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Sydney's Culinary High Notes

By Carole Kotkin

Like many Americans who learned about Australia's gastronomy via the Outback  Steakhouse chain restaurant and Foster's beer commercials, I went to Australia full of culinary misconceptions. I expected to lunch on Vegimite sandwiches and drink lager for dinner. Instead, I discovered Australia's cuisine to be so much more than "shrimp on the barbie" and "bloomin' onions." In fact, Sydney, arguably the most recognizable city in Australia, has one of the most exciting food scenes in the world. It's difficult to think of another international city that matches Sydney for the excellence and energy of its restaurants. There is more than a touch of Hong Kong in the balmy climate, Los Angeles in the relaxed and casual lifestyle, Paris in the smooth self-assurance, and New York in the passion for good food and fine wine. Its four million residents are imbued with a pioneering do-it-yourself spirit, a zest for challenges and an innate curiosity. This attitude, similar to the one that launched California cuisine two decades ago, has likewise influenced the way Aussies eat today.

The launch of Australian gastronomy coincided with the rise of Australian wine. By the end of the 1970s, wine production had become a major industry in Australia, with vineyards all over the southern half of the continent producing wines that are on a par with the best from any part of the world. Diners, who were becoming more knowledgeable about the vintages, wanted great food to go with them. This mirrored what was happening in California, where industrious chefs like Michael McCarty of Michael's in Santa Monica and Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles were pairing West Coast wines with fresh, high-end ingredients, gleaned from local growers and purveyors. In Sydney, restaurateur Stan Sarris was at the forefront of a similar movement; he has been promoting the quality and range of Australian food for ten years as director of Eaternity Group and as a member of the Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales.

Naturally, what Australia's contemporary chefs are currently sourcing from the region - lush produce, world-famous beef and lamb, and cottage industry dairy products - plays a large role in determining the impression they are making on the culinary industry. They also like to creatively showcase native Australian ingredients such as kangaroo and emu (both taste like venison); yabbies (crayfish); local caviar; sea urchins; barramundi (a white, bony fish); Sydney rock oysters; Margaret River Marron tails (small lobsters); and bush products like warrigal (a spinach-like green). "It all comes back to produce," notes Australian-born super-chef Neil Perry of Sydney's Rockpool Group. "We are like California, with everything close at hand." Commenting on his affinity for food, he notes:

"From a young age I was taught the meaning of freshness and the importance of developing a keen eye for produce. I remember sitting at the table and enjoying a glass of wine with the family at 15. I'm sure this was critical to the development of my fascination with food and flavors."

Almost exponentially, the success of Australia's restaurateurs in re-interpreting area foodstuffs has inspired the production of ever-better ingredients. Just as Alice Waters did at her groundbreaking restaurant Chez Panisse in California, many Aussie chefs, including Tetsuya Wakuda of Tetsuya Restaurant, a Sydney institution, are demanding that regional farmers, foragers and distributors aim for distinctiveness. He insists: "We use the best quality ingredients. All the technique and effects such as herbs, spices and salt are used to enhance the essence of the taste. I like to make simplicity seem like abundance." As a nod in gratitude, he and his colleagues give the regions top billing on their menus. So it's not just chicken and fish, but free-range Kangaroo Island chicken and farm-raised Tasmanian salmon.

Many also expect a growing artisan cheesemaking industry to eventually debut cheeses that match the quality and variety of Australian wines. Cheeses like luscious creamy trago river blue orchid cheese from Victoria, or tangy and nutty goats milk kervella rodolet from western Australia are getting rave reviews.

Restaurateurs like Perry, who also hosts a television series and consults for Quantas Airways Airlines, look to incorporate these products on their menus, matching them with wine lists that stay close to home. Perry's wine list at his signature establishment Rockpool, opened in 1989 in the historic Rocks section of Sydney, focuses on vintages from the Hunter Valley. Indeed, many wines on the list were bottled especially for Rockpool.

Similarly, Tetsuya (whom no one refers to by his last name) displays a remarkable sensitivity to the nuances of each of his ingredients and the role that wine plays in the meal. "Cooking is balance," he says. "It is flavors and textures that combine so that nothing sticks out. And that's what food and wine should be." At his namesake eatery Tetsuya, the wine list fills 13 pages that complement his cooking, with plenty of sparkling wines, Pinot Noirs and Rieslings.

