Recent social media posts
03/06/2026
Insurance companies had a fool proof scheme, all right. It wasn't very scientific but it worked.
Every single year, like clockwork, your premium goes up. Five percent, ten percent, thirty percent. Why? Because they can. They look at your loyalty, they look at your clean record, and they don't care. They just squeeze. If you have a loss, they fight you on the payout. If they have a loss? They just raise your rates to cover it.
What were you gonna do? Muscle YOUI? YOUI was the muscle...
31/05/2026
Wow. Just wow. Thank you. Look, I’m genuinely overwhelmed. It is an absolute honor to stand here tonight and accept the Restaurant Guru award for Best Vegetarian Restaurant in Thornbury.
It was a tough field and to come first out of such a fierce, relentless, and surprisingly empty field is truly humbling. When we set out to cook technical, vege forward food on High Street, we knew the road would be tough and that our natural wine, plant based fans were fickle at best and were almost at an age where they stop caring about things and start realising where daddy makes their money before voting for the Libs and saying things like 'community housing is great and all but we need to respect the cultural makeup of existing suburbs so maybe not THIS suburb' and pivot to supporting inner city Italian restaurants where BUSINESS IS DONE. But still, at the end of the day, I want to thank the real heroes here, the scraping bots. The flawless algorithms that looked at a map, drew a hyper specific boundary line, and said, 'Well, there is literally no one else. Give it to them.'
This award proves that if you just stay open, do your thing, and exist in a specific geographic pocket, a server in a data center somewhere will eventually notice you and award you a shiny participation trophy like the bestest boy before you're put down due to inbreeding and the inability to breathe properly.
31/05/2026
Another week. Another plate. Another night. And back again tomorrow. Well I'm not. I'm heading to Tasmania for a couple of nights on a fact finding mission to ascertain why is just so good and able to punch well above it's price point weight in a in a symphonically harmonious creation that is like tasting an orchestra working as one where the grapes are the instruments and the wine maker is the conductor. Hmmm... yes... that is correct. Oh and by the way I am safe. I like being in Tasmania. Please don't try and contact me. I am resting.
30/05/2026
It's not all spittle flecked rants and paranoia here, sometimes there is joy to be had and it's in the simple things.
Normally things written on napkins and passed to me are requests that " i leave quietly without making a scene" so this is a much appreciated change up.
Thank you
29/05/2026
Many people don't realise that I am fuelled creatively by my hatred of the English.
That's why I decided to do a wrong'un on the old fish and chips with curry sauce and mushy peas. Haha - take that you swine whose fall of empire will in no way mirror the decline of my own hubristic fortunes and over expansion. PUCKA
27/05/2026
God I haven't made garnish like this since the 90's. Why? Because it's not good? Of course not. It's because the other chefs would laugh at me with my dated reference points. Look at grandpa over there believing that seasoning food is all it takes to achieve success in Melbourne like there's some kind of meritocracy based around patience and skill rather than gatekept access and ability to do popups.
I'm already well aware of my lack of a thermomix, josper, binchotan and whatever else the cool kids are using with their maddeningly self confident belief that whatever they're into will not go the way of micro herbs or criss crossed chives. I don't need to add more ammunition to their critical gazes with their sleeve tattoos, denim aprons and open kitchens.
Screw you old man. We'll be using charcoal forever... forever...forever
Sure you will champ... sure you will
What was that? Oh yes... this dish with its awesome garnish. It's julienned spring onion, purple carrot and purple daikon that's embraced by a symphony of sesame oil and rice vinegar. It rides the mid section of a pair of a tempura wrapped choy sum leaves filled with roasted Jerusalem artichoke and pickled daikon like a goddamn champion. Tomato, roast leek and chilli sauce completes the saga.
And there we go. I started with listing perceived slights from invisible enemies and managed to finally talk about food. Not available.
27/05/2026
Op shop aesthetics for the discerning customer. Won't be able to corporate focus group your way into this sincere wall of depravity, every piece tells a story, every placement has a purpose. I always enjoy noticing someone staring at the art and am happy to provide a little bit of back story.
