Many menus are “designed to be shared”. How true that has become; the nation’s restaurants are a hall of mirrors and dishes are consuming entire decades.
Melbourne, 2011. Mohawk-haired chef Benjamin Cooper puts the finishing touches on a dish of raw kingfish with zesty lime, green nahm jim and coconut cream. For the newly opened Chin Chin, it’s an instant hit, popping with colour and tingling on the tongue. Our chopsticks can’t pick it up fast enough.
That mercurial combination – silky fish, acid punch, sting of chilli – can be traced back to the 1980s when Nobu Matsuhisa first teamed raw fish with jalapeno chilli and yuzu in Los Angeles. But this story isn’t about the history of kingfish sashimi. It’s about its future.
The dish has never left the Chin Chin menu (or, for that matter, Nobu’s). Indeed, Hiramasa yellowtail kingfish has colonised chefs’ shopping lists at every hip or high-end restaurant in the land. At a modern Asian diner, it will be kingfish sashimi; at a European bistro, it will be kingfish crudo. At restaurants with a bob each way, it will be kingfish ceviche. It will be raw, sliced, arranged on the plate and bejewelled with citrussy adornments in endless variations on a theme of kingfish.
You could call kingfish crudo the dish that ate a decade. The problem is that it seems set to eat the following decade as well. Food styling by Nick Smith. Christopher Pearce
This is no happy accident. Seafood industry consultant John Susman helped launch Hiramasa kingfish to the restaurant trade in 2002, conducting more than 1500 direct presentations to chefs. He always presented it in what he considered its best possible form: raw. “Not only was Hiramasa kingfish more consistent in size and supply, the Japanese ikejime harvesting we implemented also resulted in higher quality and better texture,” he says. “Combined with twice the fat content of the wild species, the fish was significantly different to anything that had come before.”
The top chefs of the day jumped on board – among them, Russell Blaikie in Perth, Philip Johnson in Brisbane, Jacques Reymond and Andrew Blake in Melbourne, Cheong Liew in Adelaide, and Neil Perry, Steve Hodges and Greg Doyle in Sydney. Expat Australian chefs spread the word, and Hiramasa kingfish, now farmed by Cleanseas, is a significant Australian export.
You could call it the dish that ate a decade. The problem is that it seems set to eat the following decade as well. Pick up a menu in 2023 and kingfish crudo, or sashimi, or ceviche will be in pole position. It comes with Davidson plum and kombu at Rockpool Bar & Grill Perth, and with smoked oyster mayo and karkalla at Rockpool in Melbourne.
The cover of the July 2023 issue.
It’s the signature dish at Nomad Sydney, prettily composed with avocado, finger lime and garlic chips, and a big order at SK Steak & Oyster in Brisbane, in a fragrant puddle of white soy with ginger and shallots. At Osteria Oggi in Adelaide, it’s served with a refreshing mix of grapefruit, radish and shallot vinaigrette, and at Hobart’s hotter-than-peperoncino Fico, kingfish is simply, but memorably, adorned with soy, wasabi and coriander.
Of course, it’s not just kingfish that is ubiquitous. It’s also steak tartare. It’s dry-aged roasted duck, and bombe Alaska. And oh boy, is it burrata. The first time you spear the snowy-white ball of fresh cheese with your knife and unleash its creamy heart all over your heirloom tomatoes, it’s love at first sight. The 300th time, not so much.
The menus at so many restaurants are becoming mirror images of each other, as if the chefs have decided on the dishes by common consent. Indeed, the restaurants themselves are becoming a hall of mirrors.
What might sound like a new restaurant with a unique point of difference soon reveals itself to be either a thinly disguised steakhouse, or thinly disguised French bistro (and often, both). Check out the latest rash of restaurants in Sydney alone: Clam Bar, inspired by the great New York steakhouse, and the $3 million dollar Armorica in Surry Hills, whose five-metre long Josper charcoal grill ain’t there for the spring vegetable tart.
