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.

Westcott’s mum was a community nurse who fed the family from books by the Nursing Mothers’ Association and the CWA. “It was all pretty simple,” Westcott says. “We always had chickens, so we had a lot of egg and bacon pie, and maybe vegetables from the garden with a roast once or twice a fortnight.” His least favourite of the dishes on high rotation with Mum was a version of chow mein. “Frozen peas and corn and mince and rice, all cooked in one not-hot-enough pot. No.”
 
So how did we get from there to here? From tepid chow mein to hand-pumped craft beers and rillettes with Tropea onions and house-made pickles? Where exactly did Westcott get led astray? He’d been kicking around in kitchens in Hobart for a few years, but as it turned out, one venue made all the difference.
 
Taking a punt and sticking his head through the door at a new place opening up on Murray Street in 2010 was a turning point. Garagistes was opened by Luke Burgess, a Tetsuya’s-trained chef with experience at Noma, and his partners, Katrina Birchmeier and Kirk Richardson, and drew national attention in a way that was unprecedented for a restaurant in Tasmania. Not that this was apparent to Westcott, who was still rocking a rat’s tail at the time and had never filleted a fish.
 
 
 

“It was still just a building site when I went in,” he says. “They hadn’t opened yet, and I’d been pushed to go by a friend of Kirk’s.” Despite the rat’s tail, Burgess saw something in Westcott, and he ended up staying for two years: “it was pretty formative for me.”

Then there’s the haggis bao.
 
It started with a call from Macdonald when he was first at Huon Valley Meat, going over the full list of things he could source. “He said to me, ‘can you use whole plucks from sheep?’” (Plucks being all the organs from the chest cavity – the lungs, heart and the liver.) Westcott says he wasn’t really thinking ‘novel and interesting’ so much as ‘how can I preserve all this offal?’
 
He played around with a few dough formulations and different ways of cooking before settling on the bao that graces the menu today. A yeasted dough is proved overnight, rolled into discs, wrapped around the filling, and proved again and then deep fried. The exact make-up of the filling varies from week to week, but it revolves around a mix of beef and lamb trim, kidney and liver, and lungs if they’re available. A bit of onion and freshly ground barley in place of the pinhead oatmeal that’s traditional in a haggis. Mace, ginger, black pepper, fennel seed and just a little dried and smoked chilli, and a Sichuan-inspired chilli oil with loads of garlic, Sichuan pepper, coriander and last summer’s dried chillies. “It’s been a fixture for a year now,” Westcott says, “and what arose out of someone saying, ‘can you use this?’ is now a necessity.”

Martini has stayed at the top of the game for a long time. In fact, if you happened to be flipping through the 1996 version of Rare Medium, you could find her laying out her ideas on the topic of serious meat at The Melbourne Wine Room, the restaurant at The George Hotel in St Kilda, in these very pages.
 
 
 

“We have had a char-grilled rib-eye on the menu since we opened, and I don’t think we’ll ever be able to take it off,” says 1996 Karen Martini, pictured in one of those slightly-out-focus, on-a-tilt shots that defined food-magazine photography in the 1990s.

 
 
 
She describes a 500-gram steak that was inspired by a three-inch-high T-bone popular at a hotspot called The Tuscan Grill. “It’s a big steak, but most people get through it.” At the time Martini was serving her big steak crusted with Sicilian sea salt, and dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and lemon – a dish that went on to become a signature at Icebergs Dining Room & Bar when she made the move to Sydney to open it for fellow Melbourne restaurateur Maurice Terzini in 2002. It has graced the menu there ever since.
 
What strikes you reading this piece nearly 25 years later – apart from how perfectly contemporary Martini’s food sounds – is her focus on flavour. “I really enjoy something that does have a bit of marbling running through it,” she said back then. “I think you get a lot more flavour compared with something like a tenderloin, which I find can be a bit bland and squishy. I like something with more flavour. If I ever do use eye fillet, it would probably be something like ox, with a really beefy flavour.”

For most of the last 20 years, most Australians would know Martini best as the grounded, very approachable voice of good food on Better Homes and Gardens on Seven, in her recipe columns for Sunday Life, Good Food and Good Weekend, and in her eight (going on nine) books. You’ve seen her on TV, braising lamb chump chops with allspice, or in print slicing rump steak, laying it over a pile of Russian red kale, endive, and radicchio for maltagliati of beef. Or bringing together influences from both sides of the Mediterranean in meatballs made with both baharat and pecorino, saffron and dill.
 
It’s exuberant cooking, fresh with leaves and herbs and often layered with multiple dressings. That maltagliati, for instance, is complemented with balsamic vinegar, swirled through the pan the meat’s cooked in, and also topped with ricotta. Martini has such a knack for keeping things light and fresh, and a gift for making her food approachable, it’s easy to forget that there’s a very serious chef with a very real focus on technique and consistency behind the smiling and the toss-and-scatter cooking that have endeared her to a generation of viewers and readers. Karen Martini can really cook.

