For as long as people have taken the field or stepped into the arena to test themselves against each other, there have been spectators, and for as long as there have been spectators, there have been pies.

 
Well, not pies exactly, but something like a pie – something to eat while cheering (or indeed booing) the battle playing out before you. And while things have come a long way since the days of oiled Spartans duking it out in the original Olympics (everyone usually wears clothes now, for one thing), for most of our modern era in the West, the food served at stadiums hasn’t changed that much. Even as broadcasting, advertising, changing attention spans and the rise of the professional athlete have dramatically transformed the games themselves, food stayed basic.
 
Or at least it did until now. Restaurant chefs are getting in on the business of how we eat when we’re watching sport, and it is, as they say, a game changer.

As stadiums and arenas became more established, food concessions were set up on the premises, with more varied menus and more comfortable seating. One of the earliest examples of stadium food was the hotdog – the first of them sold at a baseball game in New York City in 1893.
 
In the early 20th century, with the rise of organised sports leagues, the variety of food available at sporting events began to expand. In the US, hamburgers began to be sold at baseball games in the 1920s, while in the UK and Australia meat pies became a popular food served at football matches. As sporting events became more professionalised and commercialised, food vendors began to see the potential for selling a wider variety of foods to hungry spectators.
 
Take a look around today. At the FIFA World Cup in Doha last year, punters at Al Bayt Stadium had the option of potato chips, popcorn and (beef) hotdogs but also the more Qatari-leaning likes of faytayer, a triangular almost-pie, filled with minced meat and spinach, and luqaimat, a sweet flour dumpling drenched in sweet syrup spiced with cardamom. If you want to get really fancy, consider making a booking at Geranium, the fine-diner in Denmark named number one in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2022. It’s located on the eighth floor of Parken, the home of Copenhagen FC – so you could conceivably nip in for a taste of the Spring Universe menu (for a crisp $800 AUD a head) and smash a bit of salted herring in crisp algae with dill stems and aquavit before a game. Not so much with the pies, though.
 
And in 2023, Australia is now well and truly in the game, following a string of high-profile announcements connecting restaurants and major sporting venues. Melbourne chefs Guy Grossi and Alejandro Saravia signed on with the hallowed ground of the MCG last year, and today, when members roll into the Long Room on a game day, Saravia offers them a buffet laden with the likes of leg of O’Connor beef, cooked over a wood fire and served with smoked chilli salsa and chimichurri. Grossi’s menus at the swank Committee Room, meanwhile, place duck and porcini tortellini with caramelised pear, and a rigatoni sauced with a spiced veal ragù and a healthy dusting of pecorino alongside King George whiting presented with a Sicilian-accented arrangement of breadcrumbs, pine nuts, sultanas, saffron and zucchini, and a serious herb-crumbed veal cutlet with bitter leaves dressed with lemon and capers.

Speaking of the MCG, next door in and around Rod Laver Arena, The Australian Open has done an incredible job putting Melbourne well ahead of its international Grand Slam brethren in the food stakes. This year’s talent included Jacqui Challinor offering a Nomad menu (hello mushroom and bone marrow empanadas) on the rooftop, Saint Peter chef Josh Niland with his fast-casual Charcoal Fish concept, plus full-service versions of Rockpool Bar & Grill, Supernormal and Stokehouse and a Penfolds restaurant powered by the team from Magill Estate, not to mention Tacos y Liquor and Ca Com, the casual offshoots from celebrated chefs Aaron Turner, of Igni, and Thi Le from Jeow.
 
It is, says Matt Moran, a sign of the times. The Aria chef reckons it’s tied up with sport being such a key place for corporate entertaining, and also just the general elevation of the food conversation in Australia.
 
 

“It’s all about good produce and just done well. People just want good food that hasn’t been sitting in bain-maries for God knows how long. You don’t have to serve five garnishes with it and trick it up, we just want to make it fresh and clean.”

 
 
Moran is now culinary ambassador across two large Sydney venues, CommBank Stadium in Parramatta and Accor Stadium at Sydney’s Olympic Park, and he says his mission is to put good produce first.
 
“If it’s going to be a chook, it’s going to be a really good roast chook with a good gravy. Slow-cooked lamb shoulder, he says, is the perfect thing in this context for chefs and punters alike. “You can do it in advance, and it’s so bloody easy to reheat in a Rational and put it on a platter and let people share it. That’s delicious.”

You might know Mike Eggert as the chef behind the smash-hit success of Totti’s, which has just spread its wings from its Sydney home base and opened in Lorne on the Victorian coastline. But he also answers to another label: lifelong cricket tragic. (He has fond memories of the sandwiches his nan would make for a test-match: chicken and lettuce with butter and white pepper.)
 
So when Merivale signed on to step up the food offering at the SCG and Allianz Stadium, bringing its exec chefs Jordan Toft, Dan Hong, Ben Greeno and Vincenzo Biondini into the mix, Eggert was ready to lead the charge. And while you can now get noodles and dumplings from Queen Chow and Ms G’s, “the elevated, coastal European stylings” of Bert’s, Coogee Pavilion, wraps from Jimmy’s and a pasta bar from Totti’s, it’s Eggert’s pie and a burger from Biondini that bring it on home for the crowd in the stands.
 
 

“We had a couple of parameters,” says Eggert of the signature SCG pie he developed with the team from Sonoma Bakery. “It needed to be a one-hander. None of this two-handed pie crap.” Structural integrity, as with all good sandwiches and pies, was paramount. “You have to be able to nurse both a beer and a pie.”

 
 
For the filling, braised beef was the starting point. “I didn’t want anything at all fancy. No red wine, mushrooms and stuff. I just wanted an elevated version of a classic beef pie.” The winning mix is simply seasoned with black pepper, “a micro-amount” of onion and garlic, and that’s pretty much it. No packet gravy-flavour, no veggie boosters or chicken booster or MSG. “Just a beefy, meaty, gravy flavour stuffed inside a pie.”

It might give the appearance of being perfectly changeless, but for this landmark of Australian fine dining, evolution is constant and quiet innovation keeps it on top.

 
To the casual observer, Flower Drum is about as classical as it gets. The carpet is red, the tablecloths are white, the dining rooms divided by lacquered screens. Some of the waiters give the impression they might’ve been working the floor for all of the restaurant’s nearly 50 years in business.

Just ask Jason Lui, the GM. He hasn’t been around quite since the very beginning in 1975, not being quite yet born then, but he almost literally grew up in the restaurant. His father, Anthony Lui, moved to Australia from Hong Kong to join the kitchen, and bought it from founder Gilbert Lau in 2000, having never worked a day in another restaurant in this country. Jason has worked right across the business, as a busboy, at the bar, as a cashier, absorbing the lessons of a master maître d’ and restaurateur at Lau’s side, and his vision for Flower Drum is perfectly clear.
 
 

“We’re a traditional Cantonese restaurant working with the best Aussie produce we can find,” he says. “Our menu is quite broad; after 47 years you pick up a lot of things along the way, and we’ve still got regulars from 30 or even 40 years ago who still order the same thing, even if it’s not on the menu anymore. We still keep skewers in the kitchen in case someone comes in asking for satay.”

 
 
Glance at the written menu today and there’s everything you’d expect at the highest of high-end restaurants in Hong Kong: delicate dumplings in translucent gossamer wrappings, noodles dancing with the breath of the wok, soups of exceptional depth and clarity. You can have your rock lobster stir-fried with XO sauce and dried scallop, or whipped with egg whites and cream into an airy omelette. The Peking duck is one of Australia’s finest examples, served tableside on featherlight pancakes, and fried rice, crisp-skinned chicken and barbecue pork are all present and correct.

