The Little Mussel Cafe - Portarlington: The Mussel Capital of Victoria
If you frequent Victoria’s best restaurants, you’re already familiar with Port Phillip Bay’s bounty of seafood. These days chefs write “Portarlington” onto their menus as a marker of quality, but not so long ago, Melburnians turned their noses up at the township’s celebrated mussels.
“When we first started growing them, everyone just thought they were bait. No one wanted to eat them,” says Tracy Bold from Advance Mussel Supply and The Little Mussel Cafe. “It wasn’t actually until chefs started putting them on their menus, and now everyone eats mussels.”
Mussels have been farmed in Portarlington since 1982. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit for the Portarlington Mussel Festival, a day of live music, activities, local beer and wine tasting, art and classic car displays, some 200 market stalls and, of course, mussels (10 tonnes, to be exact). The popularity of mussels has increased spectacularly over the last forty years, but according to Tracy, people still have a lot to learn.
“There are all these myths about mussels. I get phone calls every week with people saying their mussels floated or they didn’t open,” she says. “If a mussel is closed, it’s perfectly fine to eat. That’s how the cafe evolved; to teach people about mussels.”
Tracy married into one of Portarlington’s original mussel farming families. Her father-in-law had one of the first experimental mussel farming leases in town. Along with her husband, Peter, Tracy took over the business around 30 back. Now the Bolds grow between three and five hundred tonnes of mussels each year.
Tracy calls her customers to take mussel orders the same morning Peter heads out on the boat to harvest them. Once back on shore, some stay local and are cooked up in the cafe, while the rest are distributed to seafood wholesalers and restaurants in Melbourne.
“Portarlington mussels are really sweet. Our water is so clean, and that’s what gives them such the fresh, salty flavour,” says Tracy. “I’m not biased or anything, but I do think they’re the best!”
