Ah, the joys of dining out. Also, visiting a restaurant I haven’t been to before. And best of all, cooking with fire! A triple combo that was so good!
It’s a relatively new restaurant at less than a year old. Located next to one of my favourite cafes, I always noticed it but never really took time to go visit (plus I never seem to find the money to go!), but now seemed like the perfect time. Yes, what a fantastic night!
It was just myself and another party of 5 on a stormy Friday night. Usually I avoid Fridays, but I was feeling it this time. The max capacity at the time was 10 people, and already there were no shows! How crushing. It always makes me sad when people don’t call to cancel.
Their non alcoholic options were almost non existent, so i was contemplating getting a glass of wine, but then I found on their list a green ant gin! Woah! Yeah, I definitely had to try that! It was garnished with lemon, making it harder to taste out the nuances of the gin, but since I’ve eaten green ants before at Noma Australia, I could use my imagination to sort of bridge the gin to the tonic and lemon. Good stuff!
Fired baked bread with lamb fat, confit garlic. Ooooooh yeah. Do you know how hard it is to get animal fat bread?? I recall having chicken fat with butter somewhere (maybe Automata?), and then there was the beef fat taro at Orana (ok so that’s not quite bread, but you get the point), but it seems to be pretty uncommon? This was incredible. I don’t usually like lamb fat but I suspect that this is because I never ate lamb growing up because my mum didn’t like it, but since I’ve been experimenting with my own cooking adventures, I think I’m now used to the flavour so this was delicious! And that confit garlic too! It was just SO GOOD.
Corn ribs, chaat masala, charred lemon. Yeeah that spice on the corn is great! Plus I love corn so this was so good! There was so much corn too!
Abrolhos Island scallops, salted kombu butter. This is the crowd favourite, but I’ve had a loooooot of scallops, so this one wasn’t actually my favourite haha (it was the bread). The salted kombu was super tasty though, so I can see why everyone loves this dish. But when I can get live Rottnest Island scallops for myself, this one’s a hard call. Yes, it’s great, but I’ve had many great scallops!
Grilled occy, charred corn salad, fermented chilli sauce. The rest of the menu were basically a list of their greatest hits, and this was more of a new/experimental dish. Not bad! I personally felt that it was a bit of corn overkill, considering how much corn I ate earlier, but I love corn so it was fine. The octopus was super tasty and it came covered in fermented chilli! Hmmm I still think Besk’s house hot sauce was just that bit tastier, but this also had a similar tomatoey flavour. I feel like the octopus might pair better with a different vegetable? We could just go Spanish? and say potatoes but maybe it does well with other foods too!
Mottainai lamb, pomme puree, minted jus. Yeah wow that lamb. Such deliciousness! And sorry, but I’m going to call that mash potatoes. That was super tasty too! Thick and luscious. I’m amazed at how tasty that lamb was. The chef was saying how he can always taste it out from other producers – these lambs are fattened up with carrots from the carrot farm next door! So good. This was my second favourite next to the bread.
And lastly for dessert, sticky date pudding, bourbon butterscotch sauce, vanilla ice cream. Yeah I love sticky date pudding! It’s one of those foods I wasn’t terribly fond of as a kid, but started loving it as I grew up. I pretty much demolished this dessert, it was so good, with a great sauce to pudding ratio. Yeah! If anything I wished there was a bit more date? But that’s a very minor thing and personal preference.
Overall it was a fantastic and great value dinner! Plus I loved the whole cooking with fire experience. Flames just make everything taste so much better! Because it was so quiet, I also managed to enjoy a lovely conversation with the chef, who seems to have worked at many restaurants! That’s pretty cool! What a lovely bunch of people, and I think everyone’s just happy to be out and about again. I’ve been having so much fun with home cooking, but having flavours and techniques constructed by other people is also very fun!