Came in for a midweek dinner. The place is well presented, clean and busy with good ambience. Service was a bit of a brawl initially with us being left with a drinks menu and no food menus, and we had four servers across the evening, but it smoothed out as the place got busier, which is heartening. Am unconvinced of the contribution to the ambience made by the barman carving a block of ice with a hand saw which appeared to be an entirely unsuitable tool for the job.
We wanted to start with a half dozen oysters, but two of the three on the menu weren't in stock. Opted for six of the smokey bay, two of which had shell in after shucking. Have had better oysters. It was a wobbly beginning.
Starters were Sean's Steak Tartare and the SA Squid & Pork Belly. Requested the steak tartar without onions so I take responsibility for requesting a recipe change, but the resulting sloppy mess was heavily flavoured with gherkin and distinctly under seasoned. I wanted and expected a compact presentation of well flavoured fresh meat, with the sort of bold almost terrine-like texture and seasoning you get from good steak tartare and instead got a rather runny serving spoonful plopped on a plate with six cos lettuce leaves that looked like a bit of a bad advert for not preparing salad near the meat prep area. It didn't hold a shape, oozed whatever juices had been intermingled in prep and didn't stand up to being more than half finished. Meat was a good temperature, but that's little redemption of the overall dish.
The pork belly was exquisite, but the squid wasn't crispy and the result was this odd mouth feel where the squid felt and chewed like un-rendered pork belly fat. It was an odd combination - each on their own were good, together the texture made it off putting.
Mains were the 500g limestone ribeye and the raw plate. The steak is six weeks dry aged, ordered medium rare and served exactly as ordered. It was a very good steak. The duck fat chips have been raved about but essentially this time around were a little oily on the palate. I've had duck fat roast potatoes before, par boiled and shaken to flour the outsides and then roasted in a pan of smoking duck fat. They're magnificent, and these duck fat chips seem a nod to that but fall short, because as chips they don't have the amazing floury inside of a roast potato and instead capture some of the greasy crunchiness of the crust. A side of carrots was suitably straightforward.
The raw plate is a combination of sashimi including kingfish, ocean trout, scallop, tuna, oysters, swordfish, langoustine, organic soy and wasabi. The dish is served on a high platter of ice with cold stones under each selection of fish. The soy comes in a shallow dipping dish with a relatively enormous heaped teaspoon of wasabi piped onto a spare rock and a small pile of sliced ginger to one side. I was no more excited about these oysters than the previous serve, but the tuna, ocean trout and scallop were magnificent. The tuna was jewel pink cubes like turkish delight, fresh and exquisite, the scallop a creamy dream and the ocean trout a rich, fatty, melting magnificence. The kingfish was a little dull and the swordfish was only okay.
The langoustines turn the thing into an inelegant wrestling match, served bisected lengthways and in their shells, heads and claws still on. This isn't a chopstick part of the meal and picking up raw fish to prise the meat from the shell doesn't feel quite as sporting as laying into cooked crab claws with a nut cracker so I ended up working around them. This wasn't helped by the ginger - I prefer my gari sweet and hot and paper thin. This offering was thin but felt like it hadn't been pickled for long enough, and was a little overwhelming even as a palate cleanser.
For dessert, I challenged the restaurant to my food intolerances somewhat by requesting the raspberry macaron as a deconstructed plate. In due course I was served two macaron halves, a dish of yoghurt, a dish of berry coulis and a dish of ice cream. It was perfect - I could have a bit of the yoghurt, a taste of the ice cream and as much of the coulis and the macaron as I wanted - and truly it was a sweet, melting, chewy treat of loveliness. I'd say in combination it's a show stopper.
I worked my way through the white wines by the glass through dinner and can recommend either of the sauv blancs (the NZ Dog Point is a more complex tipple than the Pannell) or the chardonnay, but the 2016 Pewsey Vale riesling was absolutely marvellous and if I'd started with that I mightn't have faffed about with the other three.
I really want to give this place 3.5 stars because of the oyster shells, the ginger, and the truly unfortunate steak tartare, but I can only vote in whole stars and at over $300 for two people those niggles bring it short of the fourth star so I'm not rounding up. read more