Can Lonsdale Street Still Be Considered The Greek Precinct Of Melbourne?

Not discounting time spent in Canberra or interstate, I worked for almost twenty seven years at the eastern end of Lonsdale Street, about two city blocks away from what we call the Greek Precinct of Melbourne.

For those not aware, it is mostly the southern stretch of Lonsdale Street between Swanston and Russell, opposite QV. There is a Greek community HQ diagonally opposite on the north east corner of Russell and Lonsdale, and there is a Greek travel agency upstairs in an adjacent laneway. Apparently, back in the 1970s, the Greek Precinct extended around the corner into both Russell and Swanston, as far as Little Bourke.

I don’t really remember that far back – the city was, until I started working there, just a place for school holiday excursions to the Cinemas (we did not have suburban multiplexes then) or for some specified purpose. I was not really familiar with much then except where the major cinemas were vaguely located (all gone!) and where to find the bus stops to get home to Footscray.

My intimate knowledge of what we now call the Hoddle Grid did not really start til I started working in an office in early 1991, and even then it was several years til I really got to know much else of town – including not really getting to know Chinatown in those early days.

From 1996 onward, when I started working in Lonsdale Street, I was a regular in the Greek precinct, where there were at least half a dozen restaurants to choose between, ranging from ones where you could settle in with a bottle or two of red for a very happy meal, right down to where you could grab a quick souvlaki after a Friday night at the pub.

Some very happy memories of dinners at Stalactites in the mid 1990s with a couple of friends, til I discovered that the eggplant dip at Tsindos was way better (I have a thing for eggplant dip).

And I still chuckle as I remember a boozy work Christmas lunch in December 2002 at Antipodes (a sadly short lived but very pleasant Greek restaurant), when one rather Karen-like colleague drank past her tolerance levels and had to be taxied home by another colleague who was going in that direction. Apparently there was a huge mess in the Ladies’ bathroom.

For a brief while circa 2000, there even was a Greek restaurant on the north side, in the QV development, not long after it opened.

But, as I mournfully observed in this blog last November, International Cakes had closed, leaving two restaurants bookending what was left of the precinct. Bit by bit, particularly over the past 15 years or so, each of the restaurants had closed, replaced by either upmarket bars or Asian cuisine.

Yesterday, I was en route to the Exford Hotel in Russell Street to meet a friend (we were going to go to the Wallabies Vs British Lions Rugby Union Test at the MCG) when I happened to notice that Tsindos was closed.

So I googled it and saw a notice that they had gone into administration in April and have permanently closed down, having been a fixture of the Greek Precinct since 1973.

This makes me quite sad. Tsindos is a place which held many happy memories for me, since I became a regular there in late 1999, quite aside from the amazing eggplant dip.

And its closure has other significance. The Greek presence in that part of Lonsdale Street is now down to a souvenir shop and Stalactites, which has also been there since the 1970s.

Can two businesses constitute a precinct anymore?

I call it with great reluctance – the Lonsdale Street Greek Precinct is now dead, having slowly died over the past decade and a half.

The only positive is that we still have the Eaton Mall in Oakleigh, where I regularly meet some former colleagues for dinner, but which is quite a long hike from my pocket of the Western Suburbs. That is a thriving al fresco dining atmosphere, with at least eight separate businesses extending down the street, some occupying shop fronts on both sides of the street.

But regardless of the Eaton Mall’s existence, it is sad that something which has been such a great part of central Melbourne’s cultural and cuisine offerings for such a long time is now gone.