Issue Eighteen LUXE

Editor’s Letter

Editor’s
Letter

Welcome to Issue 18 where we explore a little slice of luxury – and what a journey it has taken us on.

It has been wonderful to be back on the road and in the sky, crossing state lines and visiting restaurants around the country. Some venues are reporting that diners seem to be making up for lost time with average check size up – they are opting for more premium wines, choosing supplementary options and splashing out on luxury steaks. In fact, Australians spent a record $4.465 billion in cafes, restaurants and takeaway shops for the month of February, an increase of 9.7 per cent on January and up more than $500 million on February 2020, just before the pandemic.

As Pat Nourse puts it – ‘rare is the delicacy that gets the mouth watering in quite the same way as a really good steak’ and I couldn’t agree more. In this issue Pat talks to some of the greats of the steak game – Lennox Hastie, Andrew McConnell, Ross Lusted and Corey Costelloe about what makes a great steak. From the producer to the preparation, the cut to the cooking, the salt to the service – it’s not a one size fits all scenario and we are more than happy to try them all on.

Mark Best pays a visit to the pioneer of luxury beef in Australia David Blackmore who, with his son Ben, produces premium Wagyu for some of the finest restaurants in Australia and around the world. David maintains that his customer is and always has been the person choosing to dine out once a year for a special occasion – a celebration where they forget the diet and forget the budget. It’s all about quality over quantity for the Blackmore family and we learn about their new venture into Rubia Gallega, the Northern Spanish cattle David Blackmore believes will be the best grass-fed beef in the world.

Myffy Rigby makes a run for the Nation’s Capital to discover what’s good – and there’s plenty to be excited about. Established favourites sit firm amongst vibrant newcomers – from fun fine dining and everything over fire; to the simple pleasures of pizzas and jaffles – there’s certainly something for everyone.

I take a trip to Adelaide where the buzz is all around young chef Jake Kellie’s first restaurant Arkhe – and it more than lives up to the hype. Kellie’s resume reads like every young chef’s dream career run and in a leafy suburb in Adelaide he’s making his boldest move yet. Arkhe is Kellie’s dream restaurant come to life – where produce is the winner and playing with fire is the game.

It’s wagyu with a view as we shoot Cut Two Ways from the lofty 55th floor setting of Vue de monde in Melbourne. Executive chef Hugh Allen and Donovan Cooke of Ryne give us their versions of luxury dishes using wagyu brisket.

With flights back in the air, we thought we’d pay a visit to dnata catering – Australia’s largest in flight caterer creating a mind blowing 64 million meals to be served on 250,000 flights a year. Now that is Big Business.

I hope you enjoy the luxury of Australian beef and lamb.

Mary-Jane Morse

Meat & Livestock Australia
[email protected]
@_raremedium

People Places Plates

Back to contents

Beef, salt and fire: the making of a modern masterpiece.

The luxuries of the table are many and varied, but rare is the delicacy that gets the mouth watering in quite the same way as a really good steak. It’s a dish suited to celebration like few others: it makes a grand statement as it’s borne to the table, it looks good, it smells good, and is eminently suitable for sharing. It’s also a dish that is seldom better than with a really great bottle (or two) of red wine. And, on the flipside, a really great bottle of red wine (or two) more or less demands a great steak.

Beef, salt and fire: the making of a modern masterpiece at Woodcut.

It’s a dish that’s revered as the bistecca Fiorentina in the hills of Chianti, the Chateaubriand of Paris and the prime rib of the great steakhouses of Chicago and New York. It’s celebrated by the gauchos on the pampas, with a braai on the veld, in yakiniku in Tokyo, the gogigui of Seoul.

It runs the full spectrum of popular culture from Fred Flintstone’s dinosaur rib-eye to being the capper of the menu at the world’s third highest-ranked restaurant on the 50 Best list, Asador Extebarri, a grill in the Basque Country where chef Bittor Arguinzoniz takes decade-old cattle and turns them into what are widely recognised as some of the very finest steaks of the world. Yabba dabba doo is right.

And Australia, as a producer of top-drawer beef, more than holds its own when it comes to the matter of steaks to be reckoned with. There have been periods in restaurants when chefs in the pointy end of the business were ambivalent about the place of the big steak, but right now that steak holds pride of place, often boxed out on the menu to stand alone, a special event served to share, or the pinnacle of a degustation.

Right now you’d be hard-pressed to improve on the steaks served at Rockpool Bar & Grill, Firedoor, Gimlet, Cutler & Co and Woodcut. How do they do it? We spoke to the people in charge to find out.

Ross Lusted

– Woodcut, Sydney

When Ross Lusted set out to open Woodcut, in the new Crown casino in Sydney, he didn’t want it to be known as a steakhouse, but he knew he needed to serve a steak that was world class. “It had to be exceptional,” he says. So he started talking with Anthony Puharich, of Vic’s Premium Quality Meats, about a program for Woodcut that focussed on flavoursome beef, sourced largely from New South Wales.