Why that Mick Jagger piece was from the cover of an underground '70's Canadian free press issue designed by Rand Holmes whose ability to shade the g***s is still unparalleled to this day as evidenced by his seminal (nudge nudge) work "The a**s clenching adventures of Harold Hedd", a great great favourite of mine.
Next to it on the wall is a proof of concept art developed for Vincent Wards abortive attempt at making Alien 3 before studio inference resulted in a film so bad that even David Fincher refuses to be associated with it, where medieval monks are hunted by xenomorphs inside a giant cathedral. Note the p***s shape of the cathedral.
Moving on though we have a collection of pictures of legendary Mew Zealand test batsman Martin Crowes feet...
26/05/2026
Winter parsnip. What's the haps? It's shiitake stock braised then charred till the skins are caramelised. Sitting on top of a cashew-parsnip sour cream. Then there's fermented green tomato shreds, verjus & puffed brown rice. Probably several other things as well. Not available
26/05/2026
I'm so confident that our $65 feed me option of 8-10 course will sell itself that I can waste your time and mine by ranking the songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Coming in at number 1: "Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul"
Dead last: "Eddie"
Notable caveats - if you include rose tint my world as a medley then that's number one.
Thank you
25/05/2026
Test kitchen ideas I would say if I had a test kitchen and a dedicated team enacting every one of my Steve Jobs like visionary mandates. I want the return of the carrot tartare but this time I want each piece wearing a tiny turtleneck and it's rehydrated in parsnip stock. Make it so... anyhooo... not ready yet. Looks good. Sits a little one dimensional so we'll keep plugging along. Maybe some kind of white smear with a red oil & and a red powder? Devilishly decadent T Dawg. You've done it again. God I'm a goddamn hack...
25/05/2026
Look at them over there. The all singing, all dancing crap of the world.
Buzz buzz in the kitchen team. Everyone working together. They say I'm part of the team but it doesn't mean anything to me when they say there's 4 lions manes up and 12 piece croquette. That makes me feel different so I just remain here doing dishes. Gods loneliest soldier. Staring away from the light and always facing the machine. They let me have a Bluetooth speaker. They said it was for morale. It's just another form of control. I hear them laughing in there. Always laughing. Little in jokes that they won't explain anyway if I ask what's funny. They treat me different. They know I'm different.
What you got there champ? Are those live rounds?
Seven-six-two millimeter. Full metal jacket.
If the owner comes in here and catches us, we'll both be in a world of s**t.
I am... in a world... of s**t
23/05/2026
Pre chargrilled little celeriac tofu skin skewers. Smokey. Textural. Skins. I have never once not made yuba and draped it across my face like Anthony Hopkins in silence of the lambs before I try and escape from my prison. Served with a green cardamom and spinach yoghurt
22/05/2026
I used to not mind mushrooms. They did their thing. I did mine. We occasionally met up for some fun but I was fairly indifferent to them. They were the bass player to my backstage horndog thirstiness, good in a pinch but not the top prize if you get my drift.
And then I started cooking them everyday. 10kg worth of lions mane braising away next to a stock pot full of hot, wet shiitakes as some oyster mushrooms keep grilling and that duxelles caramelises.
Just mushrooms.
Godammn everywhere.
In everything.
Damn you you plant based maniacs, damn you all to hell.
And it has now reached a point where I genuinely feel like I'm having some kind trauma moment every time I get a whiff or taste of them, where I just associate that earthy funk with overfamiliarity and despair. To me mushrooms represent pain. And the kitchen is suffocating under their weight. I am cursed with what we are doing here. Mushrooms are a form of existence that God, if he exists has... has created in anger.
So sick of mushrooms...
But anyhoo! Here's a lovely little oyster mushroom riblet with celeriac puree, crispy onion rings and a Pedro ximenez green peppercorn sauce for luscious decadence. Some braised cavolo nero as well to help cut through the richness and it's all a little warming winter bit of fun. I have been assured it tastes great. I would know as I just poked it with a stick and started crying.
