Quay 2.0
Quay was the second fine dining restaurant I visited back in 2011. I really enjoyed the first experience, from the view, to the decor, to the food, especially the pork jowl dish! And everything else. To this day, some of the dishes I had then are are still prominent in my memory and a lot of other restaurants trigger the memories of that visit, notably the marron with grapefruit, the congee, and the pork jowl.
Recently they renovated, and started featuring crumpets on their menu instead of the usual bread options. There'd been a crumpet craze, and I joined in that craze when Saint Peter did uni on crumpets (which are SOOOO good!). So, I decided, now's the time to revisit!
The thing is, I've been so behind on writing up my Sydney adventures that I've forgotten what this amuse bouche is! All I know is that it was tasty, but that's a given!
I had booked the shorter course as that was the only thing available on their website, but on the day, they advised we had the entire table so we opted for the full menu! We still received the complimentary drink. Since I'm no good with alcohol I chose their tea instead, which was a savoury style tea, tomato consomme style! I thought that was really cool!
Look at the texture on that bowl! It kind of reminds me of oyster shells, which is fitting since the first dish is about seafood! We even got tweezers to eat this with, that's how delicate the food is!
Juice pairing time! The first beverage was a non alcoholic wine, made by an ex-Noma staff member, how cool!
Yeah. So many interesting things about this dish! This was my favourite for the night (and so early in the meal too!). The caviar itself I've had to death in my New York trip, but the smoked eel cream was absolutely spectacular. It was rich, strong, smooth, full of flavour, it was just so good! Wow! And the sea cucumber crackling was a great way to transform an ingredient that I don't like! I love it when restaurants use things like sea cucumber, fish eyes, beef tendons etc to make crackling because it makes so much sense!
This was the pairing with the caviar. A very light matcha flavour, which is good since I'm not a fan of most matchas and very refreshing!
The next drink was out, and I love this flavour combination. I do love tea based drinks and when they feature oils, it reminds me a lot of how Noma infuse an insane amount of flavour and texture into their juices!
Man those red pea flowers are gorgeous. What is really great is that Peter Gilmore is really into heirloom varieties and breeding interesting vegetables. Most pea flowers I see are white, and occasionally purple, so seeing these red ones were a treat! Plus one can never go wrong with a tartare dish!
A mini snack in between courses, this was so cute because it reminded me of a pot plant - that little succulent sticking out like it was growing from the mountain of peas! All my favourite ingredients in one, I loved this little tart!
Yep, this looks like a concentrated shot! Given that Seedlip was used, this was meant to resemble spirits!
Ah, this is like their new congee dish! Well ok, I should actually describe it as a crab dish rather than the congee since that's the main ingredient. Chawan mushi-like with some tasty broth!
Ah yes, the moment I was waiting for! The entire reason (ok well maybe not entire reason) I booked Quay! It's crumpet time! The smoked roe was so good though there totally wasn't enough cream haha. Very enjoyable, even though it didn't actually turn out to be my favourite dish haha. I still think Mr. Niland's crumpets are the tastiest, but admittedly those are fried so they're hard to beat!
I seem to have either taken the photos out of order or there were an uneven number of drinks to courses? Haha oh well. One day I'll get this blogging thing right. Until then, I'll just assume this is the corresponding picture. A beer-mimicking drink to go with the crumpets!
Woah! Pasta! Infused with bone marrow! Yeah! Nice and al dente, this had a great texture! I really enjoyed this one!
Okay I am guessing a bit here so apologies if I've done it in the wrong order. I think this was the buckwheat drink to pair with the pasta. I love herbacious flavours in drinks too, and I think it really complements the roastiness of the buckwheat!
The almighty smoked pork jowl dish! How it's changed so much but still very much a similar concept! Personally I liked the 2011 version better, but I mean, that was a pretty high bar and it's not like this was bad, I just liked how the textures came together better on my previous visit. Still a very good set of ingredients and such soft pork!
Haha I loved the presentation of this drink! A pear shaped frozen thing! But softly frozen, like fine granita that would melt into the drink. Pear, like apple, seems to be a good pairing for pork!
I love that Peter Gilmore loves peas! Speckled peas this time! But let's talk about the duck. I love duck and have had a few recently, including the one at Eleven Madison Park, and that one didn't actually impress me (sorry guys!). This, on the other hand. WOW. It's been a very long time since I've been surprised by a duck dish and this was GOOD!!! The duck was tender, well flavoured and the reason this is a winner - that skin was thin and perfectly crispy! Woah! I really was not expecting this to be next level crispy skin! What!!!! Yeah this was absolutely mind blowing!!! Ok so I didn't mention it at the beginning of my post as one of my favourite dishes but yes if you ever wonder whether or not you should choose this duck the answer is yes! Definitely! It is so good!!!
Yeah after the food I don't remember much about the drink haha.
After that mindblowingly amazing duck dish, it was time to move onto dessert. Look at the foamy thing on top! Visually this reminded me a lot of Noma Australia's rum lamington, but this had a harder texture and was less melty. There was also a lovely berry ice cream hiding underneath!
