Gastro Park (Sydney)

20th January 2012

With me meeting my family in Sydney and the need to sell my car for my potential apartment purchase, i decided to drive up to Sydney on the Friday and have my father drive the car the rest of the way back to Brisbane. As such i decided to make the most of the trip and go to one of the hat restaurants in Sydney. After a quick review of the 3 hat restaurants, including Quay, i found that they were booked out for several months in advance.

However having previous read an article over the Christmas break of a new and exciting restaurant in Sydney that had received 2 Hat, i decided to try Gastro Park. With a very average name and interesting location (in the middle of Kings Cross - possibly due to it being the chef's first self owned restaurant), a moderately simple dining room and a slight wait in the bar for my table, the food was required to make up for all these shortcomings.

And it really did! Having originally headed there for a simple 3 course but the waiter informed me that they also offered a 7 course and a 10 course degustation menu which offered a selection of the al a carte menu with 4 courses of snacks, 1 entree, 1 main and 1 desert (all three of the substantial courses being their signature dishes).

Before the first course arrived i was presented with a piece of sourdough bread with a smear of unsalted butter on a tile with a sprinkling of rock salt.Quality bread and the nice touch of being able to salt it as required.

Up first of the real courses was a 2 part 1st course. Place on the same plate was 2 puttanesca wafers intertwined with flavours of olive, tomato and Parmesan. Crunchy crisp and full of flavour and technique.
The other part was a grissini wrapped in cured thinly sliced blackmore short rib cover in shaved cheese. Simple but exquisite and a well thought out beginning to the meal.

The next course was a very intricate dish that combined many elements. First was a scallop carpaccio with thinly sliced pieces of scallop with some very finely sliced chives adorning them. Underneath was a olive oil and lime sauce with some black olive soil scattered around the edges. Beautifully balance intricately put together and a wondrous array of flavours that worked even better together than separately. To top off the dish was a long piece of crafted bone that was filled with a tuna bone marrow. Extravagantly and elegantly presented it lacked the magic flavour of the other parts of the dish but was still a great piece.

The third snack course was a alternating thin slices of hare and beetroot completely covered in a shaved fois gras snow and accompanied by a red cabbage granita. A wondrous display of technique and imagination, however the flavours were only good. I did like the red cabbage granita and the hare and beetroot but the fois gras snow was less than stellar and did not match that well with the other ingredients.

The final snack dish was served on a tile with a moist dense piece of swordfish glazed with soy and mustard and served with 3 textures of cucumber - granita, puree and pickled. The cucumber provided a good contrast and a freshness to the dense rich swordfish, although was not strong in flavour itself.

On to the entree and it consisted of liquid butternut gnocchi, floating in a mushroom consomme in a glass bowl with an added touch of a Parmesan crisp crown topped with enoki mushrooms sage and a couple of extra liquid gnocchi. The mushroom consomme was poured at the table adding a little theatre but the flavours and texture were the real standout. A rich and flavoursome mushroom consomme that worked well with the liquid centred, explode in your mouth gnocchi. The crisp crown had excellent flavour and was a nice little touch on top of a great dish.

The main course was a masterclass in imagination, technique and food artistry. A crispy scaled snapper (with the scales removed, deep fried and then embedded back into the fish), smoked potato puree blackened calamari crackling, calamari hoops and a piece of calamari and completed with a squid ink croquette and squid ink reduction. Masterful technique especially the scales, calamari crackling and squid ink croquette (all firsts for me) that pushed the boundaries but were underpinned by exceptional skill and produce of a perfectly cooked piece of fish.

The final course was desert and it was a great way to finish the meal. A white chocolate sphere that i was instructed to crack with the spoon and produced a flowing river of orange flavoured chocolate that ran out onto a bowl with a bed of nitrogen cooled honeycomb and cookies and cream pieces. An outstanding dish and the flavours matched the quality of the imagination of the chef.

A comparable restaurant to Verge in Melbourne (one of my favourites) where the food pushed boundaries and explored techniques but never forgot to encompass quality produce and flavour. Every part of each dish was thought out and had a purpose and everything matched well together. The service after the initial wait was jovial but professional and the dining experience was first rate. The degustation was comparable with other 2 hat restaurants and was expensive but reasonably good value. If you are in Sydney, this is very much worthy of a visit.