But there’s also a double-boiled soup made with wallaby tail and red dates – not something you see every day in Kowloon or Wanchai – and preserved egg wrapped in deeply savoury minced quail, like a Cantonese Scotch egg. The meat of the pearl oyster – not the usual eating family Ostreidae, but the Pinctada maxima used to culture pearls off the coast of Broome – is served on its shimmering shell, its dense, almost abalone-like flesh dressed with ginger and spring onion.
 
Zoom in on the red-meat situation and that quiet edge of innovation becomes even more apparent. While beef is prized as a special treat, Cantonese diners – southern Chinese diners in general, in fact – are traditionally not big eaters of lamb or mutton. Or, as Irene Kuo puts it rather more bluntly in her 1977 landmark The Key to Chinese Cooking, “beef is scarce in China and lamb is disliked by most Chinese because of its strong odor”.
 
At Flower Drum circa 2023, though, it’s a different story. Cantonese cooking is, after all, about bringing out the best qualities of the best ingredients to hand, and in Australia, that means fine lamb and beef. “It’d be silly not to use it,” says Jason. In the lamb department, Anthony Lui favours saltbush lamb, and works with Bultarra, the certified organic producer that runs White Dorpers in northern South Australia, grazing them on the saltbush and native grasses of the Flinders Ranges.
 

And then Jason throws another curve-ball. Flower Drum is famed for the breadth of its off-menu offering – most of the real regulars verbal their whole order without ever cracking the pages of the carte. But even so, learning that the Drum does a steak still comes as something of a shock. Will it be Black Angus eye fillet or Robbins Island wagyu porterhouse? “We do those with black pepper sauce or our Sichuan sauce,” Jason says. It’s more usual for these cuts to be sliced into strips before they’re cooked here, of course, as you would in any restaurant where chopsticks are the weapons of choice at the table, but the Drum also has guests who prefer it as a steak, and, this being a can-do sort of place, they’re always happy to serve them. “We’ve got seeded mustard here if you want it.”
 
So how does it work, this business of being both a timeless institution but at the same time constantly evolving?
 
 

“The techniques we use are still very traditional, they work for a reason,” Jason says, “but we have a bit of fun playing around with things and doing things differently with certain dishes. Even our spring onion cake we do with puff pastry rather than the usual pancake – you can’t just do the same thing all the time.”

 
 
Flower Drum is famed for the personal quality of its service. Jason Lui speaks fondly of Gilbert Lau’s total commitment to the job and his fastidious way of working, talking about him running his fingers under the chairs to check that they were clean all over, or drilling staff not just on the menu and the wine list but on the varieties of flowers arranged around the dining room.
 
“Above all it was him teaching us how to look after people, how to make them want to come back. Even if they’ve got to save for a year before they can come back, you overwhelm them with service and attention to detail, and the food is so wow – you make it so that they can’t not come back.”

As we enter the Year of the Rabbit, as the restaurant eases closer to its own 50th year, what does Jason want the wider world to know the Flower Drum is all about?
 
“I’d say don’t be afraid to have a chat with us,” he says. “The menu can be daunting for some people but it’s just a snapshot of what we can do for you. Tell us what you like, tell us what you don’t like, and let us do something for you. That’s when most of my guests have the most fun. Do something different. You’ve made the booking and waited two months to come in – let’s go all in.”

“I’ve been thinking about goat,” says Nagesh Seethiah. Specifically, he’s been thinking about New Year’s Day in Mauritius, when he was growing up.

 
The whole family would get together with several other families at his maternal grandmother’s place in Cottage, on the northern side of the island. New Year’s is big in Mauritius, bigger than Christmas, and a big celebration called for a goat or two, with the families making a day of it, everyone pitching in to cook every part of it.
 
“For lunch, you’d have all the cuts that are easy to cook quickly, including the offal, and then we’d break down and set aside the cuts that need longer cooking, like the legs and the shoulders, for dinner.” Seethiah’s mum, Canta, liked to take charge of lunch, the specialty being a dish called cari endan, or ‘inside curry’. “Each piece of offal would get sliced separately, the heart, the liver, marinated in lots of ginger and garlic, chillies, salt, and some of my grandma’s masala,” says Seethiah. “It’s quite a light, bright sort of masala, with cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon really prominent in it.”
 

Let’s pause here for a moment for a word on Mauritius and its food. Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa, 1,100km east of Madagascar. The island is small – about the size of Maui, or a 30th of the size of Tasmania – and when it was first discovered by Arab sailors around the year 975, it was uninhabited. The Dutch took possession in 1598, then the French took over in 1715, before losing it to the English in 1810, and it remained a primarily plantation-based colony of the United Kingdom until independence in 1968.
 
Under French rule the population was made up largely of enslaved peoples from Mozambique, Madagascar and Zanzibar, brought over to work the plantations, while British owners of sugarcane estates brought in indentured workers and soldiers from India. Today Mauritius is a developed democracy with a culturally diverse population. It’s the only country in Africa where Hinduism is the majority religion; school is taught in French and English, and most people speak Mauritian Creole at home.
 
In the kitchen, the influences of Indian, Creole, French and Hakka Chinese traditions come together. Rice and bread are staples, and daubes, patisserie, dim sum and spring rolls share space in the national cuisine with biryanis, curries, and other Indian and Tamil dishes. That daube has evolved in the centuries since French occupation to feature plenty of ginger and green chilli along with the thyme and tomatoes, and will more likely be made with lamb or chicken instead of the beef you’d see in Provence.
 

The thing that perhaps keeps more people from cooking goat is its gaminess, Seethiah reckons, and that little bit of extra chew. “But I think for our application, where we can lean on strong marinades and spices, it works really well. I don’t find goat that far a step from lamb, really.”
 
Back on the island on New Year’s Day, meanwhile, the goat offal has been marinating in spices and aromats, and it’s time to cook. Nagesh’s mum stir-fries the offal over a wok burner in the outside kitchen. It’s a dry, quite spice-heavy stir-fry, south-Indian style, with plenty of onion.
 
“Everyone sits down to eat this lunch of quite spicy offal, and then we go pretty much straight into it from lunch, setting up again, breaking down the rest of the goat and setting things up for a longer cook – a braise, really saucy curries, and that’s where the neck and the shoulder and leg come into play.”

There’s a salad of cucumber and chilli on the table with some green mango through it, and the day is peppered with little fried things and other snacks. “Chilli bites, which are almost like a falafel mix made of split peas, with fried chilli and spring onion through it. Someone will have gone fishing and there’ll be vindaye, which is something like fish pickled in turmeric and mustard.
 
Seethiah ran a play on the New Year celebration for one of the pop-ups he did at Rockwell and Sons in Collingwood, braising the leg and shoulder of a goat overnight, and then grilling the liver and the heart before folding them through the shredded meat and the sauce, all over a base of shallots, ginger, garlic, lots of little Thai chillies and curry leaves. “We cooked off the base fresh for each plate,” he says.
 
 

“That was probably one of the most intense nights of cooking I’ve ever had – so hot and spicy every time you’re facing the stove, but so delicious.”

 
 
This was quite a while ago – three or four years, perhaps – and it’s useful to understand that Manzé existed as an idea and a series of pop-ups long before it settled into a bricks-and-mortar site. Seethiah is only 29 – young, perhaps, to be a restaurant owner – yet his path to being a restaurateur and heading a kitchen of his own hasn’t been perfectly linear, and cooking food from Mauritius was by no means always part of the plan.

Nagesh Seethiah was born in northern Mauritius. His parents, Ram and Canta, moved the family to New Zealand when he was eight, to a hobby farm in Coatesville, just outside Auckland. They ran a few sheep and cows on the property and lots of chickens, grew their own vegetables and did a home-kill of a beast once or twice a year.
 
Seethiah didn’t know what he wanted to do when he finished high school, other than take his BMX and do a tour of the South Island, but he had a cousin studying at the ANU, so, with his parents’ encouragement, he moved to Canberra to study law and art history.
 
Australia gave Seethiah his first taste of hospitality life. He worked at Lonsdale Street Roasters in Braddon and at Stand by Me in Lyons, where he made the move from front-of-house to the kitchen. At Bar Rochford he worked under Ian Poy, a Noma alumnus, and then with Louis Couttoupes, a former public servant fresh from a stint at Au Passage in Paris, studying all the while. “I went to my graduation that year, had lunch with my parents and my partner, Sabrina, and then went straight back to do service at Bar Rochford.”
 
At the time, by his own estimation, he had no idea what he was doing. “I shouldn’t have been put in charge of a kitchen in my second ever cooking job, but Nick, the owner, was very trusting,” he says “I’ve come to learn, running my own venue, that a lot of the time you’re making this stuff up as you go along.”
 
The next year Sabrina landed a great job in Melbourne, and she and Seethiah made the move to Victoria. “We moved here on a Friday and I was working on the floor at Belles Hot Chicken in Fitzroy on the Monday.” The two years he spent working the floor at Anchovy, Thi Le and Jia-Yen Lee’s restaurant in Richmond, was a key inspiration. “I learned a lot there,” he says. “About making things from scratch. About Thi’s approach to cooking the food of her heritage. The way she gives that food the same or more attention, care and detail that we’re expected to put into other cuisines.”

Let’s pull focus here for a moment: what is it about the food of Mauritius, say, or Vietnam, that could make it seem less deserving of attention than Italian, for example, or French food? “In our cultures we treat food as sustenance, it’s something that’s done at home,” Seethiah says.
 
 

“We acknowledge that our mothers are good cooks, but we don’t place a lot of value on learning to cook that food, or on food having cultural value. It’s about spending time in our careers caring so much about other people’s food, and then flipping the script and treating our own food that way. Seeing that our food deserves as much attention and detail, with ingredients and a price-point to match.”

 
 
There’s challenges here. Even Seethiah’s parents aren’t entirely used to the idea of the food of Mauritius as restaurant cuisine. “They support it, but they don’t quite see the point.” Then there’s the Mauritian people who come into Manzé and tell him that what he’s cooking is too expensive and isn’t really Mauritian food. There’s also the guy on the internet who likes to say that what Seethiah is doing is inauthentic, a joke, and that he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing – a curious charge to lay against a chef born and bred on the island.

But there’s also the Mauritians who visit Manzé and delight in seeing the flavours they grew up with presented in a new light. “We had a couple come in a few weeks ago, maybe a bit older than I am, and they said, ‘we don’t know you, but we’re so proud of you, thank you for doing this’. That made me think, well, some people might not like it, but there is value in this.”
 
This is food Seethiah learned to cook from his mum and his dad, and from his grandmother. It’s a conversation in progress. “I’ll be on the phone to Mum on a Monday, saying, hey, I’m thinking of doing this. Mum will say, ‘that won’t work’, and then I’ll do it anyway, and then she’ll come in a few weeks later, try it, and say, ‘oh wow, that’s good’.

There’s certainly more than a few Australians today who get a bit misty-eyed thinking about the heyday of the prawn cocktail and the steak Diane because they were there for it, living in that time and place. But what about the familiarity of dishes that didn’t get cooked in your house, or the other places your family went to eat? How do you explain their hold on the public imagination?
 
The Beef Wellington at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill in Brisbane is a case in point. It’s a dish of British/French origin that has been around for at least a hundred years. Why exactly is it enjoying an unlikely renaissance right now at the hottest restaurant in the humid, subtropical climes of the Queensland capital?
 
For Ben Russell, there’s no mystery to its success: it’s about quality and it’s about deliciousness. A chef who has worked right across the spectrum of the familiar and the unfamiliar in his life in restaurant kitchens, Russell takes the view that the magic of dishes like Beef Wellington lies in taking combinations of ingredients and techniques that have stood the test of time, and honouring them with cooking that is all about quality produce and careful, honest preparation.

On his menu at Rothwell’s there’s a French onion dip among the appetisers, and an entrée that brings together prawn, avocado, lettuce, and cocktail sauce. There’s Caesar salad blessedly free of grilled chicken. There’s Martinis and Bloody Marys at the bar, there’s a seafood platter to share, and there’s trifle and madelines for dessert. But it’s about timeless elegance and not a retro trip.
 
 
 

“It’s not about trickery here,” says Russell, “you know what you’re in for.” There’s no side-eye, no riff or remix – the bat is played straight, and the result is dishes that surprise and delight with their freshness and immediacy.

 
 
 
A beautifully lit room, with lots of marble, big chandeliers, dark-green leather booths and well-chosen jazz, makes for a fitting backdrop. With Dan Clark, the operator behind 1889 Enoteca and one of Australia’s savviest wine importers, backing the place, the food is complemented by a list rich in treasures – 18-year-old Krug and JJ Prum riesling on by the glass, magnums and jeroboams of Gravner and Cornelissen, and a sea of Burgundy.
 
The thing about classics is that they’re classics for a reason. “They may not always be prepared in the best possible way from the finest possible ingredients but it’s easy to understand their appeal,” write Simon Hopkinson and Lindsay Bareham in their book, The Prawn Cocktail Years. “If one bothers to prepare these and other dishes that predate the whim of fashion in food then it is a revelation how good they can be.”

Which brings us, of course, to Ben Russell’s Beef Wellington. Here’s how he does it.
 
First, the beef fillet. Russell goes grain-fed because he thinks it’s firmer and holds up a little better in the way it cooks in the Wellington, which essentially steams inside the pastry. He sears the beef in a hot pan, brushing it liberally with Dijon mustard.
 
Next comes the mushroom duxelles – rather than slicing and pan-frying the mushrooms in batches, Russell roasts them off whole in a pot to cook all the water out of them and to intensify their flavour, then blends them and presses them for a couple of hours to squeeze out any remaining moisture.
 
Then the crêpes: flour, eggs, milk and a little bit of beurre noisette. He lays a crêpe out on the bench, layers on about a centimetre of the mushrooms, then the beef fillet. It’s rolled, wrapped in clingfilm and goes into the fridge for a couple of hours to set before he wraps it in a layer of butter puff pastry, egg-washes it, and then adds another layer of lattice pastry, and more egg wash.
 
Then it goes into the Rational at 200 degrees till it hits an internal temperature of 35 degrees. Wrapped as it is in pastry, the meat comes up to a nice medium rare as it rests. The thickness of the pastry is the tricky part, Russell says: if it’s too thick, it won’t cook through before the beef is done.

It’s served with a red wine sauce – red wine and port reduced with lots of shallots and thyme on a veal-stock base.
 
 

“We carve it in half in the kitchen, and it goes out on a large oval plate looking very decadent with an antique silver jug of the sauce on the side – it smells rich and warm with the puff pastry and the mushrooms and the red wine sauce.”

 
 
“When you’re eating it, even though that layer of Dijon is just brushed on, it’s something that I think is a pleasant surprise. Fillet steak, mushrooms and pastry are not necessarily hero ingredients on their own but together they’re sensational. It’s an experience to savour. It’s a good time.”
 
To drink? Dan Clark imports some pretty radical wines but he says he likes to pour classics with classics. “Top-end Yarra Valley and Margaret River cabernet work really well with the Wellington. Cullen, Moss Wood, Wantirna. Or brighter shiraz – Dune in McLaren Vale and Izway from the Barossa Valley do the job nicely as well.”
 
