Whether you want Russian sausage, rotisserie chicken, ramen or pickled pepper bullfrog, you can get it on Koornang Road. The street is arguably the south-east’s most diverse, layered with waves of immigration, and servicing students and families with affordable eats from early morning to late at night. It was a different story in 1983 when strip stayer Lizzy’s Chocolates first opened.
“It was a daytime shopping place,” says Ingrid Nichols, who runs the family store. “These days, it’s thriving in the evenings too.” Carnegie is 12km south-east of the city, with its main strip running south from Dandenong Road for about 700 metres.
The first inhabitants of the area were the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation. In the 1850s, settler William Murray Ross built a sugar beet processing factory here (never used) and a private railway from Elsternwick (used once). With remarkable hubris, Ross sold “Rosstown” land parcels for market-gardens while descending into debt and disgrace.
The essential Good Food guide to Melbourne’s best Eat Streets The Rosstown name persists in the landmark corner pub but the area was renamed Carnegie in 1908, possibly as an attempt to elicit a donation from American industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The appeal to ego had worked in Carnegie, Pennsylvania but no such philanthropy ensued here. Key moments for the suburb include the arrival of post-World War II Jewish immigrants, including my father’s family, who came from Czechoslovakia and op.
