Wallaby pikelet, an Australian experience
It’s 7.30pm, a damp Melbourne Thursday, and Ben Shewry is skipping around restaurant tables like a pixie in chef’s whites, delivering hollowed logs filled with polished pebbles topped with a few prized, raw Goolwa pippies drizzled with sea-lettuce butter.
Attica Chef / owner Ben Shewry in his Ripponlea restaurant. Source: News Corp Australia
Nothing remarkable, as such.
Except that 60 hours before, the New Zealand-born chef who has embraced Australia and its native culinary ingredients with such mastery, sat in a crowded, historic London hall, among the elite of world chefs, quietly accepting his fate.
For the second successive year, his small restaurant, on Melbourne’s bagel belt of Ripponlea, had been named the only Australian restaurant on the annual roster of the World’s 50 Best. “I think I was there (in London) for about 24 hours,” the chef, sage and owner of Attica says with a hint of exhaustion in his voice as he chats with diners.
Out to Heathrow on Tuesday morning London time, on to a plane, back to the other side of the world and straight to the restaurant, to work. You cannot question Shewry’s commitment.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list — an increasingly contentious collection culled from the votes of nearly 1000 jurors in 27 international zones — has come in for a kicking this year, with luminaries such as the great French chef Joel Robuchon questioning the arbitrary nature of voting and the potential for cronyism and conflict of interest.
Put simply, to get on the list, a restaurant needs not only the votes of local jurors, but those from other zones, too.
There is nothing opaque about the voting process; only that jurors are obliged to keep their status to themselves and that there is nothing more than a moral imperative to follow the guidelines. They stipulate that each must vote for four restaurants within their own zone, three outside, and that they must have visited the restaurants in question within the past 18 months.
Critics of the system have suggested this obligation is taken more seriously by some than others, and that a lack of obligation to substantiate these visits leaves too much latitude for corruption.
While three Australian restaurants — Quay, Brae and Sepia — were named in a “B-Team” of international restaurants ranked from 51-100, only Shewry’s small and ever-evolving Attica, included in the 50 Best now for three consecutive years, flies the Australian flag.
For the second consecutive year, the restaurant has been ranked 32. It entered the list in 2013 at 21.
It’s what the Americans might call something of a crapshoot.
It’s also testimony not only to Attica’s unique excellence — the restaurant tells an Anzac story of childhood emotions and Australian bush ingredients like no other — but Shewry’s following around the world.
Put simply, when international jurors visit Australia, they visit Attica. And, it would appear, vote accordingly.
It’s good for business. “It’s three months’ wait on any night at the moment,” Shewry told us yesterday. “Reservations for October open July 1.”
Needless to say, Attica was full on Thursday night; couples, groups, Chinese food tourists, all there to see what the fuss is about. Once a suburban bolthole with an ambitious and singular chef trying new things constantly, Attica has morphed in the past five years to an elegant, but unstitched, dining pilgrimage.
Props and whimsical effects — such as a mussel shell painted with the mussel farmer’s face, the hollowed log, or a “wallaby pikelet” that comes to the table wrapped in a linen tea towel with printed kangaroos and a recipe card that talks about doing circle-work in a ute — add layers of unpredictability to a meal that increasingly references Australiana, the bush and its indigenous tucker.
Dinner, including half-time hot chocolate in the back yard vegie patch with a young chef named Peter from Detroit, takes about four hours.
It costs about $220 per head, plus drinks.
As food tourists arrive in Australia looking for the only diner on the coveted list, reservations are never going to get any easier.
You have been warned.
Source: The Australian John Lethlean June 8th 2015
