Showing posts with label restaurant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label restaurant. Show all posts

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne


When people ask us what our favourite restaurants in Melbourne were, Supernormal is one of the first places that spring to mind. We left quite a few restaurants in Melbourne promising ourselves we’d go back. But then we got super engaged in crossing the Top 100 restaurants off the list and we never did. Except for Supernormal. We hit it first off for lunch on the second day of our trip, and the first day staying in the city. It’s a relatively large restaurant on Flinders Lane, with a large glass window and a cheery cherry neon sign welcoming you. We were offered a seat at the bar, as the dining area was full. No worries. We soon learnt that being a couple in Melbourne means you eat at the bar, or wait a long time. But if you are normally against this sort of thing, at least do it at Supernormal. Trust me, they’re the best seats in the house. Especially if you sit on the kitchen side, rather than the bar side. We not only received the best service from the bar staff and wait staff, we also watched the chefs at work, and chatted to them about what they were doing, and the best dishes to order. It was so incredibly fun, and we left feeling part of the Supernormal family.

Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne


The only downside of watching the food being cooked is that you get food envy, even though what you are eating is amazing. Which, apart from feeling like family (a sentiment backed up by the warm greeting we received on our second visit), was probably a large part of why this was the only restaurant we revisited. We were stuffed full, but so entranced by some dishes being plated, we had to try them!

Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne

As with the majority of restaurants in Melbourne (and Perth!), the dish style here is share plates. A form of meal Lance and I revel in. We started with the sea urchin crackers, a special of the day. The look of the sea urchin was a little off-putting (I think the term ‘manky vagina’ might have come up), but the dish itself was anything but manky. Raw, thinly sliced sea urchin, on a housemade seaweed cracker with pickled onion. The ocean flavour of the urchin was strong, the texture slightly chewy, slightly silky. The seaweed cracker snapped, crackled and dissolved as you ate it, like a thin prawn cracker, and the pickled onion set everything off.
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne

The white cut chicken salad was ordered on a recommendation by Rob Broadfield at the reviewers lunch I attended, and it didn’t disappoint. The soba noodles, seaweed and spring onions the perfect base for the perfectly poached then chilled chicken and spicy sauce. The chicken was so tender and clean, not the slimy texture you can get with cold cooked chook.
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne

We then went the bao route. Given my love of duck, that was a given, so we grabbed a duck leg seeing as there was just the two of us, and the pork bao. The pork was braised, crumbed and fried, and served with a tamarind sauce. This sauce was spicy, rather than the sticky sweet style of tamarind sauce I’m more used to. The spice and tartness of the sauce balancing the fluffy white mantou bun and rich fried pork well. The duck came DIY style. A plate of buns, a plate with the duck and cucumber, and a couple of sauce dishes. At first glance, the duck leg looked dusted in cocoa, but it was a dark, thin crispy shell created from the deep frying. It cracked open satisfyingly to reveal moist flesh that fell easily off the bone. The plum sauce and vinaigrette complimented it perfectly.
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne

We wanted to keep eating at this point, but simply could not. So we ordered dessert. We shared the green tea and plum soft serve – playful in it’s colourful swirl, and texturally spot-on. The tart plum soft serve, compote and freeze dried pieces playing well against the grassy matcha. The peanut butter parfait was pure sweet heaven. A peanutty mousse on a macaron base with that wonderful chewiness macarons get. Salted caramel sauce, peanuts scattered about the place and a ball of chocolate ganache mousse finishing off the sweetness overload. Lance got this the second visit too.
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne
Dining with the Skamp - Supernormal, Melbourne

Our second visit was our last dinner in Melbourne and made the perfect finish to the trip. We ordered three dishes, only one of which is still on the menu a few months later – the New England Lobster rolls. These were sweet and delicate parcels of lobster in a soft buttery bun. And my dessert was the baked ginger pudding. Straight from the oven in a cast iron pan, this dense gingerbread style pudding was everything Christmas dreams are made of. Realistically, this was big enough to be a share pudding – but after two weeks of doing nothing but eating, I greedily fit in the whole thing! Lance was too busy eating a peanut butter parfait to care too much!

Definitely deserves it's spot on our top 3 "normal" restaurant list. (Vue de Monde is in a class of it's own!!)

