrusy, and the palate cleanser I didn’t know I needed.
Red-not-red cabbage pickle — no idea what it actually was, but she was crunchy and confident.
Gluten-free furikake — homemade, nori-heavy, unexpectedly crunchy, and downright addictive.
I poured the dashi in slowly, like I was being let in on a secret. And suddenly, the bowl transformed — warm steam rising, grains of rice loosening, pickles beginning to swim, flavours starting to meet for the first time.
I finally understood the obsession with ochazuke.
It wasn’t just the comfort. It was the composition.
It had dimension — not in the flashy, fusion-y way that tries too hard to impress, but in the quiet confidence of a dish that knows exactly what it is. Every element had its place. Every bite was layered — not just in flavour, but in feeling. The kind of harmony you don’t have to think about — until suddenly, you do.
Mid-chew.
Soft pause.
Oh. This is why.
Because it held so many things at once:
The warmth of mushroom dashi slowly soaking into the rice
The zing of yuzu that caught me off guard in the best way
The earthiness of mushrooms that made me close my eyes just to taste more fully
The crisp bite of furikake breaking through the softness like punctuation
The sharp salt-sour slap of umeboshi that dared me not to flinch
And those slightly sweet, somehow red cucumber pickles — confusing, delightful, perfect
This wasn’t just a bowl of rice and tea.
It was a sensory reset. A soft exhale. A small ritual you perform with your own hands, pouring warmth into something waiting to receive it.
And on a brisk 12°C morning, in a city that hadn’t quite woken up yet, in a body that had been alert since 5AM and was just starting to fray — this dish met me there.
Quietly. Gently. Completely.
For someone who’d been clinging to iced long blacks like a life source,
this was the kind of nourishment I didn’t even know I needed.
Final Crumbs (Part One)
These first two meals didn’t just warm me — they realigned me.
They reminded me that food doesn’t have to be flashy to be transformative. That comfort can come in hot dashi and cold pickles. That harmony doesn’t always mean loud flavours — sometimes, it’s just about everything landing softly.
Part Two is coming — and it’s louder, crunchier, and slightly more unhinged.
Fried chicken and bookshelf selfies await.
