Seared scallops & grilled fennel with wild hop puree

Peripatetic Italian chef Danny Russo has probably opened more restaurants than most of us have had hot dinners. Regrettably, some of his more recent ventures were extremely ephemeral, but I’m praying The Old Library is a stayer.

Owner Mario Kalpou has done a wonderful job in restoring this century-old former Methodist church. He’s created a stylishly elegant space inside the barn-like dining room, combining a beach house sensibility with some witty evocations of the building’s more recent history as the town library.

The A3 placemat menu is a mix of Englanian and literary jokes, beginning with Introduction/stuzzichini, bite-sized snacks, such as bruschetta with tomato granita and white anchovy, $11, which echoes a tapa by Frank Camorra from Melbourne’s Movida, albeit without the same level of finesse.

Half a dozen polpette cacciatore, $10, beef meatballs, grilled on sticks, with a rich tomato sauce, are on more solid and familiar Italian ground, along with the excellent calamari fritti, $13/$22.

Ocean trout carpaccio with asparagus and almonds. * Peschiole al tartufo sold separately

From there the menu gets cute and slightly confusing – “Chapter 4” is antipasti, and “Chapter 9”, insalata (salads) before five pasta/rice dishes and then “Denouement”, meat and fish, which Italians normally call secondi. It my book, the denouement of any tale is dessert.

From the antipasti, a trio of small red peppers filled with creamed salt cod stand upright on pea puree like the few remaining 12 apostles on the Great Ocean Road and deliver a wonderful mix of salty and sweet flavours and creamy textures. The pleasant bitterness wild hop puree with seared scallops and grilled fennel, $23, is offset by a salty and acidic combination of capers and anchovies in another excellent starter.

I was excited to read that truffled dwarf peaches accompany a beautiful ocean trout carpaccio with asparagus and almonds, $23, but was disappointed when this distinctive, preserved Italian ingredient was missing, replaced by fresh peach. It’s like ordering George Clooney and getting Mick Malloy.

A marble communal table runs down the centre of the front room, which would suit the five “social plates”, $37-$78. The vegetarian antipasti is named “Why oh why eat the animals?”, the salumi plate “Because they taste so damn good!”, and the seafood grill “Throw another one on…” Yep, they’re having fun here and the service is youthful, charming, energetic and easygoing, which only ads to the delight.

Torbreck Woodcutters roussane/viognier/marsanne, $46, is a versatile white, aromatic, rich and minerally, on a wine list that divides its time between Italy and here. I’m chuckling to see wines over $130 listed under “How much do you really love her?” Not that much, but nice try anyway.

Red peppers filled with creamed salt cod on pea puree

For mains, the flaky, sweet white fillet of olive oil-poached halibut, $36, on braised octopus, olives and peppers has a quirky dollop of marmalade to sweeten the deal, while the braised beef and pea cannelloni, $24, covered in a thatch of rocket, looks like a best seller, although I’d prefer the beef softer and lusher.

Desserts seem a little whacky. Chocolate budino, $16 (an Italian fondant) has gorgonzola sharpening its melting centre and teeters slightly when combined with sharply tangy balsamic cherries, but just gets away with it, especially when refreshed by blueberry sorbet. A sorbet trio, $12, is safer, familiar ground.

The local tom toms have spread The Old Library’s gospel and just four weeks after opening, it’s already packed. It promises to be one of the hits of summer. In the evening light, it has that elusive, beguiling touch of magic all restaurants seek, but too few are blessed with. Expect quite a few late returns.

SCORE 8/10

Where Shop 1, 15 Surf Rd, Cronulla. Ph 9544 5360.

When Lunch & dinner Thu-Sun, noon-late

Food Italian

In a mouthful A new benchmark for Cronulla, this vibrant and breezy Italian is a joy and with Danny Russo in the kitchen, you know the food will deliver. 

 * A version of this review first appeared in The Daily Telegraph’s Taste.com.au section, Dec 2011.

It’s 20 years since he used to make blood sausage with Gay Bilson at Berowra Waters Inn. He glances at the recipe for a prompt before memory and instinct take over, forcing the burgundy-coloured mix through a funnel and into the sausage casing with his finger.

Janni back in action with a caul wrapping

We watch amazed as the sausage takes shape, culinary archaeologists catching a rare glimpse of living history.

In the three years since he stepped out of the kitchen at MG Garage, after a cooking career spanning 25 years – he earned 50 chef’s hats in the Good Food Guide, making him the nation’s most lauded chef – Janni Kyritsis has busied working on his first cookbook, Wild Weed Pie.

He’s also been focussing on a more personal challenge, dyslexia, which makes the book an extraordinary achievement for a remarkable culinary talent. But he’s typically humble, yet pleased, declaring his most difficult challenge to be adapting restaurant-sized recipes for the home kitchen.

A compact, gentle and polite man with quietly simmering enthusiasm and cheeky laugh, he’s eschewed the celebrity chef circuit.

It’s been two years since he last gave a cooking class, but friend and admirer Franz Scheurer coaxed and cajoled Kyritsis into spending a recent Sunday afternoon cooking some of the fifth quarter – offal – with friends. Scheurer emailed out a handful of invitations. Kyritsis was expecting a dozen people and was taken aback when he walked into the Sydney Seafood School to find 30 eager disciples, from three-hat chefs to fans from Melbourne who flew up for the day, ready grapple with tripe, pig’s ears, chicken’s feet, sweetbreads and blood.

Kyritsis fondly recalls growing up in Greece where offal was always part of the menu. Pig was the animal you could eat from nose to tail and cooking at Bennelong in the mid-90s with Gay Bilson, his coyly described ‘salad of pig bits’ even included the testicles.

When he first came to Australia and made the leap from electrician to chef, Kyritsis was thrown in the deep end with Stephanie Alexander, and remembers thrilling to her dish of veal sweetbreads with pistachio and orange peel. Now he’s using them in a stuffing for pig’s ears. His hand slides intuitively between the ear’s skin and cartilage to create a pocket for the stuffing as Kyritsis scans the faces of his friends and chats.

Stuffed pigs ears by Janni Kyritsis

Later, the large triangles will be breadcrumbed, baked and served with a watercress salad and a spinach and tarragon tartare sauce. It’s irresistibly luscious and texturally fascinating, like many of the other dishes he shows us how to cook that day: chicken livers and crumbed feet; salad of brisket, pig’s ear cartilage and mustard greens; tripe and pork sausage; duck gizzards and curly endive; and tripe Lyonnaise, a dish originally passed on from Tony Bilson’s time at Berowra Waters Inn, although Kyritsis “couldn’t cope with the imprecision” of cooking it a la minute and came up with his own version.