Mushrooms.
The horror
The horror
21/05/2026
If I stopped buying chives and replaced them with scavenged train track weeds I could reduce my prices by at least 50% I reckon.
20/05/2026
Look I don't mind not getting a hat or being in a list of Melbourne best plant based dating nights for people who have rescue dogs but this??? But this is my brand?!?
Tin pot?!? Tin pot?!? What the ever loving f**k????
Oh god I just realised you meant wuthering heights gothic for all those people a little too into Kate Bush and not batcave gothic...
I'll stop running towards the concrete playground offices like I'm Andrew Eldritch in the Lucretia music video, shirtlessly running, always running, tiny ni***es rubbing against raw leathers, past row after row of sweat shop workers who I always wonder if they considered this a pleasant diversion from indentured slavery as they asked each other why tiny man and giant woman were filming that sultry day in November.
Hmmmm
20/05/2026
Computer! Bring up "corporate speech setting zero-zero-niner", activate "go f**k yourself politely" & narrow search parameters to "sorry for your recent experience at "x" that does not meet the standards we have set for ourselves." Disengage safety protocols. Increase olfactory response by 50%. Run program.
19/05/2026
Now as a level 12 space Wizard I can recognise a review from a fellow Scientologist when I see it.
Scientology as we all know, believes that all trauma is connected to what is experienced during birth. The screams. The blood. The mucus plugs. It's all chaotic, and it creates a tension that never leaves the body until we accept it. What the body yearns for is the womb like simplicity of quite warmth and gentle sounds, a womb like experience that we mange to recreate here by pairing our moist non mucus'y food with an aural accompaniment of 1977's Cluster & Eno record on repeat. The warm heartbeat of creation pulsing, filling you up, and laying you down. Like a hug from a bald man sad that he produced several U2 albums.
By combining these elements, you will find yourself healed. And able to control buses with your mind. And several other super powers because you're a wizard now. A mighty mighty space wizard.
That's a Ballard's promise. And all this can be yours for the one off cost of $65 per person then a 50% tithe in perpetuity and a promise to work for 10 thousand years in the grease pits of Xenu. Ballardnetics: eat yourself clean
18/05/2026
I don't know why I even post photos of food. Sure, we're a restaurant and I guess it helps but even on those accounts I occasionally peek thru the blinds at with what I'm sure are 1000's of active, upright and genuine followers, food photos seem to have an engagement level on par with an announcement letting people know about your upcoming open mic night where you're taking your bedroom comedy act to the streets.
The mob demands blood, adversarial conflict and a side being taken. Or apparently, an opinion on what is a good temperature for an oven as that post is over 3k reshares, 60k plus views and the kind of likes that you normally only see on a post announcing that you're closing and thanks for the memories. Or something specifically niche erotic. It's probably a fe**sh for a very online and very active community.
So bu**er if I know what works. But as long as the IBS is flaring, I don't know what else to do with this time, so I'll guess I'll keep committing to word salad and wear my lack of professionalism like a badge.
Food. It's warming and despite what those Silicon Valley tech bro's would have you believe with their advocacy for the efficiency of nutritional paste, a pleasant part of life.
If anyone would like to know what this dish is I can tell you. Or I could just give you a list of the top 5 chef in Melbourne I reckon I could win a fight with. Whatever the machine needs I will feed it.
17/05/2026
Look if we could just speed up the bit where you have a little tanty about how there is no collective sense of personal responsibility anymore and that people would rather selfishly co-opt the staffs time for 30 minutes at the expense of other more well organised patrons, to negotiate about menu ingredients rather than make a note when they made a booking and just get to the f**king point where you tell me which dishes you arbitrarily decided to put coriander and or coriander seeds in today because really, at the end of the day a lack of consistency in your food is more your fault than ours, that would be just super mate as I feel like I'm in reservoir dogs with entitled pricks to the left of me and self righteous ba****ck chefs to the right of me and here I am stuck in the middle of the pass with you so just get to the f**king point you overgrown manchild.
