Attica
Starters and amuse bouche
Snow Crab
Smoked trout with smoked trout broth with basil seeds, crackling
"A simple dish of potato cooked in the earth it was grown"
Kingfish, chorizo, almond, squid.
Pork Loin, morcilla, fennel pollen.
Squab, celery, bitter onion
Terroir
Violet Crumble
Attica, the second restaurant on my Melbourne hit list and the current '2009 restaurant of the year' as voted by The Age. Attica is also a region in Greece (bless google), and a suburb of New York, which in 1971 was home to a prison riot of sufficient infamy to warrant a fairly lengthy wikipedia entry. Luckily, this restaurant does not serve anything like Greek prison food, but what it does serve is delicious, creative and generous.
Tucked away in what seemed like a nondescript location in Melbourne's Ripponlea, Attica is nonetheless a restaurant with serious ambitions. The service is what you expect from a fine dining restaurant: friendly, unobtrusive and accommodating. The ambience is similarly warm and comfortable, the decor modern and tasteful. And as for the food, well, to start with, a platter of goodies arrived, including almonds, olives, bread and butter and some kind of braised carrot. Accompanying this was the amuse bouche, a very nice morsel of fried balsamic chicken- intensely flavoured and sticky, this was a very nice start to the meal.
Next up was the Snow Crab - described to me by my waiter as being, more or less, a play on words, in that the dish used both snow crab and incorporated a horseradish powder, looking, as it does, like a drift of powdery snow. Thankfully, beyond the playfulness exists a terrific dish, with a myriad of textures, temperatures and flavours in each mouthful, creating a complex but successful interplay.
Excitingly, the next dish to arrive had also been awarded by the Age as 'the best dish of the year'. Described on the menu as 'smoked trout broth, crackling, basil seeds, fresh smoke', what arrived was, for the second time in as many days, a plate with a glass dome which gave way to swirling smoke and smoked trout. Hmm.. At any rate, this was a great dish, though i personally would have preferred a more intensely flavoured trout broth. Also, the crackling was doused in the broth and as such failed to deliver any onomatopoeic 'crackle' - a shame, as i like that crackle.
Intriguingly, the next dish was listed on the menu as 'potato cooked in the earth it was grown'. On the back of this ambiguous desciption i began to conceive all manner of fantastic techniques which they may have employed in the creation of the dish. Perhaps the potato fields were subjected to periodic blasts of heat from a farmer's flamethrower? If so, i wanted that job.
This potato was accompanied with fried saltbush leaves, truffle which was shaved at the table by Ben Shewry himself, and the ash of a charred coconut husk, which i also would be eating for the second time in two days and yet wouldn't be surprised if i never saw likes of it again. Anyway, the dish was pleasant and earthily aromatic and showcased the simple and delicious flavour pairing of potato and black truffles. Had i eaten this on another occasion i'm sure i would have loved it, but as it was, i inevitably drew comparisons between this and the superior black truffle dish i had eaten the day before at Vue de Monde.
Moving on, a generous slab of kingfish was set before me, on a bed of rice and squid, sliced so as to make one virtually indistinguishable from the other. I enjoyed the interesting textures present in this dish, and i'm particularly partial to kingfish, so all in all, this was a great dish. As good as it was though, the best was certainly still to come.
Pork lion with fennel pollen and morcilla was a knockout dish- it was, honestly, the best piece of pork i have ever eaten. The fennel pollen worked wonderfully well with the pork and the house-made morcilla had great depth of flavour. Following on from this, the squab was also terrific. Perfectly cooked, it was served with crisp and moreish onion rings, bitter onion jus and, best of all, a beautiful smoked beetroot puree, all of which worked to elevate this dish to the
extraordinary.
Nearing the end of the meal, at the point of a degustation where a cheese course might ordinarily appear, arrived a dish simply called 'terroir'. The waiter explained to me that Ben prefers to serve a dish of his own creation, rather than a cheese procured from elsewhere. I was about to enquire as to why, then, did the loafer not produce his own damn cheese, but thought that it could have been perceived as rudeness.
Anyway, this 'terroir', consisted of beetroot, sorrell ice, fromage frais, cinnamon and more besides. Like the snow crab, this offered an array of textures and flavours - at once crispy, soft, sweet, grassy and sour. I really liked this dish, and in retrospect, it was probably one of the most successfully innovative dishes i have eaten in recent memory.
Finally, the dessert, a 'violet crumble'. Here Ben Shewry has delivered a clever take on the snack item, rather than actually serve the diner the purple wrappered Nestle confection. Which is disappointing, because it would have been nice to have observed the reactions of the diners, which i imagine would range from confusion, to surprise, to apoplectic rage. Maybe i can live out this fantasy myself while hosting my next dinner party, and i can observe my guests reactions through a hidden camera or perhaps from behind a portrait with the eye holes cut out of it.
My delusions aside, this was a lovely end to the meal, with the violet ice cream combining better than i anticipated with chocolate powder and honeycomb, a very nice dessert indeed.
