A new salad bar for Bondi

Barry McDonald, the man who introduced Sydney to the popular Italian grocer and restaurant chain Fratelli Fresh, is now working on a new venture.

And it is completely different.

He is planning to bring quality food to a new Bondi venue, Green Dream.

It will be an all-day salad bar, a venue that’s very much about about grab-and-go meals. 

Green Dream, located at in a mall shopfront space dotted with plants and green-leaf motifs at the Pacific Building in Bondi, will have cabinets filled with more than 50 salad ingredients.

These include such delicacies as organic chicken, late-summer tomatoes, edamame and tuna preserved in-house.

And while it will be no Fratelli Fresh, that’s the place it draws its inspiration from.

"It just made sense to me," McDonald told Gourmet Traveller. "My background is produce. Fratelli Fresh was all about the produce. It's going back to the roots, really."

Ingredients will be sourced from suppliers that McDonald has worked with throughout his career.

But the big drawcard is recruitment of chef Ashleigh Jarvis, an apprentice at Fratelli Fresh who went on to The Ledbury and Dinner by Heston in London, and both the Sydney and Melbourne locations of Rockpool Bar & Grill.

The plan is for Jarvis to create weekly menus of eight salads with lots of choices on offer for a DIY bowl - tuna, rocket, radish, cucumber and egg salad dressed with pesto, say, or the Full Moon Party, a mix of poached chicken, cabbage, bean shoots and coriander finished with a spicy peanut dressing.

There will also be guest chefs creating a salad each month.

Also, 10 per cent of the sales will go to a charity nominated by the chef. The first selection is from Guillaume Brahimi with a Niçoise in support of the National Indigenous Culinary Institute.

Leon Getler 5th March 2018.