15/05/2026
Can I make a dessert or what? Well no.. but I try with the entitled confidence of an aging white man so let me mansplain feijoas to you... you know the taste of kiwifruit? The fruit that was aggressively rebranded from Chinese gooseberry by the Bay of Plenty junta in 1959 for reasons that are definitely not racist in origin? That one? Well a Feijoa tastes like a kiwifruit that's spent 6 months at uni and now tells people that James Joyce is their favourite author and you don't understand the ironic appeal of moustaches.
So there's that. But there are also other desserts because we have one speed and it's redlining.
If there was a philosophy to my cooking beyond "learn to season you bland bastards" and "bu**er seasonality just tell me what's cheap" is that I try and layer as many textures in a dish as possible and using the same ingredient many ways is just a lazy way of elevating flavour, mouth feel and overall composition.
Just look at that banana desert. It features caramelised banana, banana skin caramel, banana bread, dehydrated orange braised banana and I also just ate a banana in front of the others as a warning about what happens if you displease me. To finish there'll be a banana fritter with cinnamon and banana sugar.
It's fun.
Did you accidentally order two boxes of bananas a month ago and are starting to panic about using them all up?
Hahahahaha - no that's nutty. Textures. Plans. Passion. That's what I'm all about!
14/05/2026
Peeling
Dicing
Confiting
Drying
Fluffing
Frying
It's a lotta steps for these potatoes.
If I was making an arthouse film about hell,
I reckon I'd use the tedium of this process to illustrate it.
To demonstrate the Fate of the Unlearned, which as all good Catholics know, is the section of limbo where good people who never heard of Christ go to suffer in the absence of something they never knew was missing. Or as I call it to paraphrase the great Phil Colin’s “Another day in Hospitality”
Suffering in the absence of something you never knew was missing becuase you're too busy treating a potato to a good time. What am I missing? Is it friendship? Weekends? Sunshine? A functional back? The camaraderie of another birthday party you’ll most likely not be able to attend as another relationship withers on the vine as the only nourishment you can provide is the saltiness from your sweat and tears as you eat cold borscht and bleed and envy those that die in mining disasters. Can you even remember what it was to not be here.
But then, at the end of another week as you push that hernia back into place you think of the freedom, the passion and go god I love this before queuing up another evening of kid rock bangers for the People forced to endure what I create in order to feast upon my joy.
Wouldn’t change a thing. My potatoes make me happy
14/05/2026
Last chance to dine with decadence as sourcing these mofo's is difficult and costly and the innocent intention of my backyard harvesting of unwanted fruit from the elderly was thwarted by a vicious sack beating from a 90 year old Italian woman who was surprisingly nimble for one of advanced years and was able to wrestle me to the ground before I could get back over that fence.
So potentially no more. Unless I can broker a truce but even then, my honour prevents me from accepting my own folly or paying $25 per kg for what I still regard as farm fodder to some extent.
I left the skins on with this batch because as we all know that's where the flavour is, so I'm pretty happy with the floral, herbal decadence infesting this dish. And to the person that said it tasted "bitter", please don't. That's so inaccurate it's just strange at this moment. It's like gazing at Michelangelo's pieta and remarking that you feel "sandy" or reading the section around Druss' final battle in David Gemmell's seminal work "Legend" and saying it made you feel "quite Brian".
There's wrong and then there's whatever the hell this is...
13/05/2026
[PHONE RINGS]
ME: (greasy, trying to be professional) hi there this is Ballard's! How can I help?
CALLER: Hi, I keep trying to make a booking for 7:30pm inside on Friday night but it's not letting me, there must be a mistake with your system?
ME: hmmm ok - Let me see if i can step away from the kitchen and I'll pass that onto our I.T department.
ME: Och Aye? I.T here. Listen, laddie, I’ve got the booking sheet right in front of me, haven't I? If you canna make a booking at 7:30pm it's because we're fookin' full ain't it you daft carnt. Dinnae fash yourself you unrepentant gobs**te.