In addition to utilizing natural resources, Sydney's chefs have appropriated the variety of ethnic influences found across the country. Before 1970, most of the food served in restaurants reflected the early English presence in Australia. Fine dining meant surf-and-turf and a baked potato (just as it did in the United States). But by the early 1980's, relaxed immigration laws allowed Vietnamese, Malaysian, Korean, Thai, Chinese and Indian start their lives over in Australia. These new Australians infused neighborhoods across Sydney with their native cuisine. As a result, Perry insists, "I can get better Asian produce here than in Hong Kong."

Many of Sydney's simpler restaurants - the corner cafe, the local neighborhood eatery - are based on the successive waves of post-World War II immigration to Australia that rivals that of Ellis Island. "We're all immigrants, except for the aborigines," says Tetsuya "What's interesting to me is that each immigrant brings centuries of his own culture's food history." Perry agrees: "Born of the new world and a truly multicultural society, it has been easy for me to happily borrow from each culture myriad threads that I weave into a dish that I believe is uniquely Australian."

Of the 130 nationalities that comprise modern Australia's population, southern Europeans and Middle Easteners are becoming more and more visible. In particular, Greeek tradition is highly valued by immigrants such as Janni Kyritsis, executive chef of MG Garage. Born in Greece and an electrician by trade, Kyritsis taught himself to cook from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking when he arrived in Australia in 1970. Before becoming an "overnight success" at MG Gargage, Kyritsis' career spanned 25 years between Stephanie's restaurant in Melbourne to Berowra Waters Inn and then to Bennelong Restaurant at the Sydney Opera House. He helped introduce Mediterranean flavors to the Australian palate. "I was bringing the olive oil in as the butter was going out," he says. Now considered one of the most innovative chefs in Australia, he derives his dishes - Sicilian grilled mullet stuffed with pine nuts and oranges; galantine of suckling pig served with broad beans and lentils; and vine leaves wrapped around quail and pig's trotters sausage -from both his background and his present surroundings.

Despite the cornucopia of antipodean and ethnic ingredients, or maybe because of it, chefs have difficulty agreeing on one name or one definition for a national cuisine, which is sometimes called Mod Oz. "We don't have an Australian cuisine," Tetsuya claims. "We don't have the history yet. Maybe after 30 or 40 years we will. We definitely have good food, good ingredients." Perry, who has helped significantly to shape modern Australian cuisine, is just as heartfelt, if a bit more prosaic. "I call it Australian because I am Australian. If I were cooking in New York or Paris or San Francisco, my food would not be what it is."

Kyritsis takes a historic view. "We've only been in Australia for 200 years. The true Australian tradition belongs to the aboriginals. Modern Australian cooking is based upon what is done in the homes. It's the ability to adapt what is in their hands to their particular ethnic cuisine." This culinary Darwinism has resulted in restaurant menus that are as creative and eclectic as New American restaurants in San Francisco and Chicago.

Many of the restaurants are visceral representations of the colorful gastronomic tapestry. Sarris, credited with spearheading the trend toward regional foodstuffs, is also noted for bringing hip, savvy, sophisticated dining venues to Sydney. "Although Australians have learned about quality food, they want more. To meet this demand, our restaurants offer a whole package - quality food and wine, fun, provocation, mystique, music, fashion and theater. The demographic is 30 years old, forever," he states. Sarris proved his theory with the 1997 opening of the award-winning Banc (and Wine Banc), located in a splendid old bank building on Martin Place, in the heart of Sydney's business district.

Of course, one can't speak about lifestyle without highlighting MG Garage, one of Sydney's most striking dining rooms. Co-owned by an epicurean car importer, the restaurant is also a showroom for MG sports cars. If one can afford it - and many of the diners here can - cars are available for purchase along with dinner. With its long bar and leather banquettes duplicating the cars' luxurious interiors, the space won the Society of Interior Designers' award for best interior design of 1998. Upon awarding MG Garage the Restaurant of the Year Award for 2000, Terry Durack of Good Living magazine wrote, "MG Garage has progressed from being one of the best restaurants in Sydney to simply the best. It can take a lot of credit for putting the fun back into Sydney dining."