For the T-bone that’s now the flagship of that part of the menu, Rangers Valley Black Market Premium, Lusted says, ticked all the boxes: a local producer, Black Angus stock, raised on pasture and finished on grain for no fewer than 270 days, producing a five-plus marble-score product and aged for six weeks.

Ross Lusted with Woodcut’s flagship T-bone – Rangers Valley Black Market Premium.

For the cooking, Lusted is typically precise. The wood? Hardwood that burns slow, smokeless and very hot. The salt? Olsson’s Marine Mineral Fine Grey, which tastes like the ocean. Oil? Not on meat that is this well-marbled – it doesn’t need it, he says, and the oil can just burn and taste acrid. What’s the meat cooking on? A fine rack set about 10cm over the coals, so the meat gets a crust without the burnt, carbonised taste that could be left by heavier grilling bars.

Cooking the beef on the bone preserves the meat’s “sweet natural flavour”, and Lusted starts the room-temperature steaks over coals of ironbark standing on the bone, which allows the heat to move through it and into the centre of the cut. He then grills the wider sides fast over intense heat to form a crust before resting the meat above the grill in the smoke, allowing the residual heat to finish cooking it to medium rare.

Lusted cooks the steak standing on the bone allowing heat to move though it into the centre of the cut before grilling the sides fast over intense heat.

“A well-rested steak will carve easily and have a consistent colour from the crust to the bone,” he says. He’s appalled at the idea of resting hot meat on a cold plate, even at home. If you don’t have a rack, he says, let the steak sit uncovered on two or three forks so the air can circulate around it.

And a final word of advice: now that you’ve done the work, don’t ruin it. “The best thing about the steak is the steak,” so with all this good flavour and texture, don’t do anything else to the steak other than lay in some good side dishes as support. At Woodcut that’ll be their burnt-tomato ketchup, tomato salad and baby lettuce, seeded and hot mustard, horseradish cream, whipped bearnaise and veal jus, and maybe the macaroni and cheese made with Berkelo bakery’s Khorasan pasta if you want to really go for it.

“There’s always a wow when that steak arrives.”

Lusted says “the best thing about the steak is the steak”.

Corey Costelloe

– Rockpool Bar & Grill, Sydney

They call it the ballet at Rockpool Bar & Grill. It’s the special dance that a chef new to the grill finds themselves doing as they try to simultaneously pull dozens of steaks from their storage drawers, while keeping the steaks already on the grill moving, and feeding the fire so the whole thing doesn’t come to a halt in the middle of a roaring service.

The new person on the grill has put six or seven steaks on in one call, says chef Corey Costelloe, but there’s 20 different steaks on the menu and they’re all in different drawers, and you’ve got 250 in for lunch. “And when you first start you forget which one is where, and you’re spinning around going through them, meanwhile thinking, ‘shit, have I left something on the grill too long,’ so you turn around to check your steaks and then you turn around back to your drawer and then there’s another steak coming in, and you end up spinning, spinning doing the ballet.”

Corey Costelloe prepares a David Blackmore Mishima steak – Mishima are extremely rare and only available at Rockpool Bar & Grill and Burnt Ends in Singapore.

It’s a dance he has long since mastered, but when he first started at Rockpool Bar & Grill, it was all new. “I’d come from a seafood restaurant, I was all about fish.” The learning curve was steep. Looking back now, from his position as the chef across three locations of Rockpool Bar & Grill in Melbourne, Perth and his home city of Sydney, a brand that is completely synonymous with ultra-premium beef, Costelloe has a pretty good idea of what a top-quality steak looks like in Australia.

“Our absolute baller right now is David Blackmore’s Mishima.” Mishima, he says, is a tiny little island in the south of Japan, a dot on the map, and their animals were never bred with the British breeds, so they’re some of the oldest Japanese breeds you’ll find. “When we do a 650-gram Mishima wagyu steak on the bone, that’s the $350 steak that makes people say ‘wow’.”

Two cuts in one – the David Blackmore Mishima Chuck Roll at Rockpool consisting of the denver and chuck eye cuts.

But with a list of steaks sometimes 20 cuts deep on the Bar & Grill menu, there are other paths to ecstasy.

“Take a look at the grass-fed rib-eyes from southern Australia, from Tasmania, the Victorian hinterlands,” says Costelloe. “Somewhere where they’ve got plenty of grass to eat and plenty of sunshine throughout the day – there’s not much that’s better than one of those. I can’t afford to eat a $350 steak, but I’ll sit in the bar at night and smash a Cape Grim rib-eye – they’re just delicious.”

