Hold on to your hat, Moon Dog Wild West is bucking expectations

I did not ride the bull. It’s possible this could be viewed as a dereliction of duty. If I, as a reviewer, do not take part in one of the main draws of the venue I am reviewing, can you trust my analysis? The bull – large, mechanical, bucking – is definitely the showpiece of Moon Dog Wild West, the behemoth that finally opened last month in Footscray after many logistical bumps in the road.

To be fair, I recently had major surgery, and bull riding is currently medically ill-advised. Also, a huge part of the experience of riding the bull is getting drunk enough to want to ride the bull. And drinking that much while on the job might be considered unprofessional. (Am I making up excuses? Absolutely.)

I did watch many, many other patrons ride the bull. I assume it’s harder than it looks, or that the riders I witnessed were really, truly drunk, because few of them managed to stay on for long.

It’s a constant of drinking or dining at Wild West: the cowbell rings; a rowdy punter vaults onto the beast; it begins its rocking, tipping dance; they quickly catapult onto the surrounding padded structure. If participating in this inevitability, or watching it happen over and over again, is your idea of a good time (no judgment!), then Moon Dog has you covered.

In parts of America, there’s a certain type of corporate restaurant that’s incredibly prevalent. In these places, you can count on specific things: they are huge, often themed, and come with a dependable menu of beer, burgers, and beer-friendly snacks. Decor is of the neon variety, with some kind of kitschy or nostalgic or simply beer-related through-line. You don’t go there for craft cocktails; you go here for shots and beers and to ride a mechanical bull, to maybe hear a bad cover band, to load up on salt and fat.

Mass American culture is a funny beast, and this iteration is quite specific to places where tourists and college kids hang out.

If you dropped me into one without telling me where I was and asked me to guess, I’d say central Florida. But I could be in many American cities — in the Dallas airport, or even Times Square in New York City. Mass American culture is a funny beast; this iteration is quite specific to places where tourists and college kids hang out, and now we have a version of it in Melbourne.

In this sense, the new Wild West is a shockingly accurate facsimile of a staple of American dining. Located in the hulking former Franco Cozzo showroom, it sprawls over multiple levels, all unfinished wood and neon signs and that bull taking up the centre of the ground floor (you can see the fun from above too; the middle of the first floor has been cut out to allow for bull-ride-viewing). There’s a stage covered in chicken wire for live music, pool tables, old-school video games, and lots of televisions tuned to sports channels.

You order food and drink at the bar, where all of Moon Dog’s core brands are available, including Fizzers, their wildly popular alcoholic seltzers.

The cocktails are breathtakingly sweet – you wouldn’t order a layered frozen Sex on the Beach ($18) and expect anything different (you might expect the margarita or Old Fashioned – both $25 – to be a little less sugar-punchy, but you’d be wrong).

Given all of the above, as well as bar staff who are still very green, I expected the food at Wild West to be functional at best – little more than an afterthought to pad the stomachs of the bull-riders. So I was pleasantly surprised by the guacamole ($15), which was creamy, appropriately spiced and tasted perfectly fresh.

Corn ribs on a creamy sauce slathered in diced tomato were charred nicely, sweet and crunchy and fun to eat ($14).

I was a bit confused by the jalapeno poppers ($17), which had a hard coating, too much cream cheese filling and were barely spicy, but fulfilled their destiny as things that are easy to eat with beer.

Even the chips ($13.50) are the big, soft kind you’d get in an American chain restaurant.

The burgers, too, are pretty good. The buffalo chicken burger ($27) is a big hunk of juicy fried chicken dripping red, spicy oil, bolstered by crunchy coleslaw – in a world of spicy chicken burgers, this is one of the better versions.

And while it would be utterly ridiculous to complain that the barbecue bacon beef burger ($27) is overly rich and salty given the name, the patty itself is meaty and well cooked, and the bacon, sauce and fried onion rings in the sandwich give it its over-the-top quality.

For those in the market for that kind of greasy pleasure, it will hit all the right notes. I might wish for a slightly pared-back version, personally, but pared back is not what this place is about.

For dessert, there’s a pie of the day ($15), a very sweet but perfectly enjoyable lemon meringue when I visited, or cinnamon churro doughnuts ($12) with chocolate dipping sauce.

It’s also really cold in here right now, which feels like an unfair observation, given that heating this massive space is akin to engineering a nice and toasty temperature in an aircraft hangar. But I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t affect the comfort of the experience.

Appropriately, I think the urge to ride the bull is a good barometer for whether Wild West is for you. If that sounds like your jam, you’re going to love it here. If you’d rather leave the fun up to someone else, well, maybe that’s your loss, but I’d absolutely commiserate.