Chin Chin’s kingfish sashimi circa 2011. Melanie Faith Dove
You can add The Charles Grand Brasserie, which elevates the steakhouse experience with tableside trolleys, and Le Foote, an Etruscan-styled dining room with $210 black Angus rib-eye steaks sizzling on the Josper charcoal grill.
Alex Murrell, strategy director at UK brand agency Epoch, recently drew attention to the fact that everything from interiors, architecture, cars, movie posters and brands is starting to look the same. He says we have entered “the age of average”. “Airbnbs all have white walls, mid-century furniture and exposed brick,” he says. “Coffee shops all have Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood. And restaurants all have chalkboards, metro tiles and monochromatic sans-serif typography. These are all part of the same somewhat tired trend of modern industrialism.”
The question is, why the ubiquity? The French bistro model is much-loved, and kingfish crudo is a great dish, but to this keen diner, there seems less forward momentum. Menus may run today’s date at the top, but otherwise seem set in stone. We’re stuck in a rut.
If I had to graph a lifetime of dining in Australia, it would be a zigzag of peaks and troughs. Every peak is etched in my brain, stored under Excitement, Shock and Awe. The charred marron with green ants and native honey from the late Jock Zonfrillo at Orana in Adelaide, where to look down at a dish on the table was like flying over the desert landscape of Australia.
MoVida’s anchovy and smoked tomato sorbet.
Ben Shewry’s wallaby black pudding pikelets at Attica in Melbourne. That first bite of the anchovy and smoked tomato sorbet at MoVida. And cracking into those Japanese stones of Martin Benn at Sepia; crisp-shelled pebbles of cherry, coconut and chocolate with yuzu jelly, green tea and mint moss. It felt like some cultish voodoo ceremony.
The troughs were as deep: the heavy, reduced beef demi-glace sauces of the 1980s, the squirty-mayo dude food of the Noughties, the science-experiment era, that moment when hanging bacon on a miniature clothesline seemed like a good idea. Now the overall level of cooking, produce, skill and talent is higher than ever before, but the graph line has evened out, as if the restaurant industry has been stabilised with a Zoloftian smothering conformity.
To be fair, the restaurant business model has needed some stabilising. It’s a tough time for a sector still battered and bruised by the pandemic. Immersed in high rentals, rising food costs and skilled labour shortages, small business operators can ill afford to take risks.
“The post-COVID labour market has been difficult for everyone in the food supply chain,” says John Susman. “Chefs have been forced to reduce menu size to accommodate smaller brigades. And with a tighter range of produce going into kitchens, they tend to concentrate on those with the greatest popular appeal.” Hence the kingfish.
From left: Kingfish crudo, burnt grapefruit, radish, olive oil; kingfish sashimi with cumquat kosho; kingfish crudo, salted capers, wasabi and yuzu zest; kingfish tataki, togarashi, pickled fennel, kim bugak. Food styling by Nick Smith. Christopher Pearce
Even the most creative chef ensures there are checks and balances in place as part of the creative process. Chef Billy Hannigan of ritzy The Charles Grand Brasserie will come up with a new dish – a spectacular sea urchin with potato fondant and whipped bottarga, say – and try it out as a special for two weeks before committing to putting it on the menu. “It’s a great way to see what is eaten, and what is left on the plate,” he says. “Certain things will be delicious in one mouthful, but after three or four, might become too much.”
Hannigan suggests that seemingly copycat menus can actually be very different. “Some dishes sound as if they are the same, but the quality of the produce, technique, care and thought taken set them apart.” Ultimately, though, he will listen to the consumer. “Eating a great piece of beef and finishing with a chocolate tart is always going to be delicious.”
While it’s a challenging time for fine dining overall, are Australian chefs any worse off than their global counterparts? Loh Lik Peng has skin in the game. He’s the Singapore-based director of hotel and restaurant group Unlisted Collection, which has 35 restaurants across the globe. “I think Australia is a very hard place to do fine dining” says Loh Lik.