This kind of intimate familiarity with the very best meat in the country can make ordering a steak elsewhere a challenge. “There was a period there where it was very hard to get a well-cooked steak in a restaurant; I think that’s why the steakhouse has triumphed these last 10 years.”

David Blackmore Mishima at Rockpool – a dance with decadence.

Lennox Hastie

– Firedoor, Sydney

Not everyone welcomes crying in their restaurants, but at Firedoor they’re used to it (in a good way). Their signature steak has brought more than a few diners to tears, Massimo Bottura among them. After the Italian chef wept with joy eating his steak, Lennox Hastie smuggled one back to him when he went to Modena to visit.

Hastie believes steak reaches its full potential through the passage of time – at Firedoor beef is aged anywhere between 150 – 300 days.

You might have seen Hastie on Chef’s Table talking about the work he put into developing a program for ageing his meat for unusually long periods of time. The drought plus the pandemic knocked the whole thing for six, though, and for the first time in seven years he found himself starting from scratch. He now sources beef across a few different producers including Rangers Valley, O’Connor, Coppertree Farms, and David Blackmore.

“Right now, we’re running 260-day dry-aged Black Market Rangers Valley as well as a 150-day dry-aged retired dairy cow,” Hastie says, “but last month we had 300-day aged full-blood wagyu which was a completely different experience – rich and buttery but with a complex sour cherry and spice flavour that I find more redolent in wine.”

And like wine, all this beef can be enjoyed young, Hastie says, but it’s through the passage of time that it really achieves its full potential. He chooses the rib-sets for ageing himself, grading them on appearance, taste, touch and smell, picking out well-marbled sets before testing their pH to confirm their suitability for extended ageing. His exactitude is serious. “Depending on the producer, kills are only occurring every fortnight or month and we only find the top three percent of each batch suitable for ageing.”

Steaks at Firedoor are cut to order on the bandsaw and grilled over grape vines or spent wine barrels.

Hastie then dries the sides for two weeks, renders the fat down from the animal and then paints the sides with that rendered fat, sealing any exposed meat, preparing them to age for anywhere between 150 and 300 days, depending on the size of the animal and how it ripens.

In service they’re cut to order and grilled over gnarled 80-year-old grape vines. A Spanish flor de sal is the only addition to the meat. “The rich flavour and texture is intrinsic to the animal, the ageing process, and grilling over an open wood fire,” Hastie says. “Each aged rib-set has its own unique flavour, ranging from hazelnuts, toasted popcorn, and aged sherry through to black truffle, foie gras, and parmesan.” The flavour even varies from one end of the steak to the other, much like a cheese. “The flavour is so complex that we serve it unadorned with just a fresh salad or some charred greens on the side to clean the palate. We don’t offer any condiments or sauces as accompaniments.”

The fat is too precious to waste, and the trimmings, which are rendered slowly in the wood oven, are deployed in roasting vegetables (“potatoes and cauliflower are particularly good”), and in washing a whisky to make the Tallowed Roy, a Rob Roy with a Firedoor twist.

260 day dry aged Ranger’s Valley Black Market Rib Eye – the steak that brought Massimo Bottura to tears.

Andrew McConnell

– Cutler & Co and Gimlet, Melbourne

Trends have come and gone over the 13 years that Cutler & Co has enjoyed a place as one of Victoria’s finest diners, but the rib-eye has been a constant. “From day one at Cutler & Co we’ve offered the same 1.2 kilo dry-aged large-format steak,” says owner and chef Andrew McConnell. “And it’s the only thing that has stayed on the menu that whole time.”

Andrew McConnell says the 1.2kg dry aged rib eye at Cutler & Co is the only thing that has stayed on the menu in the restaurant’s 13 year history.

When McConnell opened Cutler & Co back in 2009, he says he wasn’t cooking a lot of steak at home and it wasn’t that easy to find one that was perfectly aged and cooked over wood with skill in a restaurant. “When I go out, as much as I love multiple courses and trying new things, sometimes I just want something that’s benchmark, something that’s simple and delicious. It’s also nice to offer a dish in this environment that’s not intimidating, something you can roll up your sleeves for and share.”

So it was when he came to Gimlet, the smash-hit restaurant he opened in the Melbourne CBD in 2020. “Gimlet was designed to be a big-city restaurant with a great dining room and a great cocktail bar, and a grown-up big-city restaurant needs that big steak. It’s something classic on the menu that really signifies quality.”

Gimlet’s T-bone is roasted at 400-500 degrees over coals in the wood-fire oven McConnell designed himself.

A steak making a statement was written into Gimlet’s DNA – and into its blueprints. Working with the kitchen designer, McConnell designed a wood-fired oven with a stone base and a pit in the base that his chefs can brush the coals into, with a rack set over it. “So we’re roasting our T-bones over coals in a wood-fired oven. It’s really cool.” Acting a bit like a Josper, sitting at 400 or 500 degrees, the intense heat creating a crust quickly. It’s pretty special, and it adds another layer of flavour.