Although i am typically wary of chefs overly fond of experimentation and innovation, believing that their boundary-pushing can sometimes push their food into unfamiliar and unpleasant territory, I really enjoyed my meal at Attica and sincerely look forward to coming back when i'm next in town.
Tucked away in what seemed like a nondescript location in Melbourne's Ripponlea, Attica is nonetheless a restaurant with serious ambitions. The service is what you expect from a fine dining restaurant: friendly, unobtrusive and accommodating. The ambience is similarly warm and comfortable, the decor modern and tasteful. And as for the food, well, to start with, a platter of goodies arrived, including almonds, olives, bread and butter and some kind of braised carrot. Accompanying this was the amuse bouche, a very nice morsel of fried balsamic chicken- intensely flavoured and sticky, this was a very nice start to the meal.
Next up was the Snow Crab - described to me by my waiter as being, more or less, a play on words, in that the dish used both snow crab and incorporated a horseradish powder, looking, as it does, like a drift of powdery snow. Thankfully, beyond the playfulness exists a terrific dish, with a myriad of textures, temperatures and flavours in each mouthful, creating a complex but successful interplay.
Excitingly, the next dish to arrive had also been awarded by the Age as 'the best dish of the year'. Described on the menu as 'smoked trout broth, crackling, basil seeds, fresh smoke', what arrived was, for the second time in as many days, a plate with a glass dome which gave way to swirling smoke and smoked trout. Hmm.. At any rate, this was a great dish, though i personally would have preferred a more intensely flavoured trout broth. Also, the crackling was doused in the broth and as such failed to deliver any onomatopoeic 'crackle' - a shame, as i like that crackle.
Intriguingly, the next dish was listed on the menu as 'potato cooked in the earth it was grown'. On the back of this ambiguous desciption i began to conceive all manner of fantastic techniques which they may have employed in the creation of the dish. Perhaps the potato fields were subjected to periodic blasts of heat from a farmer's flamethrower? If so, i wanted that job.
This potato was accompanied with fried saltbush leaves, truffle which was shaved at the table by Ben Shewry himself, and the ash of a charred coconut husk, which i also would be eating for the second time in two days and yet wouldn't be surprised if i never saw likes of it again. Anyway, the dish was pleasant and earthily aromatic and showcased the simple and delicious flavour pairing of potato and black truffles. Had i eaten this on another occasion i'm sure i would have loved it, but as it was, i inevitably drew comparisons between this and the superior black truffle dish i had eaten the day before at Vue de Monde.
Moving on, a generous slab of kingfish was set before me, on a bed of rice and squid, sliced so as to make one virtually indistinguishable from the other. I enjoyed the interesting textures present in this dish, and i'm particularly partial to kingfish, so all in all, this was a great dish. As good as it was though, the best was certainly still to come.
Pork lion with fennel pollen and morcilla was a knockout dish- it was, honestly, the best piece of pork i have ever eaten. The fennel pollen worked wonderfully well with the pork and the house-made morcilla had great depth of flavour. Following on from this, the squab was also terrific. Perfectly cooked, it was served with crisp and moreish onion rings, bitter onion jus and, best of all, a beautiful smoked beetroot puree, all of which worked to elevate this dish to the
extraordinary.
Nearing the end of the meal, at the point of a degustation where a cheese course might ordinarily appear, arrived a dish simply called 'terroir'. The waiter explained to me that Ben prefers to serve a dish of his own creation, rather than a cheese procured from elsewhere. I was about to enquire as to why, then, did the loafer not produce his own damn cheese, but thought that it could have been perceived as rudeness.
Anyway, this 'terroir', consisted of beetroot, sorrell ice, fromage frais, cinnamon and more besides. Like the snow crab, this offered an array of textures and flavours - at once crispy, soft, sweet, grassy and sour. I really liked this dish, and in retrospect, it was probably one of the most successfully innovative dishes i have eaten in recent memory.
Finally, the dessert, a 'violet crumble'. Here Ben Shewry has delivered a clever take on the snack item, rather than actually serve the diner the purple wrappered Nestle confection. Which is disappointing, because it would have been nice to have observed the reactions of the diners, which i imagine would range from confusion, to surprise, to apoplectic rage. Maybe i can live out this fantasy myself while hosting my next dinner party, and i can observe my guests reactions through a hidden camera or perhaps from behind a portrait with the eye holes cut out of it.
My delusions aside, this was a lovely end to the meal, with the violet ice cream combining better than i anticipated with chocolate powder and honeycomb, a very nice dessert indeed.
Although i am typically wary of chefs overly fond of experimentation and innovation, believing that their boundary-pushing can sometimes push their food into unfamiliar and unpleasant territory, I really enjoyed my meal at Attica and sincerely look forward to coming back when i'm next in town.
Starters and amuse bouche
Snow Crab
Smoked trout with smoked trout broth with basil seeds, crackling
"A simple dish of potato cooked in the earth it was grown"
Kingfish, chorizo, almond, squid.
Pork Loin, morcilla, fennel pollen.
Squab, celery, bitter onion
Terroir
Violet Crumble
No comments:
Post a Comment