But when it comes to food, Sydney attracts great chefs for the same reason that New York does; they jump at the chance to work alongside talented peers to develop their skills. Even Tetsuya, who had never even taken a cooking class, found himself transformed after making sushi at celebrity chef Tony Bilson's Kinsela restaurant. He had arrived in Sydney in 1982 at the age of 22 withh little more than a suitcase and a love of food, intending to stay for only a year or two before moving on to America. Instead, with Bilson as his mentor, he developed an interest in French technique, and wound up opening his first restaurant in 1989 in a tiny storefront in the Sydney suburb of Rozelle. It was always booked, with a lengthy waiting list. Last November, he relocated his restaurant to central Sydney, where he renovated a an historic site to create his dream restaurant, which includes a Japanese garden. "I still have a Japanese palate, but I don't have fixed ideas about food," Tetsuya admits. Thus the meal served here is a degustation of some 14 separate dishes, many just a few delicious bites, served in shot glasses or martini glasses to show off the rainbow colors of the fish, caviar, vegetables, fruits and sorbets that dot the menu. Among them, a sublime tartare of tuna with tomato sorbet and a confit of Tasmanian ocean trout with roe and marinated fennel, each exquisitely presented on ceramic dishes designed just for him, stand out. Tetsuya's skill in combining Japanese inspiration, French technique and the freshest Australian ingredients is apparent with his preparation of the trout. It's cooked so slowly in olive oil that the fish melts in your mouth, like foie gras.

Performing with equally laudable gastronomic ability at the upscale Rockpool, and more recent and casual XO, Perry uses Asian techniques as well as ingredients. Perry developed an interest in the Pacific Rim and Malaysian cuisines the restaurants respectively serve when his family took in two Chinese students. "I'm sure that this grounding in good food started my love affair with Chinese food and all things Asian," he states. When he started cooking (after workingg as a waiter in some of best restaurants in Australia), it seemed natural to him to make dishes such as stir-fried squid with black-ink noodles, garlic, chili and coriander, or stir-fried blue swimmer crab omelets. "My food is very individual. I use the parts of Asian cooking that I enjoy and put them with my own background in Western cooking," he explains. Along the way he also developed the fundamentals of French Provincial and Mediterranean cooking. Of his fare at Rockpool, The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide puts it, "The Chinese, Thai and French flavors and techniques meld together like friends at a party." Like many Sydney restaurants, Rockpool makes no distinction between starters and main courses; diners choose as they like. "We don't have a strong tradition to hold us back. I can be a free spirit," Perry enthuses.

Other chefs feel similarly unbound. Take Banc's Irish-born executive chef Liam Tomlin, who began his career at age 14 and honed his skills in some of Europe's finest kitchens. Moving to Australia in 1991, he joined forces with Stan Sarris when Banc opened. Tomlin and a new wave of young chefs are now embracing French cooking styles, but because they are no longer constrained by French tradition, they can have a good time with it. Thus the food at Banc - for example, a terrine of tomato and blue swimmer crab with sweet crab and tomato layers wrapped in a delicate sheet of leek, surrounded by a dice of raw vegetables - is fundamentally French in technique but it's prepared with a light, modern Australia touch.

Indeed, the flurry of new ideas, the availability of better, fresher ingredients and the ascendance of Australian wines have conspired to create a unique Down Under cuisine using classic French methods, Japanese precision, Asian spices, Australian bush products and other indigenous ingredients. Ultimately, the most influential chefs are simply using their training and intellect to make the best food they can.

Where to Stay:

The Regent, 199 George St., 612-9238-0000

Located right on Sydney Harbour in the city’s history Rocks area. It’s only a short walk to major shopping and business districts and affords dramatic views of the famous Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The Westin, 1 Martin Place, 02-8223-1129

The Westin Sydney is a spectacular hotel incorporating the historic General Post Office building opened in 1887. It is located in the heart of the city, overlooking Martin Place.

Local Guide:

Jane Strang, A Sydney Day, 02-9929-3201

Jane knows all the best places to see—from shopping and beaches to museums and restaurants.

Where to Eat:

Banc, 53 Martin Place, 02-9233-5300

MG Garage, 490 Crown St., Surry Hills, 02-9383-9383

Rockpool, 107 George St., The Rocks, 02- 9252-1888

Tetsuya’s, 529 Kent St., 02-9267-2900

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