As impressive as the oven may be, the other big advantage McConnell enjoys today in the steak stakes is in sourcing his meat. In 2015, he opened Meatsmith, a speciality butchery on Smith Street in Collingwood, and today he and his business partner Troy Wheeler run four branches across Melbourne, which gives him enviable choice for his restaurants. “Working with Troy, we’ve been able to develop a great program for meat at Gimlet,” he says.

Beef farmer Matt O’Connor hand selects 20 rib sets a week for Gimlet which are then dry aged at Meatsmith for six weeks before being sliced into T-bones and delivered to the restaurant.

Cattle farmer Matt O’Connor selects about 20 rib sets a week for Gimlet from pasture-fed animals, primarily Angus and Hereford, with a marble score of six-plus. “That’s quite high for pasture-fed beef,” says McConnell. “I think about one in 100 come through like that.” These go into Wheeler’s care for six weeks of dry-ageing before they’re cut into the T-bones delivered to the restaurant kitchen.

“It’s about provenance, it’s about how it’s selected in the abattoir, it’s about how it’s butchered, it’s how it’s aged. It’s a process,” says McConnell.

The amount of thought and work put into these epic steaks suggests that the perfect piece of meat, cooked with confidence, is as much a measure of the worth of a restaurant as anything else on the menu. “Eating in fine-dining restaurants isn’t always about technique and small plates. It should be about quality.”

Other Epic Steaks of Australia

Bistecca, Sydney

Bistecca alla Fiorentina, Riverine T-bone, $160/kilo

Icebergs Dining Room & Bar, Sydney

150-day grain-fed 500g rib-eye, crusted in Olsson’s sea salt, market price

Gaucho’s, Adelaide

650g grain-fed T-bone, dry-aged 28 days with char-grilled lemon, smoked salt, and olive oil, $80

A Hereford Beefstow

1.5kg 200 day grain-fed tomahawk steak carved at table $160′

Rosetta, Sydney and Melbourne

Cape Grim 36-month T-bone 21-day dry-aged, $165

Rothwell’s, Brisbane

800g T-Bone, dry-aged 4-6 weeks, $140

Porteño, Sydney

750g bistecca ‘ethically farmed Tasmanian pasture fed’ T-bone, $105

Society, Melbourne

Smoked Wagyu prime rib with wasabi and crème fraîche butter, sweet onion and shoyu koji jus, Japanese pickled cucumber, $245

Victor Churchill, Melbourne

1.2kg dry-aged Rangers Valley Black Market bistecca $185

Spotlight On

Back to contents

THE MORE IN BLACKMORE

For Australian Wagyu pioneer and fifth generation cattle farmer David Blackmore, one of the most important things differentiating the Blackmore brand is their story – and it’s quite a story.

Blackmore received his first cow at age 10 as payment from his grandfather for farm work. He now produces some of the highest quality Wagyu in the world for the finest tables in Australia and 15 countries around the globe.

David Blackmore at his property in Alexandra Victoria.

“We are our hardest critics – our reputation is only as good as our worst carcase. What’s really important for our business is the story and we’ve always presented that honestly, we protect the integrity of everything that we do and what we claim we do, we make sure we do,” David said.

Blackmore’s Wagyu journey started in 1988 in the USA when he saw purebred Wagyu cattle that were the descendants of four Wagyu bulls that had been exported from Japan in 1976 for research.

The Japanese Wagyu industry is highly protective, but trade discussions in the early 1990’s between the Japanese and US governments saw the first shipment of live full blood Wagyu, that included the first females exported from Japan in 1992. For the first time, full blood Wagyu cattle could now be bred outside of Japan. The Wagyu ban was re-imposed in 1996 and no Wagyu genetics have been exported from Japan since.

Meanwhile, Blackmore had established a close relationship with master Wagyu breeder Shogo Takeda – setting him up to secure the exclusive rights to import Takeda Wagyu embryos and semen into Australia. From 1992 to 2006 Blackmore imported more than 80 percent of the Wagyu genetics into Australia.

With his son Ben, Blackmore now runs a herd of 4,000 full blood Wagyu derived from Japan’s three most famous bloodlines. The business operates across five farms with 20 employees managing around 9,000 acres to produce high-quality Wagyu for the Australian and export markets.

“Wagyu is a long process so whilst 4,000 cattle seems like a lot, that only allows us to do 70 carcases a month – so it’s very small scale production but the idea is to have the very highest quality. One of the most important things we’ve tried to do is to make sure half of our beef stays in Australia and is used by Australian customers and chefs,” Ben said.

A Blackmore Wagyu cow and calf.

When David Blackmore first took his luxury beef to market, it was full carcase sales only – things started to change when Ben saw the enormous potential in his father’s relentless breeding and genetics work.