“We have opened restaurants in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Ireland, Paris and London, and nowhere is harder than Sydney.”
Having installed fine diner Silvereye in his Chippendale boutique hotel The Old Clare in 2015, Loh Lik followed with Jason Atherton’s Kensington Street Kitchen, an import from the UK, in 2016. Neither lasted the distance. (A third restaurant with local chef Clayton Wells, Automata, flourished for seven years before closing in 2022). Atherton, he says, was shocked at the labour rates and inflexibility of the labour system in Australia, and ultimately decided it was just too difficult to execute the same standards as his 15 other restaurants in London, St Moritz and Dubai.
“Intricate, multi-course menus nowadays require too many hands and too much labour to be profitable in the Australian market,” says Loh Lik. “The concepts that work best here rely on top-quality produce, which is plentiful locally, and relatively simple preparation that doesn’t require a lot of labour. This is a strength for Australia, because your agricultural and farming systems are so good.”
Perhaps – perish the thought – we are the problem. We, the crudo-loving, steak-eating, burrata-spearing diners. Faced with either dropping $300 on an unknown chef doing interesting things with Filipino cuisine or heading straight to Rockpool Bar & Grill, we’re out the door and on the way to Hunter Street in Sydney or Crown in Melbourne and Perth.
As consumers, we tend to choose the safe and familiar over the unknown. Nikki To, an in-demand food photographer and the co-founder of creative agency Buffet Digital, jokes about the number of “anchovies lying in oil on a plate” that she shoots for new restaurant openings. She also notes that sometimes the “out-there” dishes on an opening menu quietly disappear in ensuing weeks as consumers vote with their knives and forks. “One restaurant launched with a dish of fried eggs and samphire for breakfast,” she says. “But the demand wasn’t there. People wanted bacon with their eggs, not a salty sea succulent. So the samphire went.”
The samphire is the canary in the coal mine, signalling a broader malaise across culture. Whenever we select a song on Spotify or we like something on Instagram, our preferences are noted and fed back to us, ultimately getting narrower rather than broader. What we eat, drink, listen to and wear is now crowd-sourced, with fads and fashions set by the algorithms that push trending posts to the top of our feeds on Instagram and TikTok. Not so much the age of average, then, as the age of the algorithm.
The first time you spear the snowy-white ball of fresh burrata with your knife and unleash its creamy heart all over your heirloom tomatoes, it’s love at first sight. The 300th time, not so much. Food styling by Nick Smith. Christopher Pearce
In the music world, records are being set for the prices of back catalogues of artists from yesterday who we stream again and again. In January 2022, Sony bought the rights to the back catalogue of Bob Dylan for an estimated $US200 million. The year before, Sony bought Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre for $US500 million. The year before that, an 80 per cent stake in Stevie Nicks’ back catalogue was reportedly sold for $US100 million.
That’s money that would once have gone into promoting the artists of tomorrow.
To work that metaphor to death, restaurants are streaming the same dishes, rather than transforming the gastronomic landscape with original works of composition.
It’s a similar picture in the fashion world. Styles used to be declared in and then out at the whim of magazine editors. But now that most of us get wardrobe inspiration from social media, what’s “in” is what people like, and people like what they have seen before. “The puff-sleeve trend is here to stay,” reported Vogue in the middle of last year, resigning itself with an apparent sigh to a trend that has been on catwalks since 2018. Others say we are entering an “age of beige”, as fashion brands continue to make clothes that look the same in order to ramp up their likes on Instagram.
“The shift in visual cues for chefs’ inspiration from mainstream to social media has created a landscape of form over substance,” observes Susman. “These days, a nifty or unique idea seems to carry currency often well beyond the actual delivery, with chefs engaging in a TikTok battle to deliver an awesome look-at-me moment”.
Note the social media mania for cross-sections of hand-held sandwiches and wagyu katsu sandos; for surgically dissected fish; ultra-tall celebration cakes, and caviar on fast food. One does it, they all do it. We like it, they do it again.