This is such an adorably presented dessert! So-called for the jersey milk cream that was so delicious. I'm an absolute sucker for cream so this was a real winner! Super rich and creamy! Plus those biscuits were super thin, and I am always impressed by super thin stuff! There was also some tasty caramel hiding underneath.
I liked this round of desserts better than the ones in 2011 (yes, even surpassing the snow egg!), but that's probably because I have a strong bias towards cream haha.
Ok, so it looks like I am missing a drink photo. There were 10 listed on the menu but I only seem to have 9 shots. Oops! I think this was the pairing with the white coral. I must not have gotten a photo of the Moo pairing, which was apricot, cola, pepper and coffee. Man that last drink was actually quite tasty!
And finally petit fours. I was so full after this! My friend had to leave early so I had to eat all four fours! Ahaha but they were good, and while the caneles look really dark on the outside, they were pretty good!
Overall my second visit to Quay was just as fantastic as the first! Very different food experiences and it's interesting to see how main ingredients have carried through but in very different iterations. Comparing the dishes was really fun and I really should revisit restaurants more often because a lot of the fun is in watching them evolve!
QUAY
Last night my brother, his friends and I went to Quay. Finally been to Quay! This post will probably contain some incoherent excitement, but whatever. Apart from needing to visit Rockpool, my eating life is complete... almost.I had been called in on short notice because a friend of my brother's had pulled out, and no one else could fill the spot. So what if I was secretly hoping I could go! Muahahaha. It was definitely an awesome experience, what made it even more interesting and eye opening was the differences between Quay and Tetsuya's, and even Rockpool Bar & Grill since they're the only really super fancy places I've been to. So this might even have a little bit of comparing between the restaurants, just because.I remember staring at Quay from a distance for ages, always wondering how to actually get there. Turns out the entrance isn't actually that hard to find, it was just on the upper level of the Overseas Passenger Terminal. On the day we went, we just happened to have a gigantic boat blocking half the view of the harbour, but then again, the boat was a sight in itself. A sight of white!We had gotten there slightly early, and so they let us hang out on their balcony while they continued to set up. The mirror celings they have always looked cooler on TV, close up I realised they didn't actually cover the entire ceiling, and it had been scratched from many many cleans I'm guessing. At these fancy places everyone always greets you with a smile. It's a little scary considering I'm paranoid of absolutely everything, but it was also nice. We were actually the first group there, so we got a fantastic table that was right at the window. It also meant that we had several waiters walking by asking if we needed anything. We were given wine, cocktail and dinner menus. This was different from Tetsuya's where it seemed to be a set degustation without extra choice of drinks. But then again it could have been because we didn't ask.The presence of a giant boat also made it unique in the sense that we were able to have a merry discussion with the wait staff about the man in the fluoro vest down below who was going to untie the ropes and how he had to be there two hours prior to the ship leaving. There was also a cool tugboat, but not as cartoony as I thought they would be. Anyway, enough talk of boats. To the fooooooood!We all went for the degustation, though their a la carte menu was also tempting. Jewels would have been wonderful to have. We took about an hour to decide on drinks, what I found really impressive was that they had mocktails! There was even one with watermelon and elderflower, but I decided to get an alcoholic drink instead, it was called "Amaretto Sour", apparently it also contained egg white and gomme. I didn't and still don't know the purpose of either ingredient. Initially it tasted like medicine (funnily enough the last cocktail I had also tasted like medicine, and contained completely different ingredients! I must just have weird taste...), but then after a while I got accustomed to the weird almond taste that I like.
We were given a tiny entree-before-entree, which had ginger milk curd in a seaweed and oyster consomme. It looked a little weird but the taste was a pretty amazing, I love anything seafoody and the warm ginger down the throat was nice too. The curd reminded me of a very soft silky smooth tofu in a way, and my brother said it sort of reminded him of miso, so it all kind of fits in!The first dish was a raw marron on grapefruit with bergamot marmalade, almond, elderflowers and other things. There was also the flavour of some sort of dairy curd. At first I thought the marron was sitting on a bed of rice, until I realised that the little bits were actually all the little grapefruit pod things! That was incredible and made me not want to be a chef designated to pull all the little bits apart without popping them. Harvesting strawberry seeds was enough for me!
The second dish was a mud crab congee with some sort of super creamy buttery orange sauce. Funnily enough I still have no idea exactly what congee is (because I am a nub), but this contained rice and crab meat. I actually had an inedible on my crab meat (the funny thin shell thing that is in the meat in the legs), which I found amusing because those sorts of restaurants tend to require perfection with no random bits that aren't supposed to be in there. I didn't mind but I'm convinced when the waiter took my dish away he paused and/or tipped the bowl a little to observe what I had left in there. I wonder if it then got passed into the kitchen XD
The third dish was lobster + lobster velvet, hand caught squid and golden tapioca. I thought that the tapioca looked a little like caviar, but didn't taste like it. Just tasted like tapioca. This dish was sort of so-so but still nice. The velvet was an interesting experience for me since I'd never had anything like it. Fishy and foamy at the same time.