“When I first started out I was a typical farmer, I had been a stock agent and thought I could do my own marketing. I initially marketed on a per carcase basis, with half staying in Australia – of which about half of that went into Neil Perry’s restaurants who had their own butchers able to break down the carcases. The other half went to our US distributor and into restaurants like the French Laundry” David said.

Ben joined the business in 2009 with a Business Marketing degree and experience working in two Japanese meat trading companies, Itoham and Sojitz. He identified the value opportunity in breaking up the carcase to receive cut premiums by targeting particular markets.

“After university I worked for two Japanese meat companies and my first boss Paul Troja encouraged me to learn the Aus Meat handbook back to front along with the Latin names of each of the muscles. My first job, a traineeship at the Rockdale feedlot and abattoir, gave me a bit of a background in abattoirs and processing.”

“It is by design that we export to 15 countries – it allows us to identify different cuts that those markets will pay a premium for and with offal included we’re doing 35-40 cuts from every animal. Most people would think sending 300kg to a certain country is a waste of time, but for us, because of the higher value of the product, it could be a $15,000 – $20,000 order which makes it viable,” Ben said.

Dry aged Blackmore Wagyu sirloin at Meatsmith, Fitzroy.

Ben also saw the opportunity to add further value to the brand by using key chefs to become ambassadors and distributors in international markets.

“For us, a large amount of our product is sold through restaurants and the key relationship for us there is obviously the relationship with the chef,” Ben said.

Perth native, chef Dave Pynt, has been instrumental in the success of the Blackmore brand in Singapore through his Asia’s 50 Best winning and Michelin-starred restaurant Burnt Ends. Having initially imported directly for his own use and creating instant classics like the raw and smoky Blackmore Beef and Uni; Pynt has now started a subsidiary wholesaler to sell Blackmore beef.

Curtis Stone has a similar role through his burgeoning empire in the US – initially through his Beverly Hills restaurant Maude and Gwen Butcher Shop & Restaurant in Hollywood. Stone is now ‘selling coal to Newcastle’ serving Blackmore beef to Texans through his new Dallas based restaurant and butchery, Georgie.

David laughs as he tells me “Curtis is a hell of an ambassador but a terrible distributor – he keeps it all for himself” to which Ben adds “of course, we don’t mind because he uses a hell of a lot”.

Ben and David Blackmore.

At 71 years, David Blackmore has ceded control and put Blackmore Wagyu into the capable hands of his son Ben – but he is far from hanging up his boots. His ‘retirement project’ is already causing a stir as he sets himself the task of producing the best grass-fed beef in Australia.

In 2011, David and Ben were in the chiller of their French distributor when they saw some very large and heavily marbled cuts of yellow-fat beef. The beef was from Rubia Gallega cattle, indigenous to Galicia in Northern Spain – and after a decade long journey, Blackmore has again triumphed in bringing unique luxury to Australian tables.

Initially meeting similar protectionist obstacles to those that he had encountered with Wagyu, Blackmore negotiated with the Rubia Gallega breed society and the Spanish Government to import embryos into Australia and in late 2017, after implanting the embryos into surrogate cows, the first Rubia Gallega calves were born in Australia.

“The Rubia Gallega had not been exported from Spain any time before and I believe these are the first cattle born outside of Spain in the world. It’s taken us 10 years to get to this stage from when we first saw the meat in Spain to be able to have meat to sell in Australia.”

David Blackmore with one of his Rubia Gallega cows.

“They’re much more heavily marbled than other European breeds, probably double that of an Angus off grass, and with the marbling comes your flavour and tenderness – the chefs are reporting back that the butt cuts are unbelievably tender with very fine texture. We’re aiming to get to about 350 breeders and to do 15 to 20 carcases a month,” David said.

David is clear about the fact that the Rubia Gallega is not there to compete with the Wagyu but given the similar heritage of the two breeds in being work animals, believes many of the same principles will apply.

“A lot of the things we learned with Wagyu we can apply to the Rubia Gallega and I think we can produce a better product than they do in Spain. I think that we will slaughter at 28-30 months, like we do with the Wagyu, because with age comes flavour. Of course, to do this we need to charge a premium price, or it would be impossible; and if we are charging a premium price then we better deliver on quality and I believe this will be some of the best grass-fed beef in the world,” David said.

Ben agrees, considering the Rubia Gallega as complementary to the business model and welcoming its addition to the suite of Blackmore brands.

“The idea was not to create another product similar to Wagyu but a product that could be really high quality off grass or supplemented pasture – the idea is it doesn’t compete with our Wagyu products but accompanies them.”

“Rubia Gallega are a good animal to breed, the cattle are huge, they are big gentle giants. They’re actually a dual-purpose animal, the mother’s milk is used to make a Spanish cheese and a lot of the accolades of the meat qualities come from those retired female cows.”