It’s a very different media landscape to the one that greeted the pioneering chefs of the 1980s; the ones who dragged us out of the stuffy, formal, tableclothed ’70s and into the light. Then, there were only a handful of restaurant critics, contracted to weekly columns in the major newspapers of the day. No Broadsheet, no Instagram. No internet. Their power was such that a bad review would result in a flurry of cancelled bookings.
At the same time, newly launched glossy food magazines such as Australian Gourmet (now Gourmet Traveller) and the Vogue Entertaining Guide were powerful purveyors of trends. Joan Campbell brought a background in society catering and a sharp eye (and tongue) to the role of food editor of Vogue Australia in 1979.
Over the next 20 years, she defined a new, more Australian way of looking at food – everything had to be fresh, light, sunny and natural. That trend went around the world and back. When she wanted something new, she would simply come up with an idea and brief one of her coterie of pet chefs to do it. Bingo, the first-ever mango daiquiri slushy would appear on the cover of Vogue Entertaining. It made people pick up the magazine and buy it. They would marvel at the cleverness of say, chef Mark Armstrong, and book into his Paddington restaurant Pegrum’s for a daiquiri.
Mark Armstrong at Pegrum’s in 1986. Doris Thomas
Chefs such as Neil Perry, Christine Manfield, Cheong Liew, Maggie Beer, Gay and Tony Bilson, Tetsuya Wakuda, Stephanie Alexander, Phillip Searle, Greg Doyle and Peter Doyle were self-taught and bursting with ideas, determined to make their names. Campbell heroed them the way social media does now, shooting the Doyle brothers on their surfboards at Whale Beach, and Janni Kyritsis cooking al fresco. What she would do with TikTok today doesn’t bear thinking about.
That a single chef, expert in a single cuisine, could come along and change the way Australia eats couldn’t happen now, but it happened then. An example: David Thompson opened Darley Street Thai in a Newtown pub in 1992, introducing dishes from the royal palaces of Bangkok and refusing to do the popular “moneybags”, the commonly found purse-string dumplings of pork and prawn.
Feted by the media (critic Stephen Downes awarded the restaurant 20 out of 20 in 1993), Thompson achieved cult status, channelling his knowledge of Thai cuisine into restaurants and cookbooks. The filter-down effect has influenced Thai cooking in Australia at almost every level. Now that we get our information from a clamorous multitude of sources, the gatekeepers are ourselves. The star-makers are, too.
Darley Street Thai co owners David Thompson (left) and Peter Bowyer in 1991. Peter Solness
Another change has been to who owns our favourite restaurants, and hence who bears the risk. When restaurateurs ran operations, chefs were “the creative ones”. They used tweezers to position baby radishes on big white plates, while the owners woke at 3am worrying about profit margins.
Now the chefs run their own small business operations (the art and role of the restaurateur has diminished), so they’re the ones lying in bed reciting penalty rates. When it comes time for them to write a menu, it’s going to be kingfish crudo or bust.
As for the bigger restaurant groups, these are increasingly part of large entities owned by property groups or private equity. In 2017, Quadrant Private Equity’s Urban Purveyor Group (now Hunter St. Hospitality) acquired the Rockpool Dining Group for a reported $77 million. Dexus property group plays landlord to the Lucas restaurant group within 80 Collins Street, Melbourne, where fine diner Society and modern izakaya Yakimono take up 2400 square metres of prime real estate. Such restaurants are more about the concept than the chef, designed to enhance the real estate and draw in the crowds.
On a high street level, it means that cute Italian trattoria that just opened in the residential complex down the road is probably underwritten by the property’s owner. Its role is not to be a temple of creativity or an entrepreneurial outlier. It will serve pasta and pizza, not tripe, brains and coloratura.
Business guru Seth Godin says that when the stakes are very low, most creators produce things that are fairly banal and ordinary. “Part of that is the law of large numbers, but it’s mostly our cultural aversion to leaning too far into weird stuff. And so the vast majority of YouTube videos, Spotify tracks, potluck dinner contributions and craft fair items are copycats.” The grey zone, he says, is where the rents for the big restaurant are high, the budget for the film is in the tens of millions and the record label has decided to push a particular artist.