The surprising thing about cooking with offal is that while it seems daunting, most of the challenge is actually mental, rather than physical. Small teams of first timers bring together each dish with ease as the master flits from table to table overseeing their efforts and regaling all with anecdotes from the heat of the kitchen.

Blood sausage

Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson made him curious about blood sausage – a dish Gay Bilson went on to make infamous at the 1993 Symposium of Australian Gastronomy. Alas the recipe isn’t in the book: pig’s blood is just too tricky to acquire. It doesn’t take long for the jumble of breadcrumbs, spices, onion herbs, cream and blood to coagulate. The skins are peeled away and the filling tenderly coated in breadcrumbs before being baked in the oven and served with sautéed apples.

Five hours after everyone started cooking, everyone sits down to a feast they’ve been aching for since MG Garage closed. But Kyritsis is invigorated and can’t sit still, bouncing around like the Energiser Bunny, as his instinct for hospitality kicks in.

Meanwhile, with each mouthful, we too are lost in nostalgia.

* Written March 1996.

Given the chance, we’d all love to slap the almighty’s hand, but happily settle for lesser gods such as Warnie, a Kardashian or in this case, the lovely jubbly Jamie Oliver. 

That desire partly explains a queue outside the CBD trattoria bearing his name when I join it at 12.05pm on a weekday. They don’t take bookings for less than six people.

In the front window, a young chef gathers “vibrant” (it says so on the specials board) beetroot pasta as it emerges from a brass extruder. Fifteen minutes elapse before we reach an English-accented young woman who explains another 20 minutes will pass before we can be seated. I’m handed a beeper and invited to wait in the bar. She’s true to her word, however it’s after 1pm by the time our first dish arrives. The kitchen is reasonably quick, but if you only have an hour for lunch, chances are you’ll spend most of it waiting.

Italian nachos. Fair enough really, since Italy borrowed tomatoes from the Aztecs. Just sprinkle a little Mexican parmesan on top.

The god of pukka tucker is applying the same principles that made McDonalds a global success to Jamie’s Italian. He’s selling the restaurants as a franchise. There are several throughout the UK, with plans for 30 more in Asia. The Sydney branch is run by the Pacific Restaurant Group, which also owns a trio of Kingsleys Steak & Crabhouses, and they hope to roll out more of the Oliver magic across Australia’s capitals.

Jamie’s Italian is all about systems. And volume. It’s affordable, especially for the CBD. Mains generally sit in the mid-$20 mark. But to achieve that requires turnover. The 200 diners spread out across two levels in a space that’s the Magic Kingdom of Italian, with its touch of French brasserie, are processed with delightful efficiency. This is fast food dressed up as rustic Italian. The service is as cheerful and charming as the man himself.

Jamie’s special ingredient is adjectives such as “gorgeous”, “vibrant”, “beautiful” and “amazing” sprinkled liberally through many dishes.

My favourite is the “insanely good truffle oil” on that most rustic of Italian classics, “posh chips”, $6, with parmesan. At least no truffles are harmed in making truffle oil: it’s synthetic. Incidentally, an American running a French restaurant in California claims to have invented truffle fries.

The menu is divided into eight nibbles, 10 antipasti, 13 pasta and rice dishes, 12 mains, 10 sides (not contorni, as Italians would say) and nine desserts. 

I should have been Italian, Jamie says, but I suspect only Silvio Berlusconi would rival him in the popularity stakes once Italians discovered his “authentic” menu includes an appetiser of “Italian nachos”, $7, and “Italian Bakewell tart”, $9, for dessert. Putting mascarpone and grated orange zest on this almond-and-jam English tart, which also has a hint of chilli, makes it no more Italian than Queen Elizabeth drinking Chianti.

But first, we start with the nachos: deep-fried ravioli with a four-cheese filling and “angry” arrabiata sauce. Again, it’s more American than Italian, the crunchy pasta puffed up like Sicilian cannoli, with small nuggets of gooey cheese filling inside. Scamorza arancini, $9.50, crumbed and fried rice balls filled with smoky mozzarella and porcini are more satisfying and truthfully Italian.

There’s an Italian bread selection “on the house” but we neither ask for it nor have it offered to us. An Italian meal without bread is like the Vatican without a pope. 

Wild boar sausage on lentils

Next is bucatini carbonara, $12/$19. The pasta suffers from what seems like rigor mortis – a stiffness that leaves it bent like leftover electrical wires and impossible to twirl on a fork. There’s a creamy puddle in the bowl along with pancetta, leeks and parmesan.

The short pasta tubes in the cuttlefish paccheri, $13.50/$21, are also what my dining companion declares “bravely al dente”, although I like the braised cuttlefish in white wine with capers, tomato and parsley.

Tuscan wild boar sausage, $22.40 is a little dry, although pleasantly spiced on a bed of lentils sharpened with vinegar. The best dish is ‘fish baked in a bag’, $28, a take on Sicily’s pesce al cartoccio. A mulloway fillet with fennel, chilli and mussels and clams in their shells, sits on couscous-like bulgur wheat that absorbs the briny juices as the fish steams in a paper-and-foil “bag” that releases its wonderful scent when opened. 

Italian bakewell tart - take some along to your next bunga bunga party

I don’t doubt the quality of the ingredients or the commitment of all involved, but there’s something missing from this restaurant. Call it a soul. The Italian word I’d use to describe the place is furbo: clever, but not quite truthful.

No doubt Jamie’s Italian will be hugely popular. For how long, who knows. It depends on Jamie keeping his “brand” strong.

Eventually, interest will fade and Jamie’s Italian will disappear like the disposable pop it embodies. Hopefully, the investors will have made their cash after everyone’s had the chance to slap the hand of god.

But for this travesty to all that is great about Italian eating in Sydney, I just want to slap Oliver.

SCORE 6/10

Where 107 Pitt St, Sydney; Ph 8240 9000

When Lunch & dinner Mon-Sat 11.30am-late; no bookings

Food Italian

In a mouthful In a city with a great Italian heritage and food, Jamie Oliver’s faux Italian doesn’t cut the mostarda, but that won’t stop it being a roaring success.

  * A version of this review first appeared in The Daily Telegraph, December 2011

Let’s start with their restaurants. You’ll need to commit to at least 60, if not 90 minutes to dining at Stefano Manfredi’s sleek new Italian venture Osteria Balla. 