“We were getting a fair bit of publicity for the new cattle, and I said ‘Dad, remember 97 percent of our income still comes from the Wagyu, so don’t go too hard’,” Ben laughed.

One of the first Blackmore Rubia Gallega at Rockpool Bar & Grill in Sydney. Image: Christopher Pearce.

When asked about the future of the Blackmore business, both men maintain that their biggest commitment is to quality. The Blackmore brand has never set out to feed the world – their customer has always been those seeking to celebrate with a luxury experience.

“We do a lot in our process to ensure that the flavour of our beef is unique and that starts before the animals are even born. It’s about making sure that we produce a really delicious piece of beef so that when somebody puts it in their mouth, we hope their first reaction is ‘wow’.”

“It’s long hours, it’s hard work and it’s about having consistency — not over a couple of months but a number of years — it’s now 30 years of two generations that has got us to this point today. We teeter on the edge of how big do you want to grow and at what size do you start to lose quality – I think we’re probably pretty happy where we are at today, it’s quite a sustainable business but who knows what the future holds,” Ben said.

What’s Good in the Hood

Back to contents

CANBERRA

Is it even a visit to our nation’s capital if you don’t hear someone talking about the state of the union, or the fresh waist measurements of a newly trimmed down Anthony Albanese?

A city with the industry of politics at its heart, few other capitals can boast quite the same level of purpose. It’s also a city with as much devotion to preserving the establishment (where the Bordeaux flows, the big swinging heads of state gather) as it is a major supporter of the up-and-coming. Perhaps it’s the vibrant university culture that keeps the fresh blood flowing here, where new music venues and listening bars are creating big noise nation-wide. The newer crop of restaurants are certainly cooking to the beat of their own drum. At cafe level – ground zero for micro-trends – there’s a sharpness that belies the smooth outer surface of a town that vibrates just a little differently.

Here’s what’s good in the Canberran hood.

Myffy takes it to the Nation’s Capital to discover what’s good.

INTRA

Provan Street, Campbell
intracbr.com.au

The toasted sandwich game in the inner north is strong, thanks to chef Steven Hahnen. Here at this sleek Campbell cafe, owners Nick Wood and Sean Baker employ sustainable practices where they can, they use leftover milk to make cheese, give food scraps to local farms and use secondary cuts of meat in a bid to honour a nose to tail ethos.

But back to those jaffles. Hahnen got a taste for them during his time in Berlin, and has taken his love to new heights with the likes of a spicy, silky and hella stretchy Sichuan beef and mapo tofu jaffle. The coffee here white/black/batch is as straight-shooting as the food offering – simple and delicious.

Intra’s Sichuan beef and mapo tofu jaffle and it’s creator Steven Hahnen.

ITALIAN AND SONS

Lonsdale Street, Braddon
italianandsons.com.au

Italian restaurants in Canberra may come and go, but Italian and Sons is for life. Started by the Trimboli family (they also have Mezzalira in the city) back in 2009 and occupying prime position on Lonsdale Street, it’s here you might decide to bookend your evening with a barrel-aged Negroni.

Pasquale Trimboli at Italian & Sons.

Order one either side of a crowd pleasing Italian menu stuffed with the likes of house-made focaccia, savoury sourdough doughnut fingers draped in anchovies and bitter greens and beef carpaccio studded with tiny capers. Wood-roast Cowra lamb rack with a warm zucchini salad gives generously on the flavour front, as does squid ink tagliolini with Hawkesbury river calamari – deliciously ruinous to white shirts everywhere.

Wood-roast Cowra lamb rack with warm zucchini salad.

ONZIEME

Kennedy Street, Kingston
onzieme.com.au

Named for chef Louis Couttoupes’ favourite arrondissement in Paris, Onzieme (French for Eleven) is an Aussie ode to the nouveau French bistro where the wine flows free and the corner restaurant is bathed in evening sun. It’s all about small plates and big flavours here (or big plates and big flavours when it comes to the whole lamb legs cooked over the woodfire).

Bone marrow roasts in the Onzieme wood oven.

Pressed-and-golden-fried potato cakes are topped with a blob of whipped sour cream. Beef tartare is amped up with fresh wasabi. Pan-fried haloumi is cooked till a deep bronze with white nectarines and murray cod is bathed in koji butter. Louis opts for lesser known cuts like the lamb knuckle, a muscle derived from the lamb leg, cooked gently over the coals and served with a salsa verde tricked up with bone marrow.

Lamb knuckle sliced and served with bone marrow salsa verde.

AUBERGINE

Barker Street, Griffith
aubergine.com.au

The classics remain that way for a reason, friends, and there’s no better example in Canberra than Ben Willis’ plush fine diner where thick carpet and heavy linens rule.

Aubergine chef Ben Willis.