“This is the moment when more creativity is the only appropriate economic plan. Instead, cultural, financial and corporate pressure all conspire to push the creator to do precisely the wrong thing, and go straight down the middle of the road.”
Globally, few culinary risk-takers have been rewarded with honours and fame. Tall poppies include Ferran Adria of the preposterously innovative science-based El Bulli in the 1990s; Rene Redzepi of the uncompromisingly locally sourced Noma in Copenhagen; and Daniel Humm, who reinvented New York’s celebrated Eleven Madison Park in 2021 as 100 per cent vegan, saying “this is the future”.
Locally, culinary creativity is expressed in many forms. It’s on the plate at three-hatted harbourside Quay, where chef Peter Gilmore sustains his creative high, turning sea cucumber into crackling, and bone marrow into noodles. At Margaret in Double Bay, it’s behind the scenes as Neil Perry finds new ways to cook lesser-known species of wild-caught fish such as cattle dog cod, scorpion fish, and mackerel tuna.
Smoked eel cream, sea cucumber crackling, oscietra caviar and blossoms at Quay. Nikki To
Order coral trout with XO butter and your waiter will suggest you also get the fried coral trout “wings”, the collar of meat below the throat, in a bid to encourage nose-to-tail eating. At this stage of his career, Perry could get away with just throwing a steak on the barbie. He won’t.
At the Millbrook Winery restaurant at Jarrahdale, south-east of Perth, the kitchen walks a creative tightrope every day by refusing to buy any of its fruits or vegetables. Guy Jeffreys brings a zero-waste mentality to home-grown produce from the restaurant’s own gardens, with “no-waste Monday” lunches of “weekend leftovers” delivering on the promise.
Khanh Nguyen of Sunda and Aru in Melbourne carves his own creative path with standout dishes that channel his Asian heritage, such as roti with Vegemite curry, and pate en croute with the flavours of Vietnamese banh mi.
At Saint Peter, Peterman and the Fish Butchery, Josh Niland is actively reshaping the industry’s attitude to fish by ageing and cooking it as if it were meat. Such radical thinking comes with its own risks and, for the diner, rewards.
“The current generation of really ground-breaking chefs like Rene Redzepi of Noma and Peter Gilmore of Quay are slowly starting to cede ground now to the younger generation,” says Loh Lik Peng. “Clever and creative chefs such as Josh Niland of Saint Peter and Lennox Hastie of Firedoor are able to charge a sustainable premium in a difficult market.“
The successful chefs of the future, he argues, will have to create their own niches. “This requires a creative and innovative mind, and not just hard work, cooking skills, and long restaurant experience. Being a great chef is
necessary, but not sufficient nowadays to stand out, especially in Australia.”
For more, look to those independents who have cut themselves free from the system. The nomadic Analiese Gregory constantly comes up with new ways to bring her cooking to the public with guest appearances and residencies, while fellow chef Jo Barrett is ecstatically ensconced in a nostalgia-driven “bowlo” (bowling club) in picturesque Lorne on the Great Ocean Road. The fact that they are doing things their own sweet way is key. When you bring your own philosophy and beliefs to the table, you shape something new. When you shape something new, the world moves on.
As a long-time restaurant observer and passionate industry supporter, I suspect Australia’s top chefs are keeping their heads down for a year or so; biding their time; concentrating on survival. The waves of culinary creativity I expected post-pandemic haven’t happened; becalmed by interest rates and fear. They will return, however, and we diners have a central part to play in supporting those prepared to do something different.
Back to Alex Murrell and the age of average. If restaurants want to command higher price points for their services, he says, they need to create stronger memories that will ensure they come more easily to mind. “I believe it’s a commercial imperative for companies to value creativity more highly. Playing it safe may actually be the greatest risk of all.”
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