My friend LA, who has been on secondment in Sydney for the past 6 months, is about to return to her native New Zealand. I wanted to treat her to an amazing dinner as a souvenir of her great time in Sydney. For the past 3 weeks I have been trying to organise a dinner with her and some other friends and my venue of choice was The Bridge Room. But the dates kept changing due to work constraints and at one stage I was beginning to think this dinner would not happen.
But it finally did about 4 nights ago. I am pushing this post through now as I want LA to read this before she heads off to the land of the long white cloud.
It ended up being just the two of us as our other friends cancelled at the last minute. As the booking was for 6.30 on Thursday, we were one of the early arrivals so the restaurant was still quite empty. We were seated at the table nearest to the kitchen and we could see the chefs at work by looking through the open window. As we were being seated, I quietly asked LA if I should take a picture of the chefs at work. I had noticed that Chef Ross Lusted and his team were literally standing at the window only a mere feet or so away.
I was so excited to firstly be at the restaurant and on top of that I was so excited that Chef Ross Lusted was in the kitchen that night as he is the recently minted and newly crowned Chef of The Year by the Good Food Guide about 2 nights prior.
As I was asking LA this question, a voice piped up behind me saying 'I can hear you'. I turned around in surprise and realised straight away it was the Chef himself talking to us! I don't know what prompted me but I immediately stood up and went over to the window. I introduced myself and blustered about how excited I was to be there and asked to shake his hand and congratulated him on his winning the Chef of the Year. I also introduced LA as a friend from NZ. I then mentioned that I would like to take a photo of him and he said he would come out later to pose with us! Wow! I couldn't believe it and I was really excited by then!
So back I went to our table and we perused the menu and decided on the following.
My entree was Moreton bay bugs with sweet grilled endive, roasted chilli paste, tamarind and celery salt. I loved the texture of the bay bug. It was perfectly cooked, as in not overcooked which would resulted in the meat being tough, and the sauce which had a tamarind flavour was beautifully rich and worked perfectly with the subtle taste of the Moreton bay bug.
LA had the Raw Wagyu shoulder with robota smoked enoki mushrooms, Celtic sea salt, fresh horseradish and soft pickled chilli. LA loved the dish and commented on the wonderful textures in her dish.
At the same time another entree dish was served to us. It was the Spanner crab (picked and shelled) with mandarin, mandarin curd, nashi pear, chestnuts and verjuice jelly. We were told it was with the compliments of the chef! I couldn't believe it, we were served a plate each of this beautifully cooked spanner crab. The favours were clean, subtle but yet full of flavour. The citrus flavours of the mandarin just melded with the very refined spanner crab.
