Rockpool - 11 Bridge Street, CBD

Hi everyone.  Haven't blogged since Valentines! And since then, there was another occasion, my birthday in May.  Taking this opportunity I decided I wanted to go to Rockpool.  A Sydney institution of 25 years.  It has moved from the premises of George Street to now a heritage listed building with a big dark presence.  Through the large archway double doors I am instantly transported to an old school upmarket dining room with a masculine feel to it.  Service as soon as you step in is slick and friendly.

 

As my husband and I sat with the menus we are asked if we would like to have a look at the Champagne trolley . . . umm yes please!  The Champagne man wheeled the trolley over and gave us his rundown on all the bottles on offer.   I choose carefully from all the beautifully recited descriptions of each.

 

The dinner menu consists of 8 small bites, the you can choose if you want 1, 2 or 3 more courses.  We decided to share 1/2 a dozen of the Sydney Rock oysters a special of the night plus a smallish meal and then have a larger dish as a main each.

 

Oysters and champagne was the perfect way to start that I forgot to take a pic of them. 

 

Here are the dishes!

Chargrilled prawn with shiso and nam prik, and on the right tempura prawn with daikon and soy.  I didn't take a photo of the prawn being grilled at the table on a tiny clay grill with the special flavoured smoke billowing into the dark atmospere.  I can't remember what was creating the smoke though. The prawn was ok, had a strong grill flavour, I was worried it wouldn't be cooked enough as it only had about 2 minutes on the grill. . .

 

Chicken wings with egg butter and konbu butter. These were so tasty, the chicken was crisp and the butters, wow, they packed a punch so creamy and "buttery", lucky there were only two wings I could've eaten more but then wouldn't have had room for the rest of the meal.

The pork slider was unusual in this setting, as you know, this would be more at home at the The Carrington than here.  Anyway I was looking forward to this flavour combo; pork belly, chicken parfait and chilli on a rice roll.  It was 3 lady like mouthfuls of happiness!  The rich parfait mixed with the soft pork was on the money.  Can I have this as a normal sized burger please?

 

Spanner crab with scallop mousse and steamed bun, although it wasn't really a steam bun, more like a small square of white toast.  The mousse was scallopy, nice and light.  Again I could have had a bigger portion of this to taste more of the seafood.

 

Chirashi of sushi of tuna, trumpeter and squid.  Deconstructed sushi at it's best.  All the little bits that I can't remember added so much to each mouthful.  The edible flowers making it ever so pretty and the best looking dish of the night.  Loved the shell dish!

 

Snapper with clams and parsley butter.  Perfectly cooked piece of snapper.  Combined with some mini clams it was a clean, subtle flavoured, refined dish.

Honey and spelt bread served with Rockpool butter and fresh ricotta.  The red sauce on top of the ricotta was tomatoey, but really subtle.  The butter by far was the spread of choice, it was so light and fluffy, that little bit on the dish was not enough.  I could've spread all that on one piece of bread alone!

 

This was our small share dish - Sterling caviar with soft poached egg, crispy potato and allemande sauce.  Allemande is based on one of the French five basic sauces, Veloute, but made thicker with eggs.  This was a pretty rich dish, and lucky we shared as I was getting full and mains were yet to come.  The caviar was not of the pop variety, but still the balls of saltiness were delicious and went perfectly with the egg and crispy spud.

 

Pigeon with strange flavour sauce.  I can't really remember what the waiter said when I asked what the strange flavour sauce consisted of, but it had Szechuan pepper and five spice in there somewhere.  The pigeon is served pink, so be warned.  I was sceptical as I usually only have pigeon the Cantonese way which is crispy skinned and usually dry.  Eating it like this was different, I would've preferred it to be cooked a bit more.  They encouraged you to eat with your hands, which I did, but I still felt a bit funny in the posh environment of the place holding the leg and ripping the meat off it with my teeth!

My husband had the braised beef cheek sukiyaki with winter melon, gem lettuce and tendon.  This was strong flavoured and really really good.  I had food envy.  Definitely better than my pigeon.  The beef was soft, the tendon, gelatinous and all tied in with the not too sweet sauce.  I really like the use of cheap Chinese ingredients in this modern twist.  I guess that's what Neil Perry has made his name from. 

