The Sydney dining experience
During a July sortie into the Sydney restaurant scene, I didn’t manage to get a booking at Tetsuya’s, arguably the city’s most high-profile restaurant, sitting as it does at number nine on the 2008 S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list (www.tetsuyas.com). I phoned a few weeks before my departure, and was told that the first available booking was in January 2009. I put my name on the waiting list. No luck.
But if Tetsuya’s is the best restaurant in this Australian city, then it must be truly outstanding because several of the places I did get into gave me among the most satisfying experiences of my culinary life.
Planning my itinerary involved internet research, lots of phonecalls to serious foodie acquaintances and, most felicitously, email contact with Pat Nourse of the much-respected magazine, (www.gourmettraveller.com.au). I wanted to try a full range of places – from fine dining to neighbourhood casual; from established landmarks to new and trendy.
THE SYDNEY DINING EXPERIENCE DEFINED
First, some general remarks, remembering that many Australians, including Sydneysiders, believe that Melbourne offers the best eating in Australia. Above all, stunning views don’t translate into mediocre food. Chefs accept the challenge of providing a menu that’s good enough to overcome the view, rather than taking the attitude that seems to be prevalent among their Capetonian counterparts of leaving it up to the view to provide the “wow” factor. Secondly, they take being a maritime city seriously.
There is a much wider range of fish species available than the limited choice between kabeljou, kingklip and Cape salmon that so often seems to pertain in Cape Town. Icebergs has 25 different kinds of fish on its menu, while the Rockpool menu lists 21, with details of where they are sourced. The best fish and chips I have ever eaten came from Fish Face in Darlinghurst (www.fishface.com.au). This is a tiny café where Steven Hodges and Zachary Sykes are ruthlessly meticulous about serving only the freshest fish possible. I had pea and yabby (fresh-water crayfish) soup, and flathead and chips, served in a paper cone. Absolutely brilliant.
Service was uniformly excellent. It might help that there is a very decent minimum wage for waiters – A$21 (about R150) an hour. Even knowing this, and despite the fact that the exchange rate made every meal -expensive, I never begrudged a gratuity. The egalitarian “G’day mate” culture of the country is part of getting the tone right, but it’s the product knowledge that really distinguishes the Aussie waiter from most of his/her South African counterparts. They really know their stuff, so much so that on a couple of occasions I was dissuaded from first choices because the waiter felt that the starter and main that I’d chosen didn’t harmonise. They were equally adept at suggesting wine and food matches.
It was difficult for me to judge the quality of the winelists, knowing as little as I do about the Australian wine industry, but most places I went to seem to have a fair spread of Australian and New Zealand wines in a range of price brackets, with a more than representative sample of wines available by the glass. Many also have French, German and Spanish wines on their lists, but I only saw one South African wine in the 10 days – Rockpool has the Boekenhoutskloof Cab ’04 listed.
It’s the food that matters most, and the food was beguiling and exquisite. Rockpool’s Neil Perry and the Adelaide-based Cheong Liew are generally regarded as key in the development of what’s called contemporary Australian cuisine. This nods at the French roots of haute cuisine, offers an open-arms hug to the spices and cooking methods of nearby Asia, but is quintessentially Australian in its ingredient mix and casual but inventive bravado. Every chef with any serious aspirations at all talks about constructing dishes that allow quality ingredients to do most of the work. But I’ve never before eaten so many dishes where this has been more than just rhetoric; where no ingredient seemed extraneous; and where there was such an assured and confidently sophisticated control over the whole.
QUAY
www.quay.com.au
In the citation naming Quay as Restaurant of the Year for 2009, Nourse writes that it’s the “union of contemporary technology with cool and unusual fruits of the natural world (Chinese artichokes, tiny purple onions, native violets, white carrots, white borage, the tuber known only as white root) that puts Quay up there with the world’s best”. Nourse had also suggested to me that the three-course lunch at A$85 (about R700 without wine) offered superb value, so that’s what I tried.