Cecina al forno: chickpea tart at Osteria Balla

It’s not long and worth every second, but some people have already gambled away their time on other commitments. The man at the next table is annoyed and telling his wife – you’ll hear everyone’s conversation because the American oak tables regimented along the banquettes are just a sideways bum-width apart – they’ve waited 25 minutes for mains. Three minutes later, he ups his complaint to 40 minutes. Friends had a smash and grab meal elsewhere and are waiting.

The floor is acutely aware of his displeasure and the kitchen, to their credit feeds him before our table, which arrived 15 minutes earlier.

Listen buddy, if you’ve just here to refuel, you’re in the wrong place. Head for the Food Quarter, the revamped and rebranded Star’s equivalent of a shopping centre food court.

On this side of The Star, looking out across the harbour towards the city, the casino is hoping to attract punters more interested in betting on a decent feed than the slot machines behind. To enhance their reputation, they’ve enlisted leading chefs, including New Yorker David Chang, whose Momofuku Seiobo is in the new Darling hotel.

Leading the initial charge are Melbourne’s Teage Ezard, with his stylish steakhouse, Black, and Stefano Manfredi, who has a long history of creating beautiful restaurants, most recently, Manfredi at Bells on the Central Coast

Stefano has both an artisan and artist’s eye for food and design. The name honours futurist poet and painter Giacomo Balla. He’s enlisted long time collaborator Luigi Rosselli (an architect who came to Australia to work on Parliament House and stayed) to create a colourful, geometric space. There’s an aperitivi bar for drinks and antipasto and the long, large glass-walled dining room seats 160. Stefano patrols the floor as chef-patron.

Hill End artist Lino Alvarez made the terracotta plates and Manfredi’s own ceramics also feature. Most notable are the striking honey-coloured lights by Seattle glassblower Dante Marioni, which look like beehives in a Fritz Lang film.

While the room shimmers with future promise, the menu looks back, drawing on the regional heritage of both Brescia-born Stefano and head chef Gabriele Taddeucci, who grew up in Tuscany.

Divided along traditional Italian lines – antipasti, primi, pasta, then meats and fish from the wood-grill, it’s a menu that’s more rustic than sophisticated, relying on quality to justify its simplicity. Stefano collaborates with smallgoods butcher Pino Tomini Foresti so the 10 salumi includes finocchietta Balla, $7 for 50g, a Tuscan fennel salami and the diminutive, chewy Salamino Balla $7, which lets the pure flavour of cured pork shine through.

From the antipasti, cecina al forno, $8, a pancake-like baked chickpea tart with pecorino, is glorious street food; the crudo of fish, $10, in this instance mulloway, dressed in no more than Tuscan olive oil, lemon juice and herbs, straightforward bliss.

Most of the time, it’s all about adding one classy Italian ingredient to make the obvious interesting, as the wood-grilled quail and onions splashed with Barbera vinegar, $24, demonstrates. The best example is the special of white truffle from Piedmont shaved onto the house-made tagliatelle and worth its $39 as an entree or $59 main.

I’m not sure the same can be said paying $39 for wood-grilled lamb shoulder sprinkled with herbs and crunchy pangrattato (fried breadcrumbs). The meat, from dorper lambs grazing on native saltbush, has a distinctive flavour, however, it remains sinewy and chewy despite 12-hours of sous vide cooking before it’s finished on the grill.

In contrast, wickedly lush, gelatinous and sticky ox cheek braised in Barbera, $35, is enticingly sultry, especially when sweetened by pea puree. 

Gadget freaks will love the wine list on an iPad, but to me it feels like watching football from close up on TV, rather than in the stands, where you get an overview of the game.

Stefano has designed his own app for the list, but you can only search by style, rather than region or price, which defeats advantages of the technology to some extent. Thankfully, there’s an analogue sommelier to guide you, although $58 for King Valley’s Pizzini wines suggests some healthy mark ups. 

Sformato di zucca: pumpkin & amaretto flan with anise cream

At $18, desserts aren’t a giveaway either, although liquorice lovers will adore the pretty sformato di zucca. It’s pure Stefano: a pumpkin and amaretto flan with anise cream which takes traditon into the future.

It’s also Balla: poetry and art combined and perhaps, ahead of its time.

* A version of this review first appeared in The Daily Telegraph, October 2011

Where Level G, Harbourside, The Star,
80 Pyrmont Street 
Pyrmont; Ph 1800 700 700

When Lunch Tue-Fri noon-2.30pm; dinner Mon-Sat 5.30-10.30pm,

Food Italian

Service Smooth & silken

In a mouthful One of Sydney’s most lauded  and long-standing chefs, Stefano Manfredi, returns to the city with a smart and stylishly casual harbourside restaurant as one of the key dining attractions in the revamped The Star casino. 

While I can understand the allure – a side serve of fame puts bums on seats – you wonder about the cost. It’s Friday night at L’etoile, and the star, Manu Feildel, isn’t in the kitchen. I’m not sure why, but a note on the menu reminds diners to tune into his new Pay TV series.

Boudin blanc at L'etoile

I missed his appearance on Masterchef last Tuesday night because I was dining in his restaurant. Feildel wasn’t there again. Apparently he was taking a breather in preparation for Mother’s Day’s on Sunday, his normal day off, so Ready Steady Cook’s yummy mummy viewers could meet their favourite French dish in person.

Good luck to the “renowned celebrity chef” as L’etoile bills him. Feildel slogged it out at the oven-face for many years and as head chef at Bilson’s until recently, was seminal to its three-hat success. He’s talented and decent eye candy too. It’s hard to be servant of two masters, so downsizing to this appealing French bistro is understandable, given his multiple TV roles, yet he also follows in the footsteps of leading Parisian chefs who’ve downsized to bistro comfort.

Yet here’s the rub. When turned potatoes – does classical training ever fade? – on two mains were undercooked and inedible, and the chips with steak suffered a similar fate, it seems diners pay a price for a chef’s moonlighting.

It’s such a silly glitch in an otherwise deft display of Gallic bistro staples. Feildel’s imprimatur adds a gloss missing since this Paddington terrace was re-christened, post-Local, in 2007. He delivers greater depth and refinement to L’etoile’s canon, making it a must for Francophiles.

The concise dinner menu’s entrees ($18) range from a sassy duck pate to a sweetly sharp and viscous French onion soup capped by a melted gruyere crouton. A superb, creamy scallop boudin (sausage) is reminiscent of his time at Bilson’s, the texture silken yet nuggetty, speckled with chives and bejewelled with salmon roe, while a shallow pool of malty crab bisque and sautéed spinach gives its briny trill a bass note.

Twice-cooked gruyere cheese soufflé impresses simply because lesser restaurants drown their dense rubbery lump’s shortcomings in cream. This version, with a melted cheese crust, is impressively light yet substantial, crowned with micro cress and hazelnuts. The hits continue with lamb sweetbread cassoulet, a puff pastry-topped small, red cast iron pot filled with a stew of silken glands and lush, garlicky morels cream sauce.

The floor’s French accent, as thick and rich as the melted chevre in a frisee and walnuts salad ($22), helps create a Le Rive Guache fantasy, while the Gallic torch song soundtrack, black and white photos of iconic celebrities – no, that’s not Claudia Schiffer but a young Brigitte Bardot – and the view of the Victorian terraces opposite add to the spell.

The room itself has a timeless modernity: padded Thonet chairs, candlelit paper-on-cloth tables, the floor a mix of carpet and terrazzo, pale cream walls with obligatory turn-of-the-century artistic posters, a banquette running down one side of the room, the red-tiled bar and small lounge space opposite. There’s a wonderful rear sandstone courtyard that maintains its alfresco appeal on sunny autumn days, if not in the evening.

For mains, $32, a rustic yet regal bouillabaisse perfumed with fennel and start anise, half an in-shell Moreton Bay bug rising from the rust-coloured fish-filled broth was left down by those previously cited potatoes, the same flaw arising beside the otherwise excellent fish of the day, yellow belly flounder with lemon butter. Only thin slices of duck fat-sautéed skin-on potatoes with lushly salty duck confit are spot on. 

Bouillabaisse at L'etoile

On my second visit, the daily ‘butcher’s cut’ is exactly what you want: hanger steak, in this instance, wagyu. It’s chosen for flavour, but the meat didn’t seem properly rested, remaining resilient – ok, it’s never the softest cut, but I’ve had better – and stringy, so even the bordelaise sauce with its dollop of bone marrow isn’t redemption enough. At least the chips improved.

A nutty pearled spelt risotto with mushrooms, the grain’s texture enjoyably chewy, is one of the few times the French beat Italians at their own game, although the last time I had anything like it, another Frenchman, Alain Ducasse, served it at his Tuscan bistro for considerably more euros.

While a glass of chocolate and coffee mousse left me underwhelmed, the base of chocolate too dense, the creamy coffee top lacking bite, the Tatin sisters would have been impressed by L’etoile’s rendition of their legendary creation. The pear tarte tatin’s top is glossy and caramelised, as enticing as a Serge Gainsborough ballad and deserving of more lasting fame than a soapie starlet.

*Reviewed, May 2009

Score 6.5/10

Where 211 Glenmore Road, Paddington. 9332 1577

When Breakfast Sat–Sun 9am–noon; Lunch Wed–Sun noon–3pm; Dinner daily 6–11pm

Food French

Wine Petite, classy, French-garnished list with a few splurges; 15 by the glass

In a mouthful: Chef Manu Feildel back-to-basics move from Bilson’s to this neighbourhood bistro delivers enjoyable French classics, offering TV fans a more affordable taste of his talent.

SO A LIBERAL, A NATIONAL & AN ALP POLLIE WALK INTO A BAR… No. Hang on. It’s an Italian restaurant. The three men have dinner together. One leaves with a container full of Zaini chocolate-coated coffee beans. They probably come in handy during Senate Estimates. I’m not joking. This happened at the table next to me.

Welcome to Machiavelli.

Yes, it serves food, but that’s largely irrelevant. A meal here, especially lunch, is a theatrical lesson in the arts of business, politics and power. The jackets come off, revealing a sea of blue-and-white striped shirts. Sydney and the nation are carved up daily over an antipasto plate, $40.

Machiavelli is the closest thing Sydney has to Manhattan’s Le Cirque, where the table you’re allocated says all everyone else needs to know about your status.

Businessmen – and the vast majority are men – don’t come here to do deals away from prying eyes. Machiavelli is all about being seen. It’s also about reassurance. The outside world may be more tangled than spaghetti, but Giovanni Toppa, the 73-year-old chef and matriarch who still watches over service and bangs the bell beckoning waiters to the pass, provides her diners with respite. Machiavelli is like a richly patinated leather chesterfield to its regulars. They lounge in comfort.

The last time I dined here, John Howard was Prime Minister and Kerry Packer ran the country. Times have changed, but not Machiavelli. Not really, although the legendary portraits of powerbrokers have. It started out with Hawkie, Nifty, Richo and Gough, before, a few years back, when Packer’s empire was at full steam, they updated the snaps. Howard came down for Eddie McGuire.

Whatever happened to him?

Now the wheel has turned again. The Financial Review’s logo is stamped on colour portraits of corporate regulators, the Ruddster, Swannie, and Fairfax chairman Ron Walker. Joe Hockey’s long gone. Peter Costello is the only Liberal. The number of businesswomen represented has grown to include Therese Rein.

The portrait of deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard hangs next to a reproduction of Tito’s portrait of Machiavelli. They share the same cheekbones. I suspect they’re related, philosophically, if not genetically.

I’ve come to Machiavelli to see how an important part of this city’s culinary history is faring. Machiavelli has just turned 21. Toppi is the principessa of this city restaurants, having run the legendary La Strada in Macleay Street as part of a 60-year career. Machiavelli’s enduring popularity is a testament to her talents and those of her daughters.

I wouldn’t come back for the food, yet I adore the rituals Machiavelli maintains, such as the elderly black-jacketed waiters – some living treasures -who still cook. They cook ancient clichés that have little to do with Italy, but everything to do with the aspirational early days of Sydney dining: steak diane, $46, and crepes suzettes, $18, at a gueridon in the middle of the room. They assemble steak tartare at the table for $46. They’ll turn the charm dial up to 11 if they think they’re on a winner.

Over those two decades, Sydney’s Italian food has evolved into something sophisticated and contemporary. Not at Machiavelli. The menu’s barely moved from when it opened in 1988. Even then, my predecessor Leo Schofield described it as “Neapolitan clichés”. Too little of it advances the cause of Italian cucina. It feels like the kitchen’s autopilot. What’s served reminds of countless indiscriminate small town osteria, but doesn’t stack up in a modern Australian city.

What upsets me is the lost potential of this wonderful institution.

There’s a large, rustic wooden antipasto table with smallgoods suspended above it that divides the room and promises great things, but the antipasto plate is mostly fridge-cold vegetables, whether char-grilled eggplant, capsicum and zucchini or pickled carrot and beetroot. Cold, breaded eggplant and cauliflower are even less appealing. The salumi is fine and because I’m a bit of a dag, half an avocado with a spoon sticking out of it makes me smile, but I’ve had better antipasti pulling it straight from a jar.