Monday, June 22, 2015

Dining (and mini-golfing) with the Skamp - Tipo 00, Melbourne

Melbourne Mini-Golf
Melbourne Mini-Golf

Lance and I both love mini-golf. And it was telling a casual co-worker about this love that initially spawned Lance’s anniversary surprise holiday to Melbourne. He was told there was one about an hour out of Melbourne that we *had* to do. Before he could get the specifics about the course, this colleague left and Lance was left to investigate himself. And there seemed to be multiple options. No matter! He formed a for us a mini-golf tour of Melbourne. It was perfectly planned and more than a little crazy – which tends to be how most of our tours and tournaments end up. Crazy, pushing our physical limits and just So. Much. Fun. We’d fly out at midnight, getting in to Melbourne at 6am. We’d grab a rental car and then drive course to course until a winner was determined. All up, there was about 4 hours of driving between the venues, with 8 courses to play across 5 venues. We’d then drop the car off in the city, just around the corner from our hotel, check in then get a bite to eat. Dinner that first night was always supposed to be a simple affair. Just a quick meal to fill us up and get us to bed early to get over the midnight horror and full-on day. Instead, we walked a few hundred meters to a little Italian place I’d stumbled across in my research called Tipo 00 and got an early start to the best restaurants tour of Melbourne.


Melbourne Mini-Golf
Melbourne Mini-Golf
Melbourne Mini-Golf

When I say the tournament was perfectly planned – we didn’t factor in one thing – Melbourne weather. It was sunny and warm in Perth when we booked the car and finalised the tour schedule. It was not when we arrived in Melbourne at 5:30am. Sleepless and cold, the lovely Thrifty folk let us sit in their office for half an hour before they opened and could serve us, and we headed out to the first course. And it rained the whole drive. And it rained off and on the whole course. And it was freezing. The guys in the golf pro course thought we were insane. Yes, we had turned into crazy golfers who played rain or shine. They have two 18 whole courses at Yarra Bend, so we had a coffee in between the two to warm our fingers enough to hold the clubs. At the next course, it appeared to have gotten colder. And it started hailing. Yes, now we were crazy golfers who played rain, HAIL, or shine. Luckily, the second of these two courses was mainly undercover. They informed us that our next stop was actually closed that day. So, freezing, tired (we’d now gone around 30 hours without sleep) and wet…we decided to call the tournament early. Four courses completed, Lance was the overall winner. But deciding it was too cold to continue was the best decision we made. The second best decision was eating at Tipo.


Tipo 00 - bread and wine
Tipo 00 - Lingua – grilled ox tongue, balsamic vinegar & pink peppercorns
Tipo 00 - Entree Special - Wild mushrooms with smoked wagyu

It’s a fairly unassuming little spot, but hugely popular. It’s interior is rustic and welcoming, dimly lit and warm. We were told there would be a half-hour wait, but that there’s a lovely wine bar up the road, they’ll call us when we can eat. Perfect. Just as I finished the last sip of my vermouth, the phone rang. I’d recently introduced Lance to Lalla Rookh in Perth, where we ate the il Capo menu and it was hugely tempting to go for that option here. There was so much on the menu we wanted to try, that it seemed a good way to do it. But our curiosity to try a few specific dishes won out and we ordered ala carte instead.


Tipo 00 - Riso vialone nano – stinging nettles & saltbush risotto

We decided on two entrees and two mains to share, and the sommelier and wait staff then helped us pick two wines available in the half bottle that would go with our options. I love half-bottle options, especially at places where the half-price is exactly half the bottle price. More flavours, same price! The wine list was mainly Italian, not a lot I was familiar with, so the staff knowing the wine inside out was a huge help. Our dishes were the entrĂ©e special of the day – wild mushrooms, with smoked wagyu and housemade rosemary crisps and the grilled tongue. The tongue is thinly sliced and concertina’d onto a skewer before being grilled, so it’s both aesthetically interesting and has lots of crispy exterior bits as you bite into it. For mains we had clam and smoked tomato spaghetti – as I’ve mentioned many a time, Lance is currently obsessed with smoking things, so this was one of the dishes that made us lean away from the set menu. The little smoked cherry tomatoes were fabulous – but there weren’t enough of them. I think the dish totalled 10 clams and only 4 tomatoes. The flavours combined so well, but needed more of the sweet smoky bursts of flavour. The stinging nettle and saltbush risotto was vibrantly green in colour and flavour. It was decidedly different, and one of the best risottos I've eaten.