And so things went, happily, steadily, until the opportunity to run the food at a Melbourne landmark came along. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image – ACMI for short – is a museum dedicated to film, television and video games. ACMI is the centrepiece of Federation Square on the banks of the Yarra, in the heart of the Melbourne CBD, and reopened this year after a five-year, $40 million renovation. Martini, along with Sapountsis and caterer Michael Gebran, a partner in Hospitality M, their new boutique hospitality group, is across all of ACMI’s food, from the sandwiches and (excellent) popcorn through to its 150-seat flagship restaurant, Hero.
 
In opening Hero, Martini found herself reckoning with the stresses of the pandemic, but also with the more personal question of whether the city would show up for her. There are plenty of examples, after all, of good prime-time ratings being no guarantee of a busy restaurant.
 
 
 

“The pressure I felt was in not having opened anything for such a long time,” she says. “I just didn’t know how we were going to be received, especially in the climate that we’re in.” Hero opened nonetheless and received a hero’s welcome. “So much better than it needs to be”, said one key review.

“I think it’s good to quantify what you feel like your return should be.” And Rashid doesn’t just mean the bottom line. What do you want this business to do for you? Make you money? Let you express yourself? Change your community? Give you a vehicle to explore something that you’re interested in? Save the world? Buy yourself a job you like? All of the above?
 
“What are the metrics to your success and happiness?” If that’s outlined and you’re happy with that, he says, you need to figure out who your customer is. “That idea of that customer doesn’t have to stay set in stone, but you have to have an idea of where this person is. Does this person actually exist? That’s huge for people.”
 
About once every two weeks someone who wants to open a food truck hits Rashid up on Instagram, and he hits them back with the two questions. “And then if they’ve thought about it, and say, ‘this customer exists at this farmer’s market on Sunday and I’m willing to go there and do this for them every Sunday’, then cool. But if they’re like, ‘oh, we’re just gonna park up outside the MCG and you know’, I’ll say, that’s fine too, but you probably need to put in a little bit more work. You might not be able to park there. And does that person coming out of the MCG really want to eat a Scotch egg right then? You’ve got to think about those things. I return to these questions all the time.”

This is not to say Raph Rashid asked himself these questions before he opened his own thing. Right now, he runs three Beatbox Kitchen burger trucks, three Taco Trucks, a bricks-and-mortar Beatbox Kitchen diner on Sydney Road, and Juanita Peaches, a combined burger and doughnut shop in Brunswick that is home to the trucks. He’s the author of three books, has been by turns a graffiti writer, a teenage T-shirt mogul, a recording artist and a sandwich hand, and last year made his first-ever TV series, Mean Cuisine.
 
If you’re looking for a through-line there, it’s doing it yourself. His first book, Behind the Beat, has nothing to do with food – it’s all about hip-hop producers. But it’s about their home studios, taking you inside the spaces where the likes of Cut Chemist, Madlib, Mario Caldato Jr and the late MF Doom and J Dilla did their work.
 
 
 

“I was deeply into home studios and how people were DIYing their own music. One of my favourite albums of all time was DJ Shadow, and he made it all at home. I thought, people need to see what’s going on here.”

 
 
 
Whether it’s skateboarding, graffiti, hip-hop or taco trucks, Rashid deep dives into subcultures, and takes his time to absorb the details while he’s there.
 
When you take a look at the (many) cookbooks on his office shelves, beyond the extensive taco and hamburger literature – you might discern a bias for chefs who forge their own path: Roy Choi, David Chang, Gabrielle Hamilton, Fred Morin and David McMillan, the guys from Joe Beef in Montreal. “I still trip on the new Joe Beef, you know – Surviving the Apocalypse – how’s that timing?”
 
Then as you walk past a stack of shelves towards the other end of the room, the cookbooks and bottles of mustard give way to more 1970s copies of National Geographic, and scale models of treehouses. Less Enrique Olvera, René Redzepi and fermentation, more Ken Done, Henry Darger and books about crochet, tissue paper and kite craft. A poster dominates one shelf with the legend THEY DRANK ALL THE MILK AND ATE ALL THE BUTTER.

Then came McDonald’s and the other American burger chains. The points of reference for young adults now, Rashid says, are big-chain fast food, while their parents would have grown up with the fish-and-chip shop burger first. In making his own burgers, he wanted to straddle both worlds, and also bring in what he’d seen travelling in the US.
 
 
 

“I thought there was a distinct west coast/east coast style of burger. The west coast being like In-N-Out, and the east coast being more like a pub-style burger. The east coast had a fatter patty, juicier, bigger and nothing was very sweet, no brioche or anything like that.”

 
 
 
He’s also a big believer in the way a place feels. More than the actual burger, he says, it was “the feelings of conviction and honesty” that won him over at a lot of the mom-and-pop burger stands he visited in the US.