To game it out even further, Russell suggests Martinis at the bar beforehand, then settling into a booth for some raw seafood and oysters or a crab salad, maybe the tagliatelle with sea urchin, then your Wellington and sides to share, maybe a tarte tatin or a crème brulée afterwards. “And then we have an Armagnac trolley, so if you want to get really comfortable, we’ve got bottles there dating back to the 1920s. And that’s your Rothwell’s experience.”

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.

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.

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’.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

You wouldn’t call the concept for Hogget Kitchen tricky. The way Trevor Perkins tells it, it was as simple as a conversation he had with his mates Pat Sullivan and Bill Downie, winemakers both, over a meal of local, very fresh produce and local, very drinkable wines, and saying “why can’t we just do something like this, but as a restaurant?”

 
 
Hogget is the result, a place where a casual, friendly air on the floor is balanced by some real rigour and passion in the kitchen. It could well be the very picture of country dining in Australia right now.
 
The restaurant is set on a building leased from Wild Dog Winery, perhaps the oldest winery in the Gippsland region, overlooking a valley planted with riesling, gewürztraminer, merlot and a variety of other grapes. In a paddock just past the carpark graze alpacas, woolly and serene. The big deck of the restaurant is stacked with neat cordons of chardonnay and shiraz cuttings bound for a variety of barbecue rigs, many of them welded up by Perkins himself.
 
We’re five minutes out of the West Gippsland town of Warragul, and about 100 clicks east of the Melbourne CBD. The land is lush, the soils volcanic, the rainfall high – almost certainly some of the richest agricultural land in Victoria. Farming around here is typically sheep and cattle, the sheep a mix of merino wool and prime lamb, with lamb being the majority.
 
Hogget Kitchen takes its name from the word used to describe an animal that is older than a lamb – between about nine and 18 months – that doesn’t yet have the two teeth that would mark it as a mature ewe or ram, and its meat as mutton. But it isn’t a restaurant concerned solely with the meat of sheep. A meal here might trip open with a fine little shortcrust tartlet of roe from trout up the road at Noojee, or a creamy dollop of Gippsland rabbit pâté paired with a chutney made of medlars, everyone’s favourite strange medieval fruit. This is a restaurant that follows the rhythm of the local seasons and supply.

A typical breakdown might be bone-in shoulder, square-cut forequarter (with the shank, neck and brisket bone removed), the eight-point racks (chine off, cap on, “but not Frenched!”), backstrap, rump and fillet (all cap on), belly and short-cut hind legs (shank off). The bones – chine, H-bone and brisket among them – go into stocks and sauces, the trim gets pickled and boiled, and the sweetbreads, kidneys and liver get looked after as the precious jewels that they are. “The offal really speaks to the quality of the animal you’re dealing with,” Perkins says. “You can tell a lot from its flavour.”
 
Smoking and grilling are Perkins’ weapons of choice for lamb, the Kamado Joe in the kitchen and the grills outside getting a good workout. But while Perkins cut his teeth as a country cook, growing up nearby in Moe and doing his apprenticeship at Da Nunzio’s, he also worked with Philippe Mouchel at Langton’s in Melbourne, so there’s more going on here than turn-and-burn. A glance at the shelves loaded with cookbooks in the private dining room, reveals the breadth of his interest. There’s plenty on butchery, charcuterie, meat, and cooking with fire, but also Ducasse, Escoffier and Guérard, and next to them, volumes from David Thompson, Christine Manfield and Sean Brock, as well as plenty on the food of Mexico.

Why 22 kilos? Between 22 and 24 is the sweet spot, as far as Perkins is concerned, for fat cover, flavour and tenderness in a Gippsland lamb. This is not a stance struck by a chef being difficult – Perkins is not going to send a carcase back because it comes in at 25 kilos – it’s just an observation made by a guy who has cut up a lot of lambs, who pays attention, and who knows what he’s doing.