The view is quite extraordinary – to the right the Sydney Opera House; in front the blue waters of Sydney harbour; to the left the Harbour Bridge. But the amuse bouche pulled our attention to the plate. It was a delectable morsel of bluefin tuna sashimi with a ginger cucumber jelly and a Japanese lime crème fraîche topped by an edible violet. First course was Sea Pearls – a ball of tuna sashimi with egg-plant purée, and another of smoked eel, slow-cooked octopus and egg-white pearls. These are perfectly formed egg-white balls the size and consistency of caviar eggs. (There are two things chef Peter Gilmore won’t share with anybody outside of his team: how he makes those egg-white pearls, and how he constructs his eight-texture chocolate cake.)
Next up was rare-breed pig belly, gentle braise of green-lipped abalone, handmade silken tofu, Japanese mushrooms and chive flowers. It was exquisitely plated and quite, quite wonderful in the way all the tastes combined to seduce the palate.
The eight-texture chocolate cake is the eighth wonder of the modern world – a base of flourless choc fudge, then layers of choc mousse, choc meringue, choccaramel ganache, caramelised choc puff pastry biscuit, white choc cream, choc crust, and then the pièce de résistance: hot choc sauce to ladle onto the cake. It sits on top for a couple of seconds, and then the heat creates a hole into which the sauce slides to mix with the other seven textures – perfect theatre, perfect pudding!
Gilmore told : “I look to nature for my inspiration. There’s so much out there, so much elegance and beauty – to me, it’s about letting flavours and textures speak for themselves.” Under his supremely gifted baton, the flavours and textures do more than speak;they sing as a choir made up of perfect individual singers delivers a song that arrives at the ear as one voice.
MARQUE
www.marquerestaurant.com.au
The budget only allowed for one dégustation menu, and I had it at Marque in the Surry Hills part of Sydney – a suburb I returned to again and again for good food. Marc Best is widely hailed for producing some of the most interesting food in Sydney. For example, he wraps lamb shoulder in hay and roasts it in a moist oven to give it a piquant, herbal flavour; and he serves suckling pig with milk skin – milk baked until a skin forms, then roasted and draped over the pig to give a taste that is both subtle and persistent.
His 12-course dégustation meal with wine costs A$220 (R1 760). Ours started with a beetroot and foie gras macaroon – a startling but very successful contrast in colour, texture and taste. Some of the courses contained daring elements, like the bitter chocolate and parmesan that harmonised unexpectedly with roast quail. Other dishes are more conventional but equally satisfying, like the cured ocean trout with coleslaw and lemon-dill jelly. The red meat dish was Wagyu steak with root vegetables, Jerusalem artichoke and Manjimup truffle. I was told the truffles come from Western Australia where spores from France are grown on Ozzie oak, and then sold at R16 000/kg. They tasted superb, and lent a smoky edge to the steak.
The matching wines came from New Zealand; the Rhône and Burgundy in France; and Friuli and Alba in Italy. But the most audacious yet still bang-on successful match was the final one – a warm chocolate ganache with rosemary, praline and lemongrass served with a 50/50 mix of 12-year-old Muscat and home-made ginger beer.
OSCILLATE WILDLY
Tel: 0061 2 9517 4700
The hottest restaurant ticket in Sydney at the moment, for locals anyway, is Oscillate Wildly where the 25-yearold tyro, Daniel Puskas, holds sway. It’s a tiny room in Newtown with a chequerboard tile floor and pressed-tin ceiling. It’s booked weeks in advance. It’s obvious why. They welcome BYO, the service is cheery and slick, and you can enjoy three inventive, subversive courses for about A$50 (R400).