The kitchen can cook pasta with precision, but how can anyone think that adding mushrooms to the spaghetti Machiavelli ($35) – a wet basil, chilli and garlic butter sauce with prawns – could increase its appeal?

We share a plate of crumbed calamari, $25, crumbed prawns, $6.50, and battered zucchini flowers filled with ricotta and anchovies.

Order fish or meat and it always come with a tricolor of carrots, creamy potato dauphinoise and creamed spinach. That final offering has often formed an outer crust by the time it reaches the table.

Waiters recite specials, but don’t mention the prices. The john dory is nicely cooked, but at $42, as the song goes, is that all there is? A special of braised lamb shanks, $38, is a little more resilient and dry than the “fall-off-the-bone” meat promised, however, two shanks means you won’t leave hungry.

Veal saltimbocca is a mess of thin veal slices capped with ham, with melted mozzarella flowing into a wash of Madeira sauce.

A pretty tiramisu, $15, is followed by a plate of lovely biscotti and those chocolate coffee beans.

Machiavelli is a restaurant everyone should try at least once, if only to sample the city’s pulse.

* Reviewed, Sept 2009

Score 6/10

Where 123 Clarence Street, Sydney. Ph: 9299 3748 

When Lunch Mon-Fri noon-2.30pm; dinner Mon-Fri 6-9.30pm

Food Italian

Service Acceptable, mixing Italian charm with insouciance

Wine A solid range of Italian and Australian wine; 21 by the glass

In a mouthful: Lunch at this CBD institution still delivers the thrilling sizzle of the powerful at play, but the food seems stuck in the time warp of when Machiavelli first opened in 1988. Perhaps that the point

American critic and author Ruth Reichl

FORMER New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl was once more important than the King of Spain.

She knows from personal experience and in her autobiographical adventure, Garlic and Sapphires: the secret life of a critic in disguise, Reichl recounts the moment when the Queen of reviewers trumped a King for a table in one of the city’s hottest restaurants, Le Cirque.

Reichl (pronounced Rye-shul) left the job in 1999 and became editor of America’s leading food magazine, Gourmet, before its sudden, shock demise in 2010. Speaking to me  her New York office, she’s keen to get home to cook for her family, but first, is happy to discuss her eight controversial years as “the most important restaurant critic in the world”.

New Yorkers hoping it will spill the beans on that turbulent time working for the esteemed broadsheet will be disappointed.

“All I really have to tell is that they were great to me,” she says. But you don’t need to be an avid follower of the Big Apple’s restaurant scene to enjoy Garlic and Sapphires. Like her earlier memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples, it’s a witty, gentle and whimsically confessional book, which also features her reviews, and simple, reassuring recipes, like New York cheesecake and roast leg of lamb.

“All the dishes in there are very easy food. Part of the message of the recipes is you don’t need to do fancy food to serve good food,” Reichl says.

The recipes also reveal the underlying truth for a woman who was eating out up to a dozen times a week.

“Restaurants are fabulous, but if you think that’s all there is to food, you’re missing a lot. Family meals are really important. One of the things this book is about is I missed cooking; I missed feeding my family – it was like missing a limb,” she explains.

“You can go home and say to your kids ’til you’re blue in the face, ‘Anything happen at school today?’ and they’ll say ‘Nah’. And then you sit down and start eating and you talk about what happened to you and all of a sudden, it turns into ‘well so and so did this’ and ‘this one’s in trouble’ and you suddenly get a whole way into your children’s life that you don’t get by not having meals together.”

Garlic and Sapphires also offers the background adventures to her cat-and-mouse restaurant visits in a vivacious style that belies the austerity of the newspaper reviews. Reichl is at the height of her professional powers when she embarks on a journey of self-discovery through the bewigged characters invented to avoid being detected. On a flight to New York three months before she started, she had a vivid lesson in how high the stakes were about to become when confronted by a waitress offered a bounty for a photo of the critic. It inspired Reichl, with the help of a Henry Higgins-like friend, to create a series of disguises including ‘Molly’, a retired teacher, and the redheaded, happy hippie Brenda. She even faced her family ghosts by dressing as her mother, Miriam.

The personas, which she acted out, were to have a profound impact on both Reichl’s professional and personal life. She wanted her book to explore “how you manage to have this enormous power and not become a jerk”, but it’s much more: both therapy and an exercise in self-analysis.

“[The disguises] started out as a practical thing, but in some way, through them, I did find out who I am. There were people I loved, like Brenda, who is my best self. But there are really loathsome people who are also part of me,” she recalls.

Dressed as Molly, Reichl visited Le Cirque and was treated with contempt. She went back as Ruth, only to be told by the owner “The King of Spain is waiting in the bar, but your table is ready”.

Just seven weeks into her new role, the experience led to an infamous double review: as the scorned Molly – “I find myself wishing that when the maitre d’ asked if I had a reservation, I had just said no and left” – and the pampered critic receiving a dessert with raspberries twice as big as all the others.  Le Cirque dropped from (the maximum) four to three stars in the Times rating system. It was a shot across the bows of the city’s restaurant royalty.

Reichl was a pathfinder who initially didn’t believe she was up to the task: “I think I project great confidence while deep down I’m eaten up with angst and self-doubt and worry”.

After helping pioneer the organics push 30 years ago, while running a restaurant in Berkeley, California, Reichl showed early flair as a critic, writing them in a range of literary genres, from mystery to sci fi and adventure. She spent a decade reviewing for the Los Angeles Times, as well as being its food editor, before she was headhunted for New York, but did her obnoxious best to blow the interview. It only made her more desirable to the powerful men of The Times.

Her reviews became a subversive lesson in democracy. In disguise, she could offer an outsider’s view of restaurant pretensions. The paper’s previous critics had a proud Francophile tradition, seeking the attendant luxuries of Michelin-style refinement.

Preferring authentic Asian and other ‘ethnic’ flavours, Reichl demolished that aura by venturing down side alleys for Chinese banquets or visit a simple Japanese noodle bar, and taking her family to a popular steak house, or a friend to debunk an overpriced “date” restaurant. It led to a very public spat with her predecessor, who accused her of destroying ‘the system’.

The title, Garlic and Sapphires, comes from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem about humility. Reichl’s book has a keen spiritual thread, is anchored in the strength of family and friends, and littered with small epiphanies that come during the act of eating. After reviewing a restaurant dressed like a bag lady, she wrote a meditation on the obscenity of glamourising a $100 meal, titling it ’Why I disapprove of what I do’.

Reichl has spent her life exploring our relationship with food and its resonances with everyday life. “Food could be a way of making sense of the world,” she wrote in her first, coming-of-age memoir, which revealed her manic-depressive mother as an appalling cook whose food once poisoned an entire wedding party.

Editing Gourmet has given Reichl the scope to continue that search for meaning through food.

“There is an important mission in trying to make people pay attention to just ordinary life, day-to-day living… the small things that ultimately have an impact. To think that how we eat is not somehow connected to what is happening in the world is a mistake,” she says.

“Eating is a deeply political act. How we shop, how we raise our food… what’s happening vis a vis terrorism is not unrelated to how we live our daily lives. This didn’t just happen. It has a lot to do with a general lack of understanding of how we use the resources of the world and that all ultimately comes back to food.”

As Gourmet editor, she believed her mission was “getting people back to the table” and approaches it with evangelical zeal.

“The fact that we don’t pay attention to the community aspect of sitting down to a meal is devastating. I don’t care how they get there. It doesn’t matter what’s on the table, the point is being around the table.”

She believes we’re eating out too much and avoiding home.

“One of the things that concerns me and one of the reasons that I really felt good about coming to the magazine, as opposed to being a restaurant critic, is that it’s important for people to spend less time in public spaces and more time in private spaces.”

Reichl says we are facing some key turning points in how we live and eat. 

“I feel we’re on the verge of a real food revolution – or we’re in the middle of it and we barely recognise it. I don’t think there’s been a time in human history where food has been as messed with as it is now.”

And while the quality of food is improving, there are some emerging problems:

“I think there is a real battle beyond the organic movement, which is wonderful, but we need very much to be careful that we don’t create this double standard where poor people are eating worse and worse, while rich people are eating pristine food.

“We’re very much in danger of setting up a two-tier food system. If you’re rich enough, you need never eat an animal that hasn’t been frolicking around in the grass and humanely slaughtered or a vegetable that has never been touched by pesticides. But if you’re poor, increasingly, some of these fast food are creating ‘food’ that is cheaper than food and we have children who have never seen an orange.”

While she’ll remain a passionate advocate for home cooking, putting down her critic’s pen after 25 years has delivered simple pleasures like booking under her own name. And it’s not about fireworks and symphony orchestras.

“I always said [when I was a critic]: if I were a civilian I would pick five restaurants and go to them a lot so that I became a regular and they were nice to me. That’s more or less what we do.

“I want to go into restaurants where I can say ‘oh just bring me some food, I don’t want to look at the menu’, where I know I like the food and they know my tastes. It’s about family and the easiness of it. It’s a complete pleasure.”

* A version of this story first appeared in the now defunct Vogue Entertaining + Travel in 2006.

If Sir would like his dinner cooked in liquid nitrogen at the table, we can certainly arrange that!

A version of this story originally appeared in Good Living in April 2007, so the figures, references and workplaces of people who’ve since moved to other roles, date from that time. Much of what’s predicted has turned out to be true.

I SPENT THREE YEARS as a waiter before increasingly homicidal thoughts towards some customers made me flee into the kitchen. I have no doubt about how hard the job is and try not to have the same affect on today’s waiters. But lately, they’ve been trying my patience.

Just when we should be in the golden age of dining out, it seems that the service is on a downhill slide. My belief, as someone who dines out several times a week, is that there’s a rising tide of gaucheness on the floor. And the old adage is true: you’ll have a better time in a restaurant with good service and bad food than vice versa. Waiting an hour for the menu was a recent record, but I’ve waited similar lengths to order anything, even a drink. I’ve nodded off waiting for the bill. I keep checking in the mirror to be reassured that I don’t have “Ignore me!” tattooed to my forehead.

I watch waiters as they move around the room, eyes on everywhere but on customers struggling to be noticed. And those customers write to me distraught, traumatised, disappointed and outraged.

The desperation to employ anyone to schlep plates has led to waiters straight from a Mr Bean script, which leads to fudged answers that are so outrageous, even a five-year-old would blush. Wild mushrooms are described as “the kind you buy in shops”, then the maitre d’ intervened with a graphic description of foie gras as “stuffing food in a goose until it kills it”. A ravigote (a herb sauce similar to gribiche) isn’t a lemony mayonnaise.

It’s great, so long as you can enjoy the comedy when a waiter describes one dish as “bland” and another as “bizarre”. I didn’t ask what he thought of the chef, but can imagine what the chef would say about him.

Good service is an exacting art. A waiter is a combination of psychologist, logistics expert, spruiker, salesperson, food and wine encyclopaedia and countless other talents in between.

Rockpool’s acclaimed chef, Neil Perry, started out as a waiter, then retired to the kitchen 25 years ago. He believes the role is “40 per cent mechanics and 60 per cent about a sense of generosity and your ability to adapt. You need personality and reflex. Every customer in different headspace and you’ve got to be able to read customers well.”

Perry experienced the staff drought when he opened Rockpool Bar and Grill in Melbourne last year. Recruitment was a challenge.

“I was really surprised we didn’t get at least half a dozen applications from waiters at heavy hitting restaurants,” he said. Instead, they rose through the ranks from cafes and little restaurants. Despite daily briefings and weekend training, it was a rocky start, especially when his Melbourne venture hit full throttle within a week.

“There were lots of mistakes, but that happens,” Perry recounts. “It was Cup week and shit was flying everywhere. We were just trying to get everyone back onto same page. I think it takes about three years for a restaurant to really hit it straps.”

Perry says that since then, the word has gone out that “the tips are right and we’re good people to work for” and more seasoned professionals have signed on.

But that means there’s a hole somewhere else.

I’ll be your slave tonight

At the end of 2006 Olivia Wesley-Smith called last orders on an 18-year waiting career.

She took a job in television production, walking away from the passion that had dominated her working life. Two key reasons led to the shift: the pay and a harder demeanour from diners, who increasingly kept their wallets closed at tip time.

“I used to double my wage with tips, but more recently it was just a little bit of cream,” she recalls, The final straw was an growing trend by diners to treat waiters as the downstairs staff in their upstairs lifestyles.

“It seemed like the busier people got, the less social graces they had,” Wesley-Smith says. “I took my job quite seriously and worked hard to have a good knowledge of food and wine. Customers have incredibly high expectations and demand quite a lot, but didn’t appreciate the level of service they were getting.”

It’s a pincer movement that has left a time bomb on the plate. The wait for a waiter is getting longer and everyone is feeling the pressure.

Since an apex of backslapping brilliance during the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the restaurant industry has struggled to find staff. From the best fine diner to the corner café, everyone tells a similar tale of constantly being on the hunt for waiters. Along the way, a rift has emerged.

