Where - 22 Young St. Moonee Ponds
Price - $26
Website - http://pennyyoung.com.au/
Reviewers - Lee, Nikki & Stefo
And we’re back! Prepare for me to blow your mind-hole because we have officially started our tenth year of ParmaDaze. Review #1 - Mrs. Parmas was uploaded in March of 2010, which gives me two months to work out some sort of anniversary celebration (along with our four hundredth parma review in a few weeks time. We are just racking up the milestones in 2020!)
Anyway! New year, new parma and I wanted to kick off festivities with a pub I was very excited about.
Full disclosure - I love Penny Young. I have been a regular since they opened the bar and it has been one of my favourite spots in the area ever since. Starting as a craft beer bottle shop, Penny Young opened an attached beer hall in early 2018. The menu was very simple when they launched, limited to a selection of (delicious) wood fired pizzas - However when I heard over the break that they had recently added a parma to the menu I made it top priority to visit in the new year.
Penny Young started is life as a beer garden attached to a bottle shop - Now the Bottle Shop has moved a few doors down to a bigger fitout and left the beer garden attached to an empty storefront - I imagine the storefront is going to be absorbed Akira style into the beer hall, making it more of an indoor/outdoor setup, - But that remains to be seen.
We grabbed a table in the dining area and checked the menu for our first parma review of 2020…
We placed our orders at the bar, grabbed some pints of Boatrocker Sunshine & Rainbows Session sour (delicious, by the way) and headed back to our table.
As far as beers go you’re in luck because Penny Young has one of, if not the most impressive tap lists in the Northern suburbs. 18 taps of constantly rotating beers ensure that you never have to have the same beer twice, unless it is delicious, which most of them are. Too many beers to go into detail here, but check their Now Tapped page for a relatively up to date listing.
About 15 minutes after placing the order our parmas arrived at the table…
It looked good! At first glance the cheese could have been grilled a bit more and the schnitzel itself was a bit small, a look that was exacerbated by the oversized plate on which it was sitting, but size isn't everything and I would take a tasty smaller parma over a tasteless behemoth any day of the week.
We grabbed our cutlery and tucked in, the schnitzel was thick enough with a restrained coating of crumbs - However this is where we hit our biggest criticism of the Penny Young parma - The schnitzel was dry. so dry.
Not only was it dry but it was also barely hot. Bordering more on warm than anything else, I’ve got no facts to back this up but it felt as if the schnitzels were pre cooked only to be topped on demand, because the toppings were a completely different story…
… They were delightful! The cheese was steaming hot and melty. The pancetta in place of traditional ham was a welcome addition and added both flavour and a much appreciated crunch to the top of the dish. The napoli sauce was nothing special, looking suspiciously like it had come straight from a can, but it was hot, flavoursome and in this case I wouldn’t consider it a negative when paired with the other toppings on the parma. Such a shame the schnitzel underneath it was in the state it was.
Chips, like the toppings, were served piping hot and fresh. A large serve of steak cut beer battered chips, well seasoned and served almost completely out from underneath the parma. If they had’ve come with a dipping sauce they would be nearing perfection.
The garden salad, like the chips, was also generously served. Plenty of lettuce, tomato, onion and cucumber. If I had one gripe is that it was a little soggy from soaking in the dressing, but otherwise this was a top notch salad.
“I enjoyed the meal overall. The sides were tasty and the toppings flavorsome. The schnitzel sadly was not up to scratch. It was dry and only barely warm (perhaps precooked and reheated?). A quality schnitzel would have made this a top notch Parma!”
“Loved the chips, salad and toppings (the pancetta was an unexpected surprise!) However the schnitzel under it all was quite dry and served warm instead of hot. Could have been great but just fell short!”
In my mind this is a $22-$24 parma. $25 would be pushing it and the $26 they’re charging seems a little steep, not outrageously so, but rolling it back a dollar or two seems like a much better value proposition. Overall I enjoyed the dish but other than the pancetta I can’t claim that top notch ingredients were used all around, and it wasn’t the biggest of dishes. No parma nights on the books at this stage as far as I’m aware.
The Penny Young parma was one tweak away from kicking off our 2020 with a bang. The chips, the salad, the toppings, the pancetta, the beers on tap - All winners, yet they let us down on something as foundational as the schnitzel everything hinges on.
I’m hoping it was just an isolated incident and I get reports of different experiences once this review goes live. I’d even recommend it still worth checking out Penny Young as the meal as a whole was still quite enjoyable all told. Despite the issues I would happily go back … and I intend to.