A perfectly pink Frenched lamb cutlet with a verdant herb oil and poached greens accompanied by a lamb stuffed dumpling is a neat reflection of the restaurant’s elegant approach. Dishes are lean on flourishes, executed with quiet confidence. It’s a restaurant, too, where you can dive deep on the wine list, only to reemerge post petit fours.

Frenched lamb cutlet with herb oil, poached greens and a side of lamb dumplings.

CORELLA

Lonsdale Street, Braddon
corellabar.com.au

It’s a fun snack party here in downtown Braddon, and everyone’s invited. The menu has a strong indigenous hook, laced with 80s Australiana. See bread, ‘buttermite’ and native saltbush. Or fries with bush tomato thousand island sauce.

Hanger steak cooking over coals at Corella.

Ranger’s Valley hanger steak comes smothered in a native green compound butter, while spaghetti is tossed with surf herbs and pine nuts. Embrace the fun diner vibes with a sunrise margarita – all the usual fixings of everyone’s favourite good times cocktail, only made with sunrise limes with a saltbush rim. Spicy times ahead.

Hanger steak with native butter.

PILOT

Wakefield Gardens, Ainslie
pilotrestaurant.com

The star in Ainslie’s crown and one of Canberra’s most important young venues, care of owners Ross McQuinn and Dash Rumble. Chef Malcolm Hanslow has a firm grip on a menu that’s freeform but tightly wound. Over a regularly changing seven courses, the menu flits from bonito with sesame and agedashi tofu to a perfect green salad (a tiny aside, and yet possibly one of the most fresh, delightful versions you’re likely to encounter).

Pilot chef Malcolm Hanslow.

They’ve even been known to whip out a massaman curry, should the mood arise. On this visit we tuck into thinly sliced sirloin lightly grilled on one side only and served with pickled kohlrabi and fermented daikon. In an ode to the classic pub steak favourite – pepper sauce gets an upgrade with aleppo pepper in a mushroom stock base. A perfectly balanced dish, so good. Their all-Australian wine list plays on similar lines to the menu – young, fun and ultimately refreshing.

Pilot’s take on a pub classic – sirloin steak with pepper sauce.

REBEL REBEL

Marcus Clarke Street, Acton
rebelrebeldining.com.au

Chef Sean McConnell’s latest venture might just be his best. A menu in three parts, there might be breakfast shawarmas, ‘cacao pops’ (his play on the queen of breakfast cereal) or salmon belly with poached eggs. Lunch might lead you to an individual parmesan cannolo, or pumpkin with smoked yoghurt.

Afternoon light at Rebel Rebel.

Burn your fingers on a fried quail with harissa for dinner, or dig into half a kilo of grass-fed rib-eye with wakame butter (order a side of broccolini and bagna cauda to really amp that steak.) Or do as we did and snack on a chargrilled wagyu beef tongue dressed in Pedro Ximenez sherry – it’s unctuous, flavourful and unlike any other cut of meat. Also, we’d like to meet the person that can resist a macadamia ice cream sandwich for dessert.

Wagyu beef tongue chargrilled and dressed in Pedro Ximenez sherry.

AGOSTINI’S

East Hotel, Canberra Avenue, Griffith
agostinis.com.au

It’s pretty much impossible not to fall immediately in love with head chef Francesco Balestrieri – the guy just wants you to have a good time in his restaurant. As with Balestrieri’s attitude to cooking, his restaurant is all about sharing the love. Visit with a generous attitude and be rewarded.

Head chef Francesco Balestrieri.

Go for the pizzas baked in the hulking woodfired oven, imported from Italy, and stay for the house specialty – a pink, juicy 1kg bistecca fiorentina crusted in salt and served with a side of parmesan fries and a green salad.

Agostini’s house specialty – the 1kg bistecca fiorentina.

Cut Two Ways

Back to contents

WAGYU BRISKET

Butcher, Troy Wheeler

Meatsmith

When you think of specialty butcheries in Melbourne, one name springs to mind – Meatsmith.

Troy Wheeler at Meatsmith in Fitzroy.

The love child of butcher Troy Wheeler and restaurateur Andrew McConnell, Meatsmith’s commitment to quality is evident in every detail – from the opulent fit out rich with marble, timber and bronze to the cabinets filled with exceptionally prepared produce; the restaurant quality, chef prepared meals to the dizzying selection of accoutrements and condiments – it’s the butcher shop that dreams are made of.

Now with locations in Fitzroy, St Kilda, Balwyn and Brighton, Meatsmith is testament to the expert knowledge and skill of butcher Troy Wheeler from the provenance and preparation of the animals he sources to the masterful whole animal butchery and inventive value adding.

Blackmore Wagyu brisket at Meatsmith.