They offered us bread at this stage, whereas at Tetsuya's bread was offered from the beginning until the end of the savouries. It didn't matter to me either way but was interesting to note. They also gave us regular butter with salt on the side, and while the bread was yummy, I found my white sourdough crust just a little too hard. I missed Tetsuya's truffle butter too, but not by much.And then came the fourth. WOOOOOW that was an insane dish with all sorts of textures and flavours!!! A smoked confit pig jowl with shiitake, shaved scallop and jerusalem artichoke. Each individual ingredient was super yummy, and altogether almost made my brother's friend cry. It was like a combination of some pretty unique (and expensive!) salted chips with soft scallop, porky pork, squidgy mushroom in a buttery sauce. I had to agree with my brother's friend, this was the best dish of the night. Everything about it was just wonderful.
Fifth was a slow roasted quail breast, semolina in truffle butter, buckwheat, pumpernickel and these flaky things that looked like coconut flakes, but didn't taste like coconut so it must have been something else. When this was presented to us, the first thing that came to mind was Rice Bubbles! And when I ate it, the first thing that came to mind was Rice Bubbles! That was because it was puffed buckwheat and pretty much was like cereal, which was pretty awesome and made the dish fun (for me at least). There was a sweetness in this dark sauce underneath the quail which was interesting as well. And the semolina truffle butter was OOOOOHHHHH.
Then the last savoury dish came around, which was wagyu in bitter chocolate black pudding and an ox tail consomme. I was a little nervous about the black pudding, but the flavours all blended in and the meat was so soft! It was hard to take a picture as it just looked like a blob in soup. It was definitely tasty, and when the black pudding was mixed with the consomme it was thick, rich and full of flavour.
I took a bathroom break because the bathrooms must always be judged! These ones were hidden away in what I described as a snail tunnel, and one side of the walls was lined with beads, and that was pretty. The doors were ambiguous (in terms of which side of the door opens) and heavy, but at least they told me which was for which! At Tetsuya's I spent about two minutes trying to figure it out because I'm slow :( They had nice towels and no Aesop. But whatever.Dessert time, and LO AND BEHOLD THE SNOW EGG IN ALL ITS SNOWY GLORY. One of my brother's friends had been waiting for this moment and got super excited. It's so much more exciting and mystifying in real life than it is on TV, not that I'd looked at it too closely on TV. I accidentally breathed in some icing sugar, but wow. It really looks like an egg! I think my toffee shell was a little thick, as I ended up with toffee coated teeth. The inside was meringue and then there was some gooey yellow inside. It had white nectarine granita on the outside which had a really nice flavour to it, but did become a little overwhelming... until I reached the creamy custardy stuff at the bottom of the cup. This is definitely the best dessert EVER. It's a fascinating process of cracking open the shell and then actually breaking it open and running the yolk out. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm! Unfortunately the lightning at this stage got really bad so we weren't able to take clear shots.
Then it was coffee and petit fours, where we received our choice of coffee or tea (mocha, vienna, flat white and earl grey) and some truffles. There was a milk truffle with hazlenut, and a dark chocolate truffle with rice-bubbly bits (I think it was buckwheat) and a muscatel centre (I think). The coffee was okay, and I think being a snob means that I need my coffee branded from a super coffee roaster, which in turns makes me even more of a nub. My brother's tea was... disappointing. We were confused whether he had received earl grey at all because it didn't have the strong citrus flavour that earl grey usually has, even though the smell was right. It was very confusing, and ended up getting a macchiato afterwards.I think it was a little awkward because the waiter asked if we were ready for the "paperwork" and we said yes, only to order that mac afterwards. At least we tipped, right? That should be enough to cover the coffee! Surely! They also only gave us one business card, and we forgot to grab a handful more as we left. However it was definitely a memorable experience and my food tastes have now been destroyed for a while. Need to go back to eating ordinary food now. Ah, I will miss Peter Gilmore's flower covered food. It's so cute!What was interesting is that Tetsuya's felt much more formal, and the actual seating was designed so that everyone looked out at the garden with its fancy bird shadows and fountainy things. I think the way the rooms were set was meant to make it feel more intimate, with fewer guests per room and many rooms spread out on different levels, but I prefer being in a larger, more open environment rather than being secluded. Quay felt nicer and was also brighter due to the fact that all the windows looked out to the harbour in some form, and felt a little more connected through with noise passing through the entire restaurant - it made it much less awkward to speak. I wasn't facing the harbour, but when I got up and took a look, it was a pretty amazing view. Comparing the two, Quay had the more flexible menu choices as well, but it lacked the physical memorabilia such as a take-home fancy paper with the menu, which Tetsuya's provided. Personally I loved the fact I got a copy of the menu there. That's when my brother pointed out that Rockpool Bar & Grill was all about the interior and the Riedel glasses - these three restaurants have very different focuses when it comes to the decor. I personally found Rockