Grill Me Kangaroo Down, Sport
When I first began heading Down Under in the mid-1970s, the term Australian fine dining was an oxymoron. In only a handful of top hotels or in mom-and-pop-run Italian cafes could you even find coffee that wasn’t instant. Dining out was a quick trip to the pub for steak and potatoes or to a local carryout joint for burgers adorned with pineapple or sliced beets (the humble beet was, for many years, Australia’s unofficial national vegetable).
But during the past decade a revolution has taken place on Australia’s dinner plates. It’s as if the country has suddenly discovered taste buds, and from hotel dining rooms to corner cafes, menus have been transformed with fresh coriander and sun-dried tomatoes, mangosteen and wallaby shank.
“We were a nation of culinary Luddites,” says David Thompson, chef at Darley Street Thai and Sailor’s Thai restaurants.
But no more. A number of influences have converged to improve things. Inspired by their neighbors to the north, Australian chefs have begun lacing their dishes with Asian flavors. The country’s balmy Mediterranean climate has encouraged an alfresco lifestyle that’s complemented by the cooking of Lebanese, Greek, Turkish and Armenian immigrants. Embraced as they are by oceans, Australians have discovered there is more to seafood than a dressing of batter and a bath in bubbling fat. And, finally, after more than two centuries of ignoring the backyard ingredients that kept aborigines fed for 50,000 years, chefs are creating a modern cuisine using bush tucker (or aboriginal) ingredients from the outback.
Melbourne has always been the food lover’s favorite eating city, and the conservative Victorian capital is still a center of traditional cuisine. But it is in Sydney, with its casual ambience, where the new wave of haute Australian cuisine is booming. Even the head of the prestigious U.S.-based International Assn. of Culinary Professionals, Ethel Hofman, called Sydney’s food “. . . a thrilling preview of what will profoundly influence 21st Century cuisine.” The Olympics are heading to Sydney in the year 2000, and right now that city by the sea is in training for gastronomic gold.
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A pioneer in the transformation of Australian cuisine, Montreal-born chef Serge Dansereau, arrived at the brand-new Regent of Sydney Hotel in 1983. The hotel restaurant was called Kable’s for a convict who arrived from England with the first settlers and wound up as Australia’s first jailer at a prison built on the site of the present Regent hotel.
“Culinary-wise, Australia was a frontier when I arrived from Canada, a society of roast beef and fish and chips.” But Dansereau worked closely with food scientists to test new ingredients so that he could bring them to the table. He encouraged growers to produce quality rather than quantity and to develop new products, particularly for salads and cheeses. He sought out local products: lamb from Gippsland, beef from Millawa, Jervis Bay mussels.
The result is seen in a lunch I sampled at Kable’s: Balmain “bugs,” a seafood similar to baby lobster tail, dressed simply in chopped tomato and garlic; buttery Illabo lamb served fork-tender and rare with a potato leek pancake; seared Shark Bay scallops layered with cured ham and caramelized pear.
“The great thing about cooking in Australia is that you can break the rules,” Dansereau says. “Australia’s culinary history doesn’t come to us with hundreds of years of tradition.”
Seafood for most Sydney restaurants comes from the Sydney Fish Market at Sydney Harbor in Pyrmont. Hundreds of varieties of fish and shellfish are sold at the market, which is open daily and sells 35 million pounds of seafood annually.
These days, Asian influences on Sydney menus abound, but many agree that the reigning wizard of East/West cuisine is Tetsuya Wakuda of Tetsuya’s restaurant. Tetsuya’s has twice won the prestigious Australian Business Traveler magazine award for the best restaurant in the country. In the nondescript suburb of Rozelle, the restaurant is hard to find. But Tetsuya’s is often booked six weeks or more in advance.
In the simple surroundings of a pastel green restaurant with plain wooden blinds, Tetsuya’s serves food that is culinary haiku. The tasting menu can keep diners at the table for hours. The chef evokes the Japanese Buddhist dining tradition of kaiseki by serving a parade of about a dozen small dishes that present unlikely but balanced combinations: consomme of tomato and tea, a morsel of veal fillet with Japanese wasabi, a savory flan of blue cheese and vanilla. Each course is accompanied by a taster of specially selected champagnes and wines.
“I was seduced by Thailand,” says David Thompson, a Western chef who serves traditional Thai cuisine at his Sydney restaurant, Darley Street Thai. During an 18-month stint in Bangkok, Thompson studied the Thai language and discovered the tradition of corpse books: books of recipes developed by chefs that are printed and distributed at their funerals by their families. He assembled a collection of these cookbooks, some of which are up to 150 years old, and combined with his training under the guidance of a matriarch who cooked for the Royal Family, he set about presenting real Thai with a dash of the West in such dishes as “jungle curry of grilled venison and bamboo” and “stir-fried yabbies,” which are freshwater crayfish.
He works with farmers in the Northern Territory and northern Queensland, encouraging them to plant kaffir limes, water lilies, durian and wild ginger. “We have a climate in Australia where we can grow everything Asian; there’s no need to import ingredients,” Thompson says.
In addition to his lavishly modern Darley Street Thai Restaurant in King’s Cross, Sydney’s downtown night-life neighborhood, Thompson has recently opened Sailor’s Thai in the Rocks area of Sydney, site of the city’s original settlement. The restaurant name reflects the heritage of the building in which the contemporary Thai restaurant is situated, the old Sailors Mission on the waterfront. While the downstairs is Thompson’s classic Thai-style restaurant, I loved the upstairs, where I sat at a long, steel noodle bar with stools and indulged in a brief but delicious meal of Thai noodle and dumpling dishes.
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When Habib Farah was a schoolboy in the ninth and 10th grades, he said he would hide the Lebanese foods his mother prepared for his lunches. “A sign of how much and how quickly this country has changed is that by the 11th grade I was having to share my lunch with the kids in my class.”
In his Criterion Restaurant downtown, Farah, with the help of his mother, has created a menu that combines the flavors of Lebanon with Australian ingredients. After sampling a heavenly, light baba ghannouj fragrant with the flavor of roasted eggplant, a velvet olive tapenade and a smoked aioli on the traditional meze appetizer plate, I was ready to forego the main course. But after surveying a tempting array, including Cermoula lamb rack with Jerusalem artichokes and vegetable risotto encased in vine leaves with roasted pimento salsa, I settled on Habib’s classic: oven-roasted Moroccan spiced fish with couscous. It was served with a sweet date paste and fava bean puree. For dessert I couldn’t resist the fig and pistachio pie with coffee cream.
Within the bright glass-enclosed restaurant, Farah demonstrates what can happen when traditional Lebanese cooking is combined with other cuisines. Yet he has not abandoned classic Lebanese food. It is offered on Saturdays at 8 p.m., when a succession of platters arrives to the rhythm of Lebanese music and belly dancers.
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Chris Mansfield takes her inspiration from the gamut of international flavors at her Paramount Restaurant in Potts Point, a glitzy suburb of Sydney. Paramount is just as likely to serve up five-spice duck and shiitake mushroom pie with ginger glaze as seared, rare wallaby fillet with spicy masala sauce. This is one of the most innovative menus in the city.
It’s a cozy restaurant, despite its starkly modern decor, but the flavors turned out here are remarkable. Mansfield bakes fresh sardines, and they’re magical with pancetta, garlic and pine nuts, alongside a salsa verde. She smokes plump, ocean trout in the Asian fashion with tea. She stuffs squid with prawns, water chestnuts and kaffir lime and serves it with black ink noodles.
You never forget the first time you eat witchetty grubs--the finger-size white larvae of a large northern Australian moth--especially when they’ve been lightly grilled and exposed to the expertise of a Frenchman named Jean-Paul Bruneteau at Riberries Taste Australia restaurant. I downed those delicious morsels back in 1984 when Bruneteau was the first chef in the country to experiment with bush tucker ingredients in his restaurant.
He moved Riberries into the city a few years ago and continues to lead the wave with indigenous ingredients, but he is no longer the only one on the block using wattle seed from the indigenous wattle tree as seasoning. It’s becoming so mainstream now that Qantas airline serves bush tucker ingredients and more and more restaurants are including native ingredients on their menus.
Kangaroo and emu have leaped off Australia’s coat of arms and onto dinner plates at many restaurants, including Edna’s Table in the heart of Sydney’s downtown financial district.
Chef Raymond Kersh headed to the Kimberley Ranges in Western Australia 30 years ago and began learning about native foods from a tribe of desert aborigines. Together with his sister, Jennice Kersh, they opened Edna’s Table, an elegant if somewhat funky place with boomerang chairs and aboriginal art.
The food is exciting. I started with emu and pine nut tortellini served with Asian greens, quandong (a native apricot) kernel and ginger jus, then moved on to tender grilled fillet of kangaroo served rare on risotto with a Davidson plum sauce. A second visit was necessary just to try the gum leaf smoked loin of veal wrapped in paperbark (the bark of a Queensland tree).
Crocodile is also on the menu as is Northern Territory wild goose. So many native ingredients are used--from warrigal greens to the Kakadu plum, that the menu comes with a bush tucker glossary. Small wonder the aborigines of Sydney Cove watched with amazement as the original English settlers nearly starved to death rather than acknowledge the native food.
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GUIDEBOOK
A Sydney Sampler
Where to eat: (To reach the following restaurants from the United States, dial 011-61-2 before each number.) Criterion Restaurant, MLC Center (lobby level), Martin Place, Sydney; local telephone 9233-1234, fax 9223-3387. Open Monday through Friday for lunch and morning tea; Monday through Saturday for dinner. Main courses (in Australia, the word “entree” refers to appetizers) about $19. Reservations recommended.
Darley Street Thai, 30 Bayswater Road, Sydney; tel. 9358-6530. Dinner nightly. Main courses about $24. Reservations recommended.
Edna’s Table, MLC Center (lobby level), corner of King and Castlereagh streets, Sydney; tel. 9231-1400. Lunch Monday through Friday; dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Main courses $15 to $18. Reservations recommended.
Kable’s at the Regent hotel, 199 George St., Sydney; tel. 9238-0000. Lunch Tuesday through Friday; dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Lunch special, two courses about $36; three courses $42; main courses about $28. Reservations recommended.
Paramount, 73 MacLeay St., Potts Point; tel. 9358-1652. Dinner nightly. Main courses about $25. Reservations recommended.
Riberries Taste Australia, 411 Bourke St., Sydney; tel. 9361-4929. Dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Bring your own wine. Fixed-price menu: three courses $41. Reservations recommended.
Sailor’s Thai, 106 George St., Sydney; tel. 9251-2466, fax 9357-7592. Lunch Monday through Friday; dinner Monday through Saturday. Main courses $17 to $24.
Tetsuya’s Restaurant, 729 Darling St., Rozelle; tel. 9555-1017, fax 9810-4824. Lunch Wednesday through Saturday; dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Five-course lunch menu $55, dinner menu $80, wine-tasting menu $21. Reservations essential.