For our Luxury themed Cut Two Ways – Troy chose Wagyu brisket, and in this case, Blackmore Wagyu brisket. The brisket is derived from the underside chest area between the front legs – there are two briskets per carcase. As a well exercised muscle, the brisket contains ample connective tissue – the rich intramuscular fat on the Blackmore Wagyu brisket ranks it at a MS9+. Brisket is prepared by a straight cut which commences at the junction of the first rib and the first sternal segment through to the thirteenth rib.

Troy attends to the front window display at Meatsmith.

At Meatsmith, Troy uses Blackmore Wagyu brisket to make his decadent house made pastrami. First the brisket is pickled then rubbed in Meatsmith’s pastrami spice mix of black pepper, coriander seed, mustard powder, paprika, garlic powder, onion and brown sugar – it is then smoked for between eight and fourteen hours. Hot out of the smoker the brisket oozes juiciness as Troy slices through the black outer bark to reveal the vibrant pink centre.

Meatmsith’s house made Blackmore Wagyu Pastrami.

Meatmsith’s house made Blackmore Wagyu Pastrami.

Meatmsith’s house made Blackmore Wagyu Pastrami.

Meatmsith’s house made Blackmore Wagyu Pastrami.

Meatmsith’s house made Blackmore Wagyu Pastrami.

CHEF ONE

Hugh Allen – Executive Chef

Vue de monde

Wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Perched atop Melbourne’s iconic Rialto Building, Vue de monde is synonymous with luxury dining in Melbourne – as Gemima Cody puts in her 18/20 review of the restaurant in July 2021 ‘few can serve true end-of-days indulgence like Vue’.

Chef Hugh Allen, whose background includes three years working alongside Rene Redzepi at Noma, the Noma pop ups in Australia and Mexico and Noma 2.0 in Japan, was appointed executive chef at Vue in early 2019.

Currently enjoying pride and place on the Vue de monde menu is this Blackmore Wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips. Brisket is brined for four days in a solution that includes additions of kelp, shitake mushrooms, cep mushrooms, lemon thyme, mountain pepper and more with the brisket turned daily to ensure even brining.

Vue de monde executive chef Hugh Allen.

Next the brisket is lightly dusted all over with a spice mix of salt, brown sugar, coriander seeds, mountain pepper, fennel seeds, chilli flakes and garlic powder. It is then vacuum packed and cooked in a water bath at 68 degrees for 24 hours. It is then chilled and portioned for service.

Turnips are cut into ribbons on a Japanese mandolin with half then being cooked in bone marrow while the remainder are pickled. For the truffle puree, Hugh uses Northern Victorian truffles that were preserved last year in oil, salt and vinegar.

For service, the brisket portion is grilled over the hibachi, topped with truffle puree and adorned with delicately placed ribbons of turnip.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

Hugh prepares wagyu brisket with fermented truffles and turnips.

CHEF TWO

Donovan Cooke – Chef Patron

Ryne

Smoked brisket, onion three ways, tendon and bone marrow bordelaise.

Smoked brisket, onion three ways, popped tendon and bone marrow bordelaise.

Chef Donovan Cooke knows a thing or two about luxury food and fine dining – from his early days learning from the Godfather of English Cuisine Michael Roux; four years working as Marco Pierre White’s head chef and then on to the three-Michelin-starred La Cote St Jacques in Roigny.

Donovan moved to Australia and was only 25 years old when he put it all on the line to open Est Est Est – a Melbourne institution and prolific three hat holder. Next came Luxe, gaining three chef hats in its first year and the now legendary Ondine which was the Good Food Guide’s Best New Restaurant in 2002. Donovan was the Good Food Guide’s Best Chef in 2003 and 2004.

Fast forward almost 20 years – years that included Hong Kong Jockey Club and opening The Atlantic in Melbourne and much more – Donovan now showcases his incredible knowledge and technique at neighbourhood eatery Ryne.

Included on the menu at Ryne is this smoked brisket with onions three ways, popped tendon, bone marrow and bordelaise.

Chef Donovan Cooke.

Brisket is rubbed in a spice mix of cinnamon, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, cardamon, coriander and salt then left to marinate overnight. It is then vacuum packed with a tablespoon of beef fat and cooked in a water bath at 80 degrees for 8-10 hours. Next the brisket is cold smoked with applewood chips for 3-4 hours.

Onions three ways include a puree of onions sauteed in beef fat, thyme and rosemary; baby onions cut in half and caramelised in a hot pan with thyme and rosemary then gently cooked until tender in veal stock; and baby onions cut in half and brined overnight.

Beef tendon is cooked in chicken stock with a splash of vinegar for six hours then removed from the stock, rolled into a sausage shape and left in the fridge to set. It is then sliced on a meat slicer and dehydrated overnight before frying in a deep fryer until it pops and puffs up.

For service, the brisket is grilled all over on the hibachi until evenly charred – it is then plated with the onions three ways; the popped tendon and a bordelaise sauce tricked up with bone marrow and black garlic.