CALLER: what the f**k. No one talks to me like that. Put the goddamn owner on.
ME: I’ll see if the gaffer’s in...
ME: Hello! You’re speaking with the Owner. How can I help you? They said what to you? Oh deary deary me that is totally unacceptable Everything’s under control. I will see that man fired immediately have no fear!
ME: < falsetto screaming) HEY! YOU! YOU’RE FIRED! I KNEW IT WAS A MISTAKE HIRING YOU BECAUSE YOU REMINDED ME OF A YOUNG JIM KERR, PARTICULARLY THAT VIDEO WHERE HE HAS THE FARRAH FAWCETT HAIR & JODHPURS. HOW DARE YOU TALK TO A CUSTOMER LIKE THAT. GET OUT!
ME:
11/05/2026
The myth of the empty table
Just because a table is vacant doesn’t mean that it is without purpose or allocation. It may be awaiting a guest with a reservation who's parking the car, it may be about to be reset between rotations, it may have just been in use or it may about to be in use.
To see an empty table and demand a seat is to mistake a pause for the void. It is like claiming that nothing is happening because the world goes dark every time you blink. Life exists beyond what you can perceive and with patience, will come the realisation that it is only with eyes wide open that the generosity and wonder of life itself will be seen.
Or maybe we just refuse to seat you because we hate you. It's probably this one. You were right. You were always right.
11/05/2026
So after a weekend where someone had a go at me for not opening Mother's Day because I selfishly chose to spend it with my own family rather than working to feed theirs, and we had a 1 star review where we were called disorganised by someone that turned up 30 minutes late, failed to mention their complicated dietaries despite multiple requests highlighted several times on the booking platform (we served over 160 people on Saturday in a process that was pretty much seamless I felt) so if we're talking about disorganised maybe take the call that's coming from inside the house and I can recommend a good therapist to look into this concept called projection if you'd like, I realise that the only thing keeping me going is the knowledge that the rolls Royce of jaffle makers awaits my arrival for a late night snack before I get up and do it all again.
It's coated in something called Cillian rail and the handle is bone. It even leaves a watermark on the toasted bread that due to the cast iron weight actually crisps and seals rather than steams and shreds. It's a great machine and a personal favourite of mine.
Address
915 High Street Thornbury
Melbourne, VIC
3071
For those taking public transportation, take the train/bus to Thornbury station and walk down High Street. The restaurant will be on your left.
For those driving, take High Street towards Thornbury. There is street parking available along High Street and surrounding streets.
Opening Hours
| Wednesday |
6pm - 10pm |
| Thursday |
6pm - 10pm |
| Friday |
6pm - 10pm |
| Saturday |
6pm - 10pm |
| Sunday |
6pm - 10pm |
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What people say
Ballard's 915 high st thornbury is a must-visit for all vegetarian and vegan food lovers. This all-vegan food and wine bar offers a homely and delicate menu that is sure to satisfy your taste buds. The casual tunes and quality drinks add to the overall ambiance of the restaurant, making it a perfect spot for a night out with friends or family.
The restaurant's location on High Street Thornbury makes it easily accessible for everyone. The menu boasts an array of delicious vegan dishes that are sure to impress even non-vegans. From starters to desserts, every dish is prepared with utmost care and attention to detail.
Although their $14 parma night offer may be coming to an end soon, there are still plenty of reasons to visit Ballard's 915 high st thornbury. Their commitment to providing high-quality vegan food in a cozy atmosphere is truly commendable.
So, whether you're a vegan or simply looking for some delicious plant-based options, Ballard's 915 high st thornbury should definitely be on your list of go-to restaurants in Melbourne. Book now and experience the magic of this amazing vegan food and wine bar!
![[PHONE RINGS]ME: (greasy, trying to be professional) hi there this is Ballard's! How can I help?CALLER: Hi, I keep tryin...](https://img5.melbournemeal.com/932/307/1787279839323077.jpg)
