Restaurant Arras

My former career in media sales required that I attend a certain number of meetings with my clients per week. My biggest client was located just around the corner from this restaurant. Although I hated the meetings, I loved the area- Walsh Bay is a superb part of Sydney, with great heritage sandstone buildings situated right at the water's edge. Restaurant Arras is located in one of these buildings, which in keeping with their stated ambition, has been converted by chef/owners Adam Humphrey and Lovaine Allen into 'a restaurant that they would enjoy dining in'. A year and a career change later and I would finally discover whether I too would enjoy dining there.

First of all, I'll have to disclose that I came to Arras with very high hopes, with the restaurant having enjoyed great reviews both from professionals and the eatability community. Furthermore, I really wanted to like Arras- put simply, they seemed to make the sort of food I liked to eat. So then, it was my intention to order the degustation and prepare to be amazed.

First impressions were excellent, being quickly seated by my friendly waiter and presented with this thing:

This lovely snack consisted of variously favoured crispbreads rooted in a kind of honeyed nut crumble. Then, ordering a drink, I was informed ofthe restaurant's excellent 'unlimited sparkling water for $9' policy- great value given that there are others who think nothing of charging that amount, or more, per bottle, and then, I assume, sleep soundly at night.

A selection of terrific breads and butter then arrived, followed promptly by the amuse bouche

This was described to me by my waiter as a 'cheese sandwich with pickled blueberries'. The cheese was actually a blue cheese mousse and worked well with the acidity from the blueberries. Plus, it did look quite cool.

The raw and the cooked

Simply called 'the raw and the cooked', this dish was designed, according to my waiter, to showcase 'vegetable's vertality'. Featuring too many little vegetables and edible flowers to name, interspersed with little pools of a rich carrot puree, this was, I suppose, the Arras version of the famous Bras dish 'gargouillou' and was a great way to get things started

Smoked, roast and dressed

With the dish descriptions on the menu seemingly restricted to the realm of ambiguous punnery, I had to rely on my waiter to furnish me with information regarding each dish. This one featured kohlrabi, a sardine and a perfectly cooked scallop and some other things I didn't recognise. One ingredient I did recognise, however, were the now ubiquitous little purple flowers, their having made an appearance in every dish thus far. Anyway, the scallop was very nice, though I'm still not sold on sardines.

Quinoa kedgeree

Kedgeree is a uniquely british dish of rice, smoked fish, eggs, parsley and, showing the indian influence on british cuisine, curry powder. Like most taditional english dishes, it is typically a pretty slap bang affair- this one, however, is a fair bit more sophisticated. Forgoing rice for quinoa, curry oil for the powder and topping it off with a slow cooked quail egg, this was a great display of various textures and flavours while not trying to be too clever or straying too far from the traditional preparation of this dish.

Birds of a feather

Next up- a pheasant terrine with golden raisins soaked in mead, accompanied by what tasted like a gingerbread cream. Despite the terrine being slightly disappointingly bland, this dish was saved by that gingerbread sauce, which was slightly sweet, cinnamonny and smooth. I'm going to have to remember to rip this one off in my future cooking experiments.

A plate of duck- beak to tail feather

Accompanied by a little ceramic jug of duck gravy, this dish sought to celebrate all things duck and largely succeeded- the duck breast was incredibly tender, the little chips of what I presume was duck prosciutto were a nice textural touch and the corn puree was a surprisingly complementary addition. Where the dish fell down was the duck sausagey thing, which I didn't feel was quite as good as it could have been. I think a little bit of duck foie gras would also have worked extremely well here.

Slow cooked lamb, lavender and honey sweetbreads

Huh? This dish actually has a conventional name on the menu- I figure this must be a new addition to the lineup and they haven't thought of anything clever yet. In keeping with its prosaic name, the execution was also fairly straightforward - a nice piece of lamb, some kale, jus and some wedges of potato. The only real aberration came in the form of the sweetbreads, the honey and lavender not doing much to enhance their natural flavour. Still, a nice dish.

Ah pre-desserts- a course which is fast becoming my favourite of the meal. I'm not sure why, but they so often overshadow the dessert itself. This one was a shot glass of chiled melon soup, coconut sorbet, coffee crumbs and a touch of bitter orange powder. Not bad, and all of the ingredients certainly didn't interfere with one another, but they didn't exactly marry perfectly either. I hoped that in this case the dessert would buck the trend and be incredible.

An adolescent breakfast

It wasn't. Consisting of a 'muesli' of nuts and raisins topped with a milk sorbet and a chocolate 'thing' (my words, not theirs). I was disappointed, as I really wanted to like this dish. I liked the idea of different elements to the dish, all playing off a central theme, and I initially thought the tube of what turned out to be a chantilly cream to be a nice touch. Unfortunately, the theme itself seemed contrived- merely a means of getting these individual elements onto a plate together. Does a typical adolescent breakfast consist of a chocolate bar and some cereal? I don't know, I have only ever really had coffee for breakfast, but something tells me that it doesn't.

This would have been forgiven if everything came together well, but it didn't. The chocolate thing featured a meh chocolate and nut base, a too-dense chocolate ganache centre and an oversalted caramel topping. The little toothpaste tube, meanwhile, wouldn't have been wanky if it held something that really tied the dish together excellently, rather than an unnecessary cream.

Just as well for what happened next then. I peered up from the book I was reading to see my waiter straining with an enormous slate tray, which must have been a metre squared. Struggling over to my table, he sighed with relief as he balanced its heft on the edge of my table. It's at this point that I see that the tray is abolutely festooned, overloaded, with an array of various petit fours. There must have been 20 different types, from peanut brittle to honeycomb, jellies, cookies and a vast array of filled chocolate treats. Invited to help myself, I attacked the tray with the gleeful abandon that the situation invited, loaded up my little plate and then went to town on it.

A terrific end, then, to what was, overall, a good meal. While none of the dishes were bad, there were no standouts either, which is a shame, because I like the English food angle and the creativity of the chef, even if everything didn't quite work as well as hoped.