Puskas will probably tone down his exuberance as he grows older, but I delighted in the way he grafts a showman’s touch onto simple, familiar flavours. His chicken liver parfait is sublimely made and achieves heroic status with some extraordinary presentation – towering sheets of oh-so-thin pastry flavoured by imprinted garlic and thyme. He calls them garlic fossils and they rise out of the plate like golden menhirs. I also had to try his venison because of the chocolate “soil” he serves with it – a crunchy mix of almonds, cocoa and butter that looks uncomfortably like a handful of dirt but which, in the mouth, blends perfectly with the venison, pumpkin purée and sautéed beetroot leaves.
BODEGA
www.bodegatapas.com
Another newcomer duo making big waves in Surry Hills is Best New Talent for 2009 – Elvis Abrahanowicz and Ben Milgate of the über-trendy tapas bar Bodega. It’s Spain meets South America with lots of Aussie cheek thrown in for good measure. No bookings and lots of would-be diners, but it’s worth standing in line for fried prawns coated in smoked paprika, black pepper and coriander seeds; boneless lamb neck cooked for 24 hours before being served with aubergine and pinenut purée; spicy black pudding with apple and radish; and an awe-inspiring citrussy crème catalana. Watch out – the prices might seem reasonable, but everything’s so good that the bill can mount up scarily.
LONGRAIN
www.longrain.com
Then there’s the Asian food. Longrain in Surry Hills is where lots of Sydney’s beautiful people hang out. Again, no bookings, and everybody’s seated at a long communal table, but patrons are happy to sit for hours in the very stylish bar, listening to funky music and sipping lethal cocktails, waiting for their chance to eat dishes like crisp fried duck and banana blossom salad with sweet fish sauce, and caramelised pork hock with five spice and chilli vinegar. It’s loud, it’s expensive and it’s fabulous.
SPICE I AM
www.spiceiam.com
Spice I Am, also in Surry Hills, is much more downmarket, but Nourse says it’s the most authentic Thai food he’s eaten outside Bangkok. Try the hoy tod – a mussel omelette – or the rich and spicy boat noodle soup. If you have a firewall on your palate, go for the jungle curry. It’s searingly hot but still redolent with taste.
MARIGOLD
www.marigold.com.au
You can’t be in Sydney without a yum cha experience at the Marigold in Chinatown. Yum cha literally means drinking tea and refers to the custom of eating small servings of different foods while sipping Chinese tea. Go to Marigold on a weekend at about 11. There are two floors and every one of the nearly 500 tables is full of people selecting from a constant stream of trolleys going past. Pork, chicken, beef and prawn in a bewildering variety of forms – for me, pork in a sadza-like envelope, steamed beef tendon and mango pancake stood out.
BISTRODE
www.bistrode.com
Jeremy and Jane Strode serve very assured bistro food at this converted heritage butcher shop in Surry Hills. It requires great confidence and even greater skill to present food as unadorned as pig’s head terrine and corned wagyu beef served with creamy potato mash and a dab of hot mustard, but both were truly memorable. This is the restaurant I’d most like to live close to.
NOTABLE OTHERS
The budget didn’t allow for full meals at Rockpool (www.rockpoolsydney.com) and Pier (www.pierrestaurant. com.au), but I got a sense of the excellence of each kitchen, firstly from the Bar Menu at Rockpool, where I had the deceptively simple but rewarding ham and eggs – (does cured pork come better than this?) with an egg poached at 60ºC so the white sets but not the yolk; and from the Tasting Room at Pier – another picture-perfect view over Rose Bay complementing the coral trout carpaccio, yellowfin tuna tartare with beetroot and wasabi foam, and pan-roasted scallops.
And you can’t go to Sydney without a visit to Bondi Beach. At one end is North Bondi Italian – no bookings and always a long queue, but worth getting there early for the view, the people and Italian classics like Arancini (fried rice balls). At the other end of the beach is Icebergs Dining Room and Bar – more upmarket, equally trendy (Nicole Kidman was there when I visited), equally worth visiting (for both, see www.idrb. com). And if you haven’t got R300 for a piece of fresh fish, sit in the bar with a glass of bubbly from the Yarra Valley and watch the passing parade with deep contentment in your heart. That’s what I did.
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