Bentley Restaurant & Bar (Sydney CBD)

Bentley used to be located in Surry Hills but earlier this year relocated to the business part of town. It is now located on the ground floor of the Radisson Blue hotel. It made it a lot easier for me now that Bentley is in town (literally) to have an early birthday dinner with my dear friend SH.

SH is, I must say, a wine buff and for special meals she tends to frequent restaurants that have a good wine list. Bentley was earmarked by her because they have a good sommelier and have a reputation of having a good repertoire of wine. Having recently won the NSW Wine List of the year, expectations were high!

I found the interior to be quite interesting, it was very modern in look and feel. And it was quite dark. Sigh! :(

One of the first things SH does is to scrutinise the wine list to decide what she wants.

When the young lady attending our table asked for her choice of wine, there seemed to be a slight miscommunication and no matter how many times SH pronounced the label, the young lady failed to understand her. You can imagine how frustrated SH was starting to become. She had to resort to opening the wine list to show the actual label name and vintage she wanted.

To make matters worse, when the wine was being poured, there was no showing of the bottle to her nor was there even a chance to taste the wine before the glass was filled. And on top of that they did not even provide the right wine glass for the pinot noir! Poor SH was quite offended with the whole process and I think that set off a rather negative view of the service at Bentley.

But let's talk about the food. :)

We started with a complimentary Smoked eel and mash crisp. I thought it was going to be a warm bite but surprisingly when I bit into it, the filling was cold but the pastry was crunchy. Very interesting contrasting texture of cold and crunchy.

Entree of Alpine salmon, malt, mandarin, and black sausage crumbs. SH was thoroughly enjoying this dish. The verdict was delicious!

Entree of Quail, smoked celery, and white soy dressing. I was enjoying how perfectly cooked the quail was. The meat was tender, and had a nice touch of pink. The texture of the celery shaved lengthwise was different and this provided the much needed crunch.

Main of Kurobata pork, macadamia milk, wattle crumbs, and rhubarb. I liked that there were elements of our native greens being used in this dish. SH couldn't help but enjoy the dish. She mentioned that the flavours and textures made it a delicious dish.

The Bridge Room (Sydney CBD)

I start this post by stating that this is not a sponsored post but somehow I ended up getting complimentary dishes as part of my dining experience at The Bridge Room. Which is why this write up has become a lot more fun and interesting to talk about.

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.