I was too full for a proper dessert, which was fine as you still get the famous Date tart as the petit four with the pre dessert of yoghurt sorbet with vanilla, white pepper, grapefruit and thyme honey granola.  An interesting mix but just what we needed to end on a sweet note.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed  my experience at this 3 hatted restaurant and was not let down after having wanted to dine here for over 10 years.  All the food had significant and memorable flavours and there was no dish that was a thumbs down.  I definitely recommend Rockpool for a special occasion.

 

 

The Apollo - 44 Macleay Street, Potts Point

Ahh Valentines Day, the day to show your loved one how much you love them and shower them with gifts so everyone else can see how much they are loved.  Yeah right.  This day is an excuse to go out for dinner, stuff the roses!  I just wanted to go to a nice restaurant and eat a nice meal with my husband.  So I took the liberty to book a restaurant (yes how romantic "I" booked it) I have been meaning to go to since it opened a few years ago as, Greek cuisine would  remind us of our honeymoon.

The Apollo is a restaurant that serves Greek food in Australia in a modern way, put simply.  Using ingredients that are in season in Oz but go well with Greek staples like octopus and lamb.

To start off with we had the grilled octopus with cucumber, oregano and some thin potato chips, $26.  The octopus had a great charred flavour and the cucumber soaked up all the juices, very tasty.  We said we could have had a plate each. 

Next up we had the rabbit salad with charred radicchio and manouri cheese, $33.  This was a yummy salad, lots of rabbit meat.  I was trying to come up with an adjective that differentiated it from chicken.  I couldn't really.  It's just very similar to chicken.  The dressing added the saltiness along with the shaved cheese, a bit creamy which balanced out the sight bitterness of the raddichio.

Then we had the fried okra with mint and vinegar, $12.  I only ever had okra once Egyptian style in more of a stew so I decided to give it a go as a side to the main.  Okra is kind of like a seedy, less meaty zucchini I guess.  The vinegar and mint went really with it.

And the pièce de resistance!  The oven baked lamb shoulder with lemon and greek yoghurt, $38.  Oh my how I love this dish, anywhere in the world!  The generous piece of  meat was cooked perfectly with the crispy bits on top and the melt in mouth fat under the skin.  With a squeeze of lemon and the yummy thick yoghurt peppered with cucumber each mouthful was insanely delicious. 

I highly recommend you try The Apollo.  Great service and food.  Lots more I could try on the menu.  Thank you to the waiter who chased us up the street to give my husbands bag back when we left without it!

 

Wooden Whisk - Shop 8, 38-46 Albany Street, St Leonards

To find a café where you can book I think is quite rare.  So when Wooden Whisk took my booking for a Saturday brunch I was well surprised especially for 5 adults and 2 kids.  This is definitely a kid friendly café as they have a play corner with toys, which is hard to come by in Sydney. 

 

It's a cute cafe, with coffee bean scales as the main tables centre piece, cool herringbone wall tiles and bench style seating around the walls of this café which is under a big office building. It was pretty busy despite the eerie weekend CBD feel in this part of St Leonards.

 

The menu has great choices from "Organic maple crunch granola"  to "Croque Monseur" to good old "Eggs Benedict".  Swift service and coffee wasn't too bad either, which to you coffee aficionados out there, they use Single Origin Roasters blend.

 

Ok so this is what we all had.  Consensus was that the meals were good but not memorable despite the good sized servings.  It takes a bit to make a memorable breakfast.  For example I had the "Sautéed field mushrooms with garlic, truffle butter, marinated fetta, smoked pork, poached egg and toast."  Sounds amazing right?  Totally my type of dish - truffle butter and pork!  But alas it was lacking that punch.  Not enough truffle butter  to tie it all together perhaps?   Only a slight shortcoming but it was overall pretty good for only $15.90!

 

Wooden Whisk is a must try if you live on the North Shore.

 

My mushroom dish, $15.90

 

Corned beef and potato hash, fried egg, sautéed spinach,  oven roasted tomato, hollandaise. $14.90

 

 Fried eggs with grilled tomato and bacon on sourdough toast. $13.90

 

 

Wooden Whisk Breakfast - two free range eggs, bacon, sausage, sautéed mushrooms, tomato, black pudding, Spanish style beans, toasted sourdough, $16.90

Eggs Benedict with ham, $15.

 

 Brioche French toast with fresh banana, strawberry, mascarpone and maple syrup, $14.50.

  

Momofuku Seibo - The Star, 80 Pyrmont Street, Sydney

To mix things up a bit I had a request last week from a friend to do a guest blog.  And I thought, why not?  I mean, one person cannot simply have the time or budget to experience all the amazing eating houses/restaurants in Sydney or the world over to share with all of you.  So please enjoy the review and fine (proper) photos by Wesley Tan.  I apologise for the small size of them!
 
If there are any readers that use blogger as their platform  could you please tell me, if you know, why I cannot resize my photos?  The pop up menu only works for the first photo.  Very strange and frustrating!

Anyway I'll let the review start now. . .

I love food. Like, I LOVE food. And that’s really no secret to anyone who knows me. I love the universality and ubiquity of great food - it really doesn't matter if you're having a $225 degustation or a $2.50 banh mi, whether there are 30 ingredients in a bouillabaisse or 4 in a nigiri; given quality produce, they all have equal potential to be absolutely delicious!

 

 

It was with this in mind that I booked a lunch degustation for 2 at Momofuku Seibo, the Sydney branch of David Chang’s gastronomic kingdom, and the best new restaurant in town if the 2013 Good Food Guide is to be believed. Momofuku has a 20 day online booking policy - bookings open at 10am and allow everyone equal access, meaning you don't have to book for a special occasion months in advance but have sufficient time to eagerly anticipate the goodness in store. And that anticipation was definitely not wasted. For what we were served, the lunch degustation is supreme value - $110 pp for approximately 8 courses (we had 11). Their dinner degustations are $185 pp.

We were seated at a table adjacent to the bar. Service was brisk and polite, with various chefs personally delivering courses to our table, but not attentive enough to discover after 11 courses and our repeated and obvious migration of eating utensils that we were both in fact left-handed.

 

The first course we had was smoked potato encased in a cylindrical tuile biscuit with dehydrated apple and apple gel. Delicate with a subtle sweetness and savouriness, it was a harbinger of great things to come.

 

 

 

Next came the moment I had been waiting for my entire life - the infamous David Chang pork bun. I held those pillowy, alabaster clouds encasing that perfectly unctuous, gelatinous pork belly for a good minute as I admired it from every angle before I dared taste it. It was love at first bite. That said, my friend said she still preferred the ones she had tried in New York.

 

 

The cured striped trumpeter with celery and mustard oil was perfectly balanced and delicious, with the sweetness of the fish carefully accentuated.

 

 

The deep friend parson’s nose with crispy potato and watercress was one of our favourites.

 

That was followed by one of the most beautiful dishes I’ve ever eaten - sous vide octopus on eel dashi jelly with radishes, sunflower and almond milk. I found the creativity of the dishes inherently regressive, as they rendered me as giggly as a tween holding Robert Pattinson’s hand while on Red Bull at a One Direction concert. While the peppery radishes were a tad unwieldy to eat, I was impressed by the fact that this wasn’t just beauty for beauty’s sake, or complexity for complexity’s sake - but every element had clearly been carefully considered and balanced in a demonstration of supremely technical cooking.

 

 

 

Next came a perfectly cooked egg yolk with spiced cauliflower on an emulsion of fermented mushroom. A perfectly seasoned textural triumvirate.

 

 

Then we were finally onto the mains. First came the perfectly cooked pan-fried striped trumpeter with fennel, dill and a squid ink reduction, followed by my personal favourite - pork neck with squash two ways, kombu and a broadbean puree. As the pork arrived the music in the restaurant transitioned from a blissful Bon Iver track to a Beastie Boys classic that had most of the diners rapping along between mouthfuls.

 

 

To cleanse our palette we were then served a small bowl containing South Australian goat curd, mint oil and a blackcurrant juice.

For dessert we were served slivers of pear and honey cream dotted with native Australian muntries berries; again a perfectly balanced flavour and texture combination.

 

 

To our surprise this wasn’t the last course, as we were finally delivered their version of a French canalè - perfectly crispy on the outside, moist and sticky on the inside; and a decadent salted caramel fudge that left me with a lingering sense of satisfaction as we left the restaurant with our vacuum-sealed packet of Momofuku kim-chi in hand.

 

 

 

Momofuku definitely isn’t your typical 3 hat restaurant. If eating with your hands, loud and eclectic playlists and sitting at the bar are not to your taste, then this mightn’t be the place for you. Personally, I found that the somewhat childlike curiosity I entered the restaurant with was keenly fostered by the relaxed environment. I’m already saving to go back for dinner.

 

West Juliett - 30 Llewellyn Street, Marrickville

Lunch is the time to explore new places to eat instead of eating at your bloody desk all the time.   A colleague of mine suggested this new café, not so new now as this post is so overdue.  West Juliett is one of those cutesy, DIY, natural, organic vibed cafes.  Very reminiscent of what's happening in this part of town like The Grounds and Kitchen by Mike but much cosier.  It is known as a breakfast café, but lunch I must say from reading other reviews is the way to go for me  so I can give you a review of non breakfast offerings.

 

Anyway as usual I was starving and so in order to taste not just one dish individually we shared two and I'm glad I did.

 

We opted for the 12 hour roasted pork sandwich and the Greek style beef soup.  I was too excited that I didn't take a pic of the menu to remember what I actually ate.  All I can say is that I am not a sandwich lady, I prefer heartier hot meals, I think that's down to my Asian upbringing.  So after eating this sambo I am converted.  If someone made me a sandwich with fresh, great quality ingredients, preferably with soft shreds of pork and fab mayo, I would  happily eat them for lunch every day.

 

For double meatiness, the beef soup was really tasty.  The broth was thin but delicious!  Not too light as the big chunks of fall apart meat and potato filled me up quick!  The fried sage reminded me how much I liked this herb.  It also came with two big pieces of soft brown bread and a small block of butter that I used to mop up every last drop of this soup.

 

 

There's a great counter filled with baked goodies, but I was too full to sample any.  My colleague got one of those huge salted choc bikkies to go and of course I had a bit when it was arvo tea time, how could I refuse?  And gee was it yum.  That perfect consistency of soft and crunchy and the dash of pink salt on top.

 

I for, the life of me cannot remember how much it was but I can confidently say it's reasonable, the servings are a good size and the food is just so fresh and tasty. It doesn't leave you feeling a bit regretful that you ate so much.  You will leave feeling happily satisfied.  I will be back for a coffee and sweet baked treat.

 

If you're heading Marrickville way, make some time for this low key joint.  You will be glad you did.

 



Barrio Chino - 30 Bayswater Road, Kings Cross

I have eaten here about four times now and so I thought it was time to write my review about this place.  It's nothing to rave on about but at least it's consistent.  It's Asian fusion Mexican you could say.  A wierd combo, but I know of the owner and he is Chinese with other joints under his name, Fei Jei and Bayswater Diner which is just opposite this place.

I suggest going here during the week when it's less busy so you get more attention from the staff as it can get hectic and noisy.  On this night we have one very genuinely nice  and attentive waiter and another waitress not so much as she asked us with attitude "is that all we were ordering?" not knowing we had already ordered the first lot of food with the other guy.  Then she realised and kind of apologised.  Still.

Not sure if you will notice but these pics have been taken with a proper camera and not my iphone!  Much better looking!

Ok, so here is what my husband and I ate. . .

We started off with Botanas which is snacks, in Mexican.  It was the Botanas specials night.

3 Queso Grilled Jalapenos, $4 - The little jalapenos packed a punch and was great with the 3 cheeses melted on top, not sure what cheeses they were but it was nice and creamy with the right amount of saltiness.  Could have had double the amount for $4, as it was only 2 halved peppers.  Tiny.

 

 

Salsa Picante Wings, $4 - Nice and saucy with the dipping mayo to mellow out the heat of the wings.  Pretty yummy.

Kingfish, prawn and squid ceviche tostada, $4 - Tiny but I knew they were going to be.  It was fresh and zingy and the crunch of the tostada makes it a great combo.  That is why I ordered the tuna tostadas.

Tuna tostadas, $14 - For $3.50 each they better deliver and they did!  This time however was the first time it was a large chunk of tuna on top instead of like a tartare of tuna.  I prefer it this way so you can taste the tuna more.

Crispy potatoes, ancho chilli salt and chipotle mayo, $6 - Had to have a filler.  Not so crispy, but it was the mayo that lifted this dish from plain to better than average.  Needed more of that stuff though.

 

Taco Carnita, $ 6 - Prune and garlic braised pulled pork with char grilled pineapple salsa.  These are pretty good, and the pineapple is just bordering on too much, as it nearly over powers the pork which is already sweet with the prune flavour.  I reckon they should be $3.50 each, not 6.  Plus the three chilli sauces are a great addition, all you need is a bit.  The hottest one is far left and the mildest the green looking one. 

 

 Overall Barrio Chino is a restaurant/bar that won't go out of fashion soon, yet isn't the newest and hippest place to be.  The food is consistent and the vibe is good, you shouldn't be let down if you do go.  Try the weekly special nights for better value.