As standards rose over the last decade, diners grew accustomed to good service. We expect it as the norm. At one end of the spectrum, waiters have never been better skilled or more knowledgeable. The arrogance of the early 90s has also evaporated.

Restaurant and Catering Australia (RCA) predicts that at the current growth rates, the hospitality industry needs an additional 20,000 employees over the next five years. The RCA’s most recent survey found that, on average, each of its 7000 restaurant members could all employ an extra person – if only they could be found.

Check the hospitality section of mycareer.com.au and you’ll find around 100 waiting jobs in Sydney, from cafes to Matt Moran’s ARIA. Even the prestige of working at the city’s best isn’t always incentive enough. Craig Hemmings, maitre d’ at Guillaume at Bennelong says he’s always looking for new floor staff to join his team of 30.

A 20-year veteran who still puts in 18-hour days, he’s aware of the pressures. He’s also seen a rise in brusque customers, adding that the older you get as a waiter, the harder you bite your tongue.

“It’s a young person’s game, but at this level, it’s hard to find people with the experience required,” he said.

Hemmings trains staff “the old school way”. They begin by polishing cutlery, graduate to running food and six-to-nine months later; the chance to wait a table may come. That table means tips.

There’s an old waiter’s joke: What’s the difference between a canoe and an Australian? A canoe will tip occasionally.

If it wasn’t for tips, Hemmings doubts he’d have any staff at all.  “Tips are a very important part of front of house. They provide a comparable standard of living and stop waiters taking jobs in another industry.”

Sam Christie from Longrain agrees that tips are “the key to sticking around”.

They can put an extra $400 a week in the wallet, but not every waiter is that lucky. Next time, remember to toss a few coins in the tip jar in front of your favourite barista. 

In London, a growing number of restaurants add a 12.5 per cent service charge (infuriatingly, some still leave room for a gratuity). It’s a similar situation across Europe, but keep in mind that even an average meal can cost as much as dining in a top Sydney restaurant. Plenty of bills hit $1000. Hands up if you’ve left a $100 tip in Sydney.

In the United States, the tip, while not always compulsory, is the closest a waiter comes to a birthright and ranges between 15 and 20 per cent. American waiters are often paid less than AUD$10 an hour. That’s why you can dine at Thomas Keller’s Per Se, in New York, with a waiter for every two customers. Keller introduced a 20 per cent service charge late last year.

While some Sydney restaurateurs see a compulsory tip as the way forward, they’re wary and no-one wants to be trailblazer.

“If you want to get more people into the industry, that’s the way to do it, but don’t think Australian public will take to it, “Craig Hemmings says.

Neil Perry would “like to go there. And more than 10 per cent”.

“It would go a long way to helping attract the right staff. But we’d need to sort out the whole tax thing.”

While the Australian Tax Office insists tips be declared as income, restaurants are currently not liable for additional costs, such as nine per-cent superannuation. The extra paperwork makes restaurateurs nervous, along with the additional costs.

The waiter shortage

When Luke Mangan of Glass bistro joined Perry and Melbourne’s Guy Grossi for an industry panel discussing the future last year, it sounded like an episode of Grumpy Old Men. The consensus was pessimistic, fearing the next generation would be diverted by bright lights and instant rewards elsewhere.

Mangan decided to do something about it, and in February launched the Lexus young waiter of the year award to complement the young chef award he founded two years ago. It’s open to waiters under 30 and the generous prize includes trips to the UK and Japan to work.

“We must motivate, innovate and educate,” Mangan says. “Without such awards and standards our industry will not grow.”

RCA CEO John Hart lists number of barriers than need to be jumped.

His association has been working with equally concerned governments in recent years. The taskforces, committees, enquiries, submissions and reports are a never-ending feast.

Upskilling, retention rates and migration are three key concerns

Despite the shortage, the federal Government doesn’t class waiting as skilled for migration purposes. If the late Claude Terrail, who spent half a century presiding over the famed La Tour d’Argent in Paris, wanted to head to Australia to work, his skill as the world’s greatest host would count for nothing.

The RCA is pushing to get trained waiters on the migration list.

At state level, the industry is keen to see apprenticeships reinstated after they were dropped during the 1990s.

Neil Perry backs the move. “It would be a lot better for industry if young people came out of school and were apprentices as waiters, going through the process of learning how to be a real professional.”

Hemmings wants to go a step further. “We need a restaurant school so they come out and could do a section at a one hat standard.”

Robert Goldman, chief executive of RCA NSW,  agrees in a greater emphasis on training. “There needs to be more courses or programs that develop service and sales techniques for the restaurant industry.”

But, he adds, restaurants also need to focus on human resource issues such as career orientation.

“Too often staff are treated like mushrooms and left in a job with little career development planning. This leads to a higher industry attrition rate, which has a very real impact on service.”

The RCA is about to launch an advertising campaign to sell the benefits of a career in hospitality. It will target school leavers, mature age workers and people returning to work, as well as aiming to convince casuals to convert to a full time job.

For once, the waiters will be acting, rather than the other way around.

But RCA CEO John Hart sums up the dilemma with staff costs thus: “Restaurants can’t set up a call centre in India to wait on tables to keep the costs down.”

But this doesn’t make it a waiter’s paradise where you can name your price. The full time award wage peaks at $668.90 per week: just two-thirds of the average weekly wage. Casual waiters – 53 per cent of the total and more than half of those are women – earn between $13.46 and $17.61 per hour.

Just over one quarter of waiters are employed full-time. Restaurateurs say they’d take on more if they’d accept the full-time positions. Sam Christie at Longrain would love it to “maintain consistency with the customers”, but many of his staff prefer part-time roles and “you’ve got to work with them”.

Christie says that while some regard it as a career others are looking for a “top-up job”.

“The funny thing is they’re still doing it 10 to 15 years later and enjoying it.”

RCA NSW chief Robert Goldman can see why a career as a waiter has mixed appeal. “The flexibility of the restaurant industry still makes it attractive to students and the transferability of skills offers backpackers the opportunity to find local employment,” he says. “However they’re not entering the industry as a career, but rather as a job. Any stigma being attached to working in a restaurant has disappeared, but overall salaries are not as high as in competitive industries and working nights and weekends is still regarded as anti-social.”

Hart adds: “Young people don’t see it as a career and older people don’t want to work the hours.”

In the meantime, the lesson for diners is that if good service matters then remember to reward it. Otherwise, that waiter my end up after your job. 

A snapshot of  an industry under pressure

The RCA’s bi-annual industry snapshot, which draws on Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, says it’s a boom time for new restaurants, but paradoxically, staff numbers have fallen.

* The workforce has shrunk by 20 per cent in three years, employing 50,000 less people.

* A labour shortage has put pressure on wages, making Australian restaurant staff the most expensive in the world. But the RCA warns that with wages hitting 40 per cent of total costs “is not sustainable in the long term”.

* Understaffing has left those still at the coalface working overtime, which is good for a waiter’s hip pocket – if not their sleep patterns – but at a crippling cost to the restaurant. An Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey found that staff turnover rates were at 35 per cent, almost double the level of other industries.

* One in 10 people leave the industry within 12 months.

* The cost of a meal has actually fallen behind the rate of inflation. Dining out is getting cheaper in real terms. Restaurant profits sit at around two per cent.

* The take-home pay for a top Sydney waiter ranges between $600 and $1200 a week. Tips make the difference between a competitive wage and the poverty line.

Just Ducking out for lunch

Trust me, I’ve tried. And I say that as someone who believes lavender should only be found in your grandma’s undies drawer.

There are times when Blumenthal’s food seems to defy logic and certainly confounds my understanding of flavours. He’s a genius who makes me feel mortal, but unlike chefs with bigger egos, doesn’t belittle me in the process. He’s having fun and makes sure he takes you with him, rather than having it at your expense.

For several years, The Fat Duck was the world’s second best restaurant, behind El Bulli, Ferran Adria’s Spanish gastro-temple . That makes Blumenthal Buzz Aldrin to Adria’s Armstrong, but then, you have a better chance of flying to the moon than getting a table at El Bulli. 

The Fat Duck, a low-ceilinged, no-nonsense Tudor-style building just outside London, is at least accessible. It’s an unlikely three-star setting serving food that grabs headlines for its quirky approach. 

Spectacled Blumenthal, often portrayed as an eccentric boffin, is a philosophically adventurous chef with a rollicking sense of humour. Most likely he was the naughty boy down the back of the classroom when you grew up. I suspect he had quite a few lollies in his bag too, judging by his love for sweet treats. He’s the brash Brit who sits in stark relief to the grandfather of modern British food, Frenchman Michel Roux, at the nearby Waterside Inn, which opened a year after Blumenthal was born.

At Fat Duck, he grabs haute cuisine by its over-starched collar to give it a thoroughly enjoyable shake. His food it rooted in classical French cuisine, but he’s added a showman’s pizzazz in a highly entertaining approach sits somewhere between Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and Las Vegas conjurer. This is dining as burlesque and you’re one of the cast.

Yet there’s a strong sense of whimsy and yearning too. He explores themes of memory and childhood in a jubilantly informed yet guileless fashion. 

Get me the iPod with Kate Bush singing Wuthering Heights please.. the homage to Alain Chapel: oak moss and truffle toast, quail jelly, langoustine cream & foie gras parfait.

His dishes – scrambled egg and bacon ice cream, snail porridge, hot and iced tea – have assumed their own mythology. Yes, there are relatively sensible a la carte options, but most come here for an 18-course tasting menu of his greatest hits.

After all, who goes to a Bob Dylan concert for his new album? 

Self-taught Blumenthal wants to engage all the senses while eating. That’s why the ‘sounds of the sea’ – a glass plate of malty tapioca ‘sand’, shellfish, samphire and seaweed, with a ‘surf’ foam – comes with an shell containing an iPod. Chew to seagull squawks and crashing waves. The loop of synthetic sounding aquatic acoustics reminds me of Jean Michel Jarre’s 1976 work Oxygene Part VI.

Does the soundtrack make the seafood taste fishier? Well, music is evocative. It’s more likely to make you think of fish and chips on the beach at the expense of this fascinating dish, but I don’t mind being part of the experiment.

So what would your serve with Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit? Spherified McDonald’s?

Blumenthal’s homage to Alain Chapel – oak moss and truffle toast, plus a splendid combination of quail jelly, langoustine cream, foie gras parfait and pea puree – evokes the Yorkshire moors as mist from a tray of moss pours across the table.

To sea or not to sea, that is the music... Sound of the Sea is served with a side of iPod in a shell.

Over more than three hours, there are numerous moments of levity and surprise, such as the sleight-of-sight in beetroot and orange jellies. I won’t recount the details and spoil the moment, but there’s also some interesting subtext too.

A small cornet of sorbet is presented as a pre-dessert, and is named in honour of the 19^th century cookbook writer Agnes Marshall, who Blumenthal champions as the pioneer of ice cream cones. She invented the world’s fastest ice cream churn and even suggested, in 1901, using liquid gas. The next course, the scrambled egg ice cream on French toast, with toffee ‘bacon’ and tea jelly – part of a ‘breakfast’ that begins with parsnip cornflakes and parsnip milk – realises her vision, when an egg is cracked into liquid nitrogen, then served seconds later.

It’s exuberant, startling and sweetly delicious.

The only shortcoming to Blumenthal’s wit is its delivery by French waiters with all the joy of an existentialist. They do their job professionally, but a good jest is all in the delivery. I’m not convinced. Perhaps it’s because I lived in London’s East End in my twenties and I’m craving Arthur Daly and a wink as he serves me.

The wine list, heavy as an ancient manuscript, is encyclopaedic and I admire sommelier who matches pigeon ballotine with a South African red.

I came to The Fat Duck with high expectations and loved it, even if, on occasion, the showmanship eclipsed the food. Blumenthal is an original thinker with an ability to defy conventions yet keep you smiling. His flavours dance, intrigue and entertain. It’s a restaurant everyone should put on their bucket list and is remarkable for what he’s achieved in just over a decade, especially when Chef wasn’t a chef until that moment. 

THAT egg & bacon ice cream - single-handedly responsible for the revival of gueridon cooking by waiters at your table & oh-so-worth-it

The woman at the next table is thrilled. She beams as she engages in conversation, declaring this the best meal of her life.

“So when are you coming back?” I enquire.

“Oh no, once is enough,” she declares.

And that’s the problem with jokes, once you’ve heard them it’s never as funny again.

But the last laugh is on her. Blumenthal is restless and already dreaming up new ideas.

I’ll be back.

* Reviewed, Sept 2008

Score 9.5/10

Where High Street  Bray, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 2AQ, England
+44 (0) 1628 580 333; www.thefatduck.co.uk

When Lunch & dinner, Tues-Sat

Food Spectacular

Wine Impressive 2500+ bin list from around the globe, featuring all the marques. 

Service Personable and chatty

In a mouthful Wow. Yes, you can believe the hype. Deservedly one of the top 5 restaurants in the world & utterly unique