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Sydney Eats 2009

On Plates Now from October 2009

Meat

If you’re palate is really, really finely tuned you’ll be able to taste the sweet spring grasses in the grass-fed beef in the grilled hanger steak served with sweet and sour garlic, anchovies and raisins at Bird Cow Fish. You might also find sirloin of Cape Grim beef from Tasmania served with Montpelier butter (a very complicated herb butter best eaten at a restaurant as you’d never make it at home).

Over at Bistro Ortolan, Paul McGrath is doing wonderful things with new-season suckling pigs, a real porkivore’s treat: pressed, crisped, confited legs accompanied by a crepinette of the braised head flesh with crisp pig’s ears, wild French mushrooms and a Jerusalem artichoke veloute. Don’t knock the crisp pig’s ears — they serve them as a tapa in Rioja in Spain. Why waste ’em?

Fish

We found out something from chef Javier Carmona at The Codfather. Latchet is sometimes passed off as flathead! Now, that just goes to prove what Stephanie said last month about the “once humble” flathead: it’s a fish that’s getting a bit up itself. Javier proudly serves latchet as latchet, fried, with chips.

It’s not strictly seasonal and not always available, but when you see mahi mahi on a menu, lunge at it. It’s a firm, flavoursome fish treated simply but beautifully by Michael Nash at the Manly branch of Garfish, where it’s rubbed with the special Garfish herb mixture (made for them by Herbie’s) containing stuff like sumac, lemon myrtle and lime leaf, fried in oil and butter and served with roasted asparagus, blood orange and aioli.

Fruit

The kitchen at Danks Street Depot has taken to pears in a big way, poaching Beurre Boscs in red wine and serving them with panna cotta, and roasting the little Corellas and plating them with hazelnuts and honey.

We noticed a lot of interest recently among the local kids in the tree at the end of our street and, sure enough, it’s mulberry season again. At the Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay they’re poaching them (and we don’t mean pinching them) and serving them with the dessert del giorno, buttermilk panna cotta and roast rhubarb.

Vegetables

At Chippendale’s Mission they’re serving a luscious antipasto plate of broadbean salad, chargrilled asparagus, caponata, baked polenta and little half-balls of labna sourced in Marrickville and branded Granpa’s, the same company that makes a sensational ayran yoghurt drink. The labna is terrific, fooling you into thinking it’s mozzarella, then delivering all soft and creamy.

At Bistro Moncur Tom Walton is dishing up a boudin blanc of chicken and veal sweetbreads with ceps, broadbeans fresh herbs, cracked wheat and tomatoes.

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