Send to a friend

Print

del.icio.us this

Digg this

Manly Pavilion, Sydney restaurant review

Ah, waterfront Sydney. Just when you thought you’d seen it all, along comes another shining vista, another corner of this most impressive of harbours, and you see the city anew. It’s all the better if you happen to be seeing it anew, too, with bold knife and fork. The briny view on the cards today is what’s thrown back at you as you look towards the eastern suburbs with Manly Cove at your back. There’s the gap in the heads way off yonder, and the sparkle of the lights of Bondi Junction, with ferries cutting their way from one side of the frame to the other.

The view’s pretty good looking back the other way, too. Manly Pavilion was built in 1933 in what is apparently called “inter-war Mediterranean”, which explains the colonnades, the lovely expanses of space and the faint expectation that there’s a Bob Guccione Caligula lurking around the place somewhere. The renovation, completed mere weeks ago, is of a school I like to call Money Has Been Spent. It’s discernable in the cords upon cords of timber and the small herd’s worth of leather swathing the dining room and the slick black tiles facing the bar. The men’s room is kitted out with a vast battery of gleaming black ceramic sinks; in the ladies’ they’re pink. One section of wall is hung with monogrammed pashminas – a functional touch catering to those who brave the southerlies on the splendid terrace over the water. The Heritage Room (aka Siberia) at one entrance holds three of those faintly lethal-looking LED-lit crystal chandeliers that also adorn the dining room over at Bécasse. On the ground floor – so tantalisingly close to Oceanworld! – a function centre is under construction, catnip, surely, to the sea-nymph would-be brides of the northern beaches. As I say, Money Has Been Spent, most probably in the expectation that Money Will Be Spent. And it’s a fair bet to say that it will because this place is the real deal.

Don’t let the name confuse you: though Manly Pavilion and the Bathers’ Pavilion in Balmoral are both old, grandly constructed beachgoers’ changing rooms converted into restaurants, they’re separate enterprises with different owners and distinct personalities. Someone, somewhere, has had the good sense to hire Jonathan Barthelmess, the young-gun chef whose praises we sang in these very pages for his impressive cooking at Coast only a year ago. Barthelmess, one of the nominees for the Best New Talent gong at last year’s GT restaurant awards, had been champing at the bit at the Cockle Bay establishment and was ready to take the next step and find a restaurant he could really make his mark with. And, at the risk of tempting fate, everything appears to have fallen into place here in Manly. His food is accomplished, but also fresh in both its thinking and execution, and resonates beautifully with the setting.

This pavilion is not cheap, but nor does it have to be a gouge. There are some great bargains to be had on the wine list, especially in its upper reaches, but it’s the five-course fixed price menu, at $88, that really impresses. It’s the chef’s choice, so it could take in dishes from any of the five brackets that the menu is broken up into. Stuzzichini, word of the moment for little snacky things, equals the likes of herb-crumbed white anchovies, oysters and crostini of the day. The pick is the mozzarella grilled on a lemon leaf and splashed with oil and zest. It gives a lovely lifted fragrance to the cheese without compromising its own flavour. In the slightly-bigger-snacks department, the antipasti include the whisper-thin slices of cuttlefish and crisp eggplant that worked so well at Coast, and the perfectly seasoned snapper crudo, judiciously studded with capers and white balsamic vinegar.

There’s a little sleight-of-menu in the accompaniments of celery ragù and bagna càuda presented alongside hefty, sweetly grilled scampi; the “ragù” almost more like a cooked salad of compressed celery, the bagna càuda – in Piedmont, a hot dipping sauce of anchovies and garlic, butter and oil – transformed into a dressing. The harmony of the flavours, however, is 100 per cent faithful. Coarse shreds of tender veal, more tartare than carpaccio, are garnished prettily with mâche leaves and seasoned boldly with parmesan and cured egg. Cured what? It’s the raw yolk of an egg, cured in salt and sugar, that has been spread out to dry, the waiter tells me, and is sprinkled over the meat. I can vouch, at least, that as wrong as it sounds, it gives the dish a richer taste and texture.

If you’ve not tried the black pepper risotto, cooked to order with aged Acquerello carnaroli rice and made luxe with the addition of sage and Taleggio, that has become Barthelmess’s signature, don’t miss your chance. If you’ve already had the pleasure, consider the gnocchi. They’re sweet and more than a little green with peas and lightened with ricotta. Nettles, well browned in butter, and a goodly helping of blue swimmer crab meat make for a memorable sauce. The bucatini all’Amatriciana is distinguished by tangy guanciale and a good chilli-hit. Where it revels in properly al dente noodles, the charm of the pappardelle lies in the soft suppleness of the house-made pasta ribbons, and the ragù of wild boar, sharpened with verjuice and bound with a very little mascarpone, is something else entirely.

Main courses – so often a stumbling block in fancy Italian restaurants in Australia – maintain the rage. Take the quail – pieces of partially boned bird with a semolina crust, pan-fried on one side, sporting among crisp fried vine leaves and a custard. It’s cooked a little rarer than might be perfectly ideal, but it’s imaginative and thoroughly edible. It’s trumped, though, by a simple-seeming plate of whiting. Wrapping seafood in lardo, pig fat cured like salumi, is one of the surf ’n’ turf mack-moves of our culinary times, and here the fat melts into the superbly fresh fillets in a way that’s all but invisible, and registers on the palate as greater savour rather than a too-potent competing taste. It all melds neatly with the pool of velvet-smooth cannellini purée studded with whole beans and hunks of fruity tomato innards underneath. Grilled jewfish sees Barthelmess successfully introduce a note of his Greek heritage in the form of a bracing avgolemono sauce, while the charry, fall-apart-tender beef short ribs, served with a hunk of roast bone marrow, are so beefy and rich that even with their fresh salad of olive, radish and watercress, they’ll defeat the most serious meat-eater.

Your nonna might be hard-pressed to recognise the budino as any kind of rice pudding. It’s been re-imagined as crisp croquettes teamed with a slick of apple purée and a quenelle of ice-cream made, I’d guess, with milk infused with toasted farro, sitting on a little crumble of farro.

The standard set by the food is matched by the wine list, a document that has both heft and nuance. It offers curiosities such as the “mistelle” – a drink made with a mixture of grape must and spirit – as well as flexibility, in the form of extensive choice by the glass or carafe.

Service is, thus far, seriously uneven, swinging from a thorough competence and charm on the part of some members of the team to a lack of simple comprehension from others which is, frankly, hard to countenance at a restaurant asking high-30s for its main courses. What the floor lacks in consistency, though, it more than makes up for in numbers. Where the front-of-house needs time to settle in, the kitchen, incredibly enough, appears to be firing on all cylinders. It’s clear that Barthelmess is a chef in the sense that he’s a skilled manager as well as an individual blessed with distinct creative and technical gifts. He’s doubtless helped in no small part by the presence at the burners of James Parry, a young Sydney chef of repute fresh back from a six-month stint at acclaimed Spanish restaurant Mugaritz. Between them they’re producing food that is at once full of life but also startlingly mature and restrained.

Dare we suggest that the north shore finally has its very own Icebergs of sorts? If you’re looking for a restaurant that blends glamour and comfort, Europe and Australia, sex and the city, surf ’n’ turf, Manly, you’ve got it. Now all you have to do is flaunt it.

PHOTOGRAPHY WILLIAM MEPPEM

This article is from the May 2010 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.