Tipo 00 - Riso vialone nano – stinging nettles & saltbush risotto

Given how much we’d enjoyed the food thus far, skipping dessert was simply not an option, which set a decadent precedent for the remainder of our Melbourne Food Odyssey. Lance ordered the torta del giorno, which was a light and airy white chocolate mousse dish which I remember as being a little lacking in textural variation. My dessert is their signature – the Tipomisu – or their take on the classic tiramisu. It was Oh. My. Gosh. Fabulous. A dense chocolate brownie round filled with sweetened rum mascarpone, topped with chocolate and then smothered in the richest coffee caramel sauce you could imagine. I still have dreams about that sauce. Such an intense coffee flavour, tempered by the caramel, without sweetening it too much and a hint of salt to further round out the coffee bitterness.

Tipo 00 - Torta del GiornoTipo 00 - Tipomisu

 As we do with Lalla Rookh, we left proclaiming that we would try and head back there to try a few more dishes. And we had the best of intentions of doing just that – especially considering the restaurant was only a 5 minute walk from our hotel. But other restaurants beckoned and we didn’t end up back there. Sadly. Maybe next trip we’ll do the rest of the tournament and go back for the chef’s menu. In summer.

Sunday, May 31, 2015

All's Quiet on the Blogging Front - Eating around Melbourne

Duck Waffles at Cumulus Up
Peking Duck at Flower Drum

So, it's been a while since my last post, but it's been with good reason! My husband surprised me with a holiday to Melbourne for an anniversary present and so instead of cooking (and photographing, and blogging), I've been eating food. So. Much. Food.

Smoked Tomato and Clam Pasta - Tipo 00
Cured Scallops at Rockwell & Sons

When he told me we were going to Melbourne, he asked if I could do a bit of research and find a few restaurants we should go to. Mission, accepted! We've both been to Melbourne once before, and absolutely loved it - but didn't really know the go-to places for good eats. I put a shout-out on my Instagram, I asked Rob Broadfield when I met him at The Trustee Food Review lunch, I checked on Yelp, I found a few Melbourne blogs and re-read my Gourmet Traveller reviews. 
Matcha Soft Serve at Supernormal
The Dessert Platter at Gingerboy

Whilst taking on lots of advice and ideas, our main food plan came down to the Top 100 restaurants list that was being compiled by the Australian Financial Review. It started off with a list of 500 restaurants Australia-wide, that chefs and restaurateurs then voted on to get the best 100 restaurants in Australia.
Alpaca Tartare at Pastuso
Grilled Prawns with Squid Ink CousCous at Bar Lourinha

When we left Perth, only the top 500 were released so we started eating our way around Melbourne, whilst we also indulged in 2 of our other shared passions - putt-putt and pinball. (We held our own Melbourne Pinball Tournament - more details on that in the future!!). The Top 100 list was released mid-holiday so we started re-focussing our last few days of eating on the winners. By the time we got home, we'd eaten at 11 of the Top 100 restaurants in Melbourne. Not bad for a 13 day trip, hey?
Smoked Brisket and sides at Le Bon Ton
Creamed Corn at The Town Mouse

I'll go into more depth on some of the incredible dishes and highlight restaurants we ate at over the coming weeks, but I just thought I'd check in and say hi! And I'll also get back to cooking and blogging my own dishes!

The Denise and the Huxtaburger


Have you been to Melbourne? What is your must-eat at restaurant?

Monday, April 20, 2015

Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth

Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth
Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth
Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth

My brother has been trying to convince me to go to Public House for ages. He works around the corner from it, so hits it frequently for lunch and after work drinks. Based on his recommendation, I added it swiftly to the “To-Visit” list (which is ever-growing), but not working in the city means I don’t go into the city that frequently. I tend to be more of a fringe dweller, hitting Mt. Lawley or Northbridge, rather than Perth proper. When the South American Lamb Feast came up as part of EatDrinkPerth, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up!

Talking to the chef (and backed up by my brother), most of the dishes that we ate on this event were similar, if not the same as what is regularly served on the menu at Public House. This was their first event like this (although the plan is to make it more regular), so they decided to make it easier on themselves by keeping with the basic foods they already serve. All paired with Spanish and South American wines.

We started with Cava and Ceviche. The fish lovely and fresh and delightfully limey. It was served drier than a lot of ceviches are, which made it the perfect canapĂ© presentation. Cava is my go-to bubbly, I find it much easier to drink and full-bodied than a lot of sparklings – not to mention a cheaper option compared to Champagnes! The fruit/sweet/dryness is balanced and refreshing.

We were then seated, long-table style and presented with the first wine and some guacamole and house-made corn chips. Both were fabulous. My brother enjoys this guac, despite really not liking avocado. But it’s perfectly seasoned and also with a nice limey/chilli kick which flavoured it enough for him. The chips were some of the best I’ve had. The perfect crunch, with a slight oiliness to them from the frying. Not enough to grease your fingers, just enough to flavour the tortilla.
 
Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth
Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth
Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth

All dishes were presented family-style – with share platters placed down for folks to dig in. A bit difficult when sharing with strangers, as you have to politely negotiate your “share” – but sharing food is the best way to start friendships, so it isn’t long before you are chatting with the folks around you. Entrees were Smoked Lamb Sausage with Burnt Lime, Brazilian Espresso and Treacle Lamb Ribs and Lamb, Mushroom and Truffle Empanada. I think the stand-out dish here was the Lamb Ribs, partly because of presentation – a paint brush for adding extra sauce! But also because the rich sauce was so moreish. The coffee and treacle was a perfect match, with the treacle providing a mildly sweet counterpoint to the bitter richness of the coffee. It was sticky and dark, rather than sweet like a lot of BBQ style rib sauces. Definitely different! The Sausage was flavoursome and not overwhelmingly oily, which puts me off of a lot of sausages. The burnt lime cutting through the smoked meat perfectly. The lamb and mushroom empanada simple, but well-balanced. The filling rich, the pastry flaky and buttery.

The timing of the main meats and side dishes was a little off. The Spit Roast Lamb Shoulder came out and we divvied it up. When that was gone, the Chimmi Lamb Back Strap with Beetroot and Goat’s Curd came out, as well as all 3 sides together (Baby Cos, Crispy Onion, Horse Radish,, Tomato, Palm Heart and Smoked Mozarella, Local Greens, Pisco Raisins, Brazil nut). By this point we were stuffed to the brim…and then the Charred Lamb Rack & Onion Textures came out. At the end of the whole meal, we were asked for feedback, again mentioning this was the first time they were trying something like this, and I mentioned this, so hopefully it was just them finding their function feet. The food was again, all delicious. The meats were perfectly cooked. Flavoursome and rich the way good lamb should be. Simply, but well seasoned to allow the meat to shine, but also using South American flavours. Smoke was present in all the flavours, and the smoked mozzarella, tomato and palm heart salad stood out to me as the best side. The sweet, rich and fresh elements were all present and played well together. As my husband pointed out to me, this smoked mozzarella also went well with the Chimmi Lamb Back Strap – more so than the softer flavoured Goat’s Curd it came with, and it ramped up the earthiness of the beets as well. Three reds were presented during this extended course, two of them Malbecs of entirely different styles. Both with the trademark body of a Malbec that paired brilliantly with the South American BBQ flavours. Sadly, I was so distracted by the eating that I forgot to take photos. But it was also beautifully presented.
 
Dining With the Skamp - Public House Argentinian Lamb Feast - Eat Drink Perth

We were thankfully given a mini-break to finish our reds and rest a little before the dessert wine and desserts were brought out. There is always room for dessert – but the rest of the servings were incredibly generous, and tasty enough for you to not want to be stingy on your serves. The dessert wine was a hugely floral Moscatel, that paired particularly well with the lime and lemon curd dark chocolate tart. The citrus and flowers was delicious. This was my favourite dessert. The dulce de leche parfait was also spot on, sweet and creamy. The brownie was fairly dry and definitely needed the apricot compote that it came with.
 
All in all, it was a very good meal. The staff were lovely and attentive, and despite finding their footing a little, it was an ultimately well executed long table dinner. We enjoyed it so much, we stayed on for a coffee to finish off the night. It’s a shame that this end of the city is so quiet on Saturday nights, as at the end of the meal, we were the only ones left in the restaurant

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Dining with the Skamp - Wills Domain


I love a good degustation.  It can be so much more playful and inventive than the entrĂ©e/main combo. My husband and I often order a bunch of entrees, rather than a main each when we dine because the entrĂ©e is where a chef often shines. They can be a bit more experimental, more bold, more fun. Because if you don’t like it, it’s only a small dish, and you have a main coming to fill you up. Generally that’ll be a much safer meat + vegetable + sauce scenario and is rarely the stand-out of a whole dinner out. Good and dependable, but nothing groundbreaking. A degustation takes the playfulness of an entrĂ©e and runs with it. I’ve had a few degustations over the years, and so far, Wills Domain has probably been my favourite.




The lunch is 7 courses, with two additional courses available at an extra cost – all with the option of matching Wills Domain wines. Well, what’s the point in half-arsing a fabulous food experience? Lance and I went the whole hog and did both additional courses. In fact, we even went the wholer hog and added an additional course, making it a 10 course lunch. I have to stress though, that it wasn’t added because we needed the extra food! Lance had eaten the degustation at Wills Domain back in November and ever since, wanted to take me down there for the experience, and for one dish in particular – the carrot and quinoa salad with smoked yoghurt. You might recall that he is currently obsessed with smoking foods, so this smoked yoghurt dish blew him away. It was swapped out for a different “Garden” dish on the dego menu, but still available ala carte, so he asked them to add it in for us, which they happily did. Our service that lunch was top-notch from all staff. They were friendly, attentive and so knowledgeable of the dishes and wines they were bringing us . We were told that that day, there was a review lambasting the service in the paper and so everyone was on their best behaviour – but Lance had mainly the same staff on his last visit, and had already remarked how good his service was. In fact, a lot of the staff remembered him from his last visit and welcomed him back before we even started.

 


We started with a sourdough bun with cultured butter, a glass of their NV sparkling and the three ‘snacks’. The snacks on our day were crispy kale with wattleseed, mini herring tacos and fish bladder with a creamy fish sauce. The herring tacos were more of a tostada – with the corn tortillas crisped up and the perfect textural counterpoint to the oily fish. The fish bladder was something of a revelation. The texture was similar to a prawn cracker, slightly oily and that crispy/tingly/stick to your tongue awesomeness. It had quite a fishy taste, and slid through the accompanying creamy fish sauce, it was so unique and delicious. It was rich and salty and went perfectly with the sparkling. Lance said that last time they had beef tendon, which was the same prawn cracker texture but meaty, rather than fishy.

 


The next dish was cured Kingfish. Kingfish is my favourite sashimi fish, and cured it was just as good. The cucumber mousse and lemon curd were the perfect accompaniment to the fish. This was paired with their 2013 Rose. A lovely bright rose made from Shiraz grapes, which is also one of their cheaper wines, which makes it perfect to take to summer lunches! It treads that line between sweet and dry very well, making it easy drinking and well suited to seafood.




The extra dish Lance ordered for us and my favourite dish of the original degustation were both the “Garden” course. And both were mind-blowingly good, worth going to Wills Domain for by themselves. The current summer menu pairs various heirloom tomatoes with various types of basil from their own garden. The flavours of each basil leaf are vastly different, whilst still maintaining the basic basil flavour that goes so well with tomatoes. This was then paired with a crispy savoury pine nut granola which was delightful and one of my favourite things ever – mozzarella ice cream. My goat’s cheese ice cream is one of my favourite ice creams ever, and this blew it out of the water. It has a strong mozzarella punch that made the tomatoes sing. The ice cream is intensely cheesy and very savoury, whilst still being unmistakeably ice cream. It’s perfect in this dish, but could also make an amazing dessert – maybe with grilled figs! I am a much more savoury person than sweet person and this ice crean the perfect combination of salty and sweet. I would curl up on the couch with a whole tub of this ice cream and a whole bottle of the accompanying Semillon by myself. Who needs a cheese platter, when you have a cheese bowl?
 

From here we went to the broth supplement. This was a very simple, but very delicious dish. A small marron, a few native fruits in the quandong and bunya bunya nuts, as well as sea spinach and then a lovely jamon broth poured over at the table. Theatrics is always fun! Whilst eating it, I couldn’t help but quote some Arrested Development – the jamon broth was essentially “Hot Ham Water” – but delicious hot ham water. Hot ham water that was so delicious that in a fancy establishment, I uncouthly but discretely picked up the bowl to drink the last little bit that my spoon couldn’t reach!

 

The ocean dish was a piece of dhufish (although this changes depending on the market that day), with a piece of silken cuttlefish draped over the top and a lovely crunchy potato stack. The cuttlefish was a beautiful shiny black ribbon, slightly chewy in texture and fairly mild in flavour. Definitely a way of presenting cuttlefish I’ve never had before. And the matching Cuve d’Elevage Chardonnay was my favourite wine of the lunch. We were told that this vintage doesn’t use malolactic fermentation, but still had a wonderful creamy/butteriness in the mouthfeel. It was such a smooth Chardonnay, and so good, we left with a bottle. It’s a little pricier as it’s on their reserve list, but it was well worth it in my opinion!


Paddock then brought us a melt-in-your-mouth-tender piece of rump with a caramelly-charred baby onion. This and the fish both showcase how good the local meat and seafood are down south. Very simply cooked and presented – the flavour is in the produce itself. This was paired with their 2010 Reserve Shiraz, that we also bought a bottle of, as it was Lance’s favourite wine of the meal. We’ve since drunk that one with smoked chicken and smoke-roasted potatoes and it also paired wonderfully with that. The smokiness loving the boldness of the wine.

 

After Paddock, we had our extra Garden dish – the carrot and quinoa salad with smoked yoghurt. It was everything Lance had talked it up to be and more. Beautiful multi-coloured carrots, roasted to a tender, sweet but still fresh crunch, or peeled in long strips decorated a salad made of quinoa and various nuts and seeds dressed simply, and a few small dollops of strongly smokey yoghurt dabbed around the plate. It was a perfectly realised dish. Each texture and flavour element bringing out the best in every item. If you don’t go the whole hog and do the dego at Wills Domain, I strongly urge you to order this dish. It’s filling enough for a light lunch and is just so full of flavour. As Lance put it, it’s rare that he’ll order a vegetarian dish, but this was so flavoursome, so ‘complete’, that he didn’t feel like he was missing out on anything by not having any meat.

 


If you couldn’t tell from my gushing over the mozzarella ice cream, I am a big fan of cheese. I must admit, I don’t know a huge array of cheeses, so I love finding any opportunity to try more. So of course we were going to order the cheese supplement. This cheese was the Heidi Raclette, which is a Swiss style cheese, nutty and ripe flavoured. A fairly plain buckwheat cracker, a long, thin strip of apple and drops of intense almost burnt onion jam brought out the cheese flavours perfectly. It was served with a German style of grape in the Scheurebe wine.
 



The first dessert was served with a 2008 Shiraz. The aging of this wine making a wonderfully mellow accompaniment to the first chocolate dessert. Lance and I will often have a couch movie date with a bottle of Shiraz and a block of Bahenand Co Chilli Chocolate, so the Shiraz-chocolate pairing is one that we were excited about. Being a summer menu, instead of having a rich and heavy chocolate dessert, this was a rich and light dessert. The dish consisted of 3 different flavoured and textured balls, one a ganache, one an ice cream, one I can’t remember what (possibly a sorbet?), topped with a ribbon of beetroot. The flavours of beetroot and chocolate are fairly classic. The flavours of beetroot and caraway are fairly classic. The combination  of all 3 was extremely good. The caraway was very subtle, not overwhelmingly aniseedy, and the whole dish refreshing, despite it’s richness.
 

The final dish was an elderflower cheesecake with an oaty cookie base and strawberries, served with a dessert wine. This was a lovely, but I guess ultimately forgettable dish as I can’t really remember all the details of it, like I can every other dish. But I guess out of 10 dishes, that’s not bad. I did enjoy it at the time, but nothing about it stood out enough to gush about it like I have every other dish. The dessert wine was enjoyably sweet, and not cloying like some tend to be. It had a nice floral tone to match the cheesecake.

Oh, and I’ve forgotten to mention the palate cleansers! The first was an ‘apple sour’ and it was truly one of the most delicious drinks I’ve ever had. It was zingy and vinegary and refreshing. It was like a combination of apple cider with a dash of apple cider vinegar and such a novel take on palate cleansers. Apparently they have had people complain it’s a little too sour, but I thought it was absolutely delicious. Add some rum and it would make an epic cocktail! The second was a herby sorbet. Flavours of basil, coriander and mint all mingled in your mouth in a fun way, each flavour taking precedent at times as we tried to pick the herbs used.
 
Not wanting our epic meal to be over quite yet, Lance and I both ordered coffees while our taxi for the day and friend checked out the gallery and cellar door. And they came with peanut butter salted caramel truffles. Just in case we weren’t blown away enough already, these little bites were a perfect full stop to the day. There is nothing not to love about peanut butter, salted caramel and chocolate, and nothing about these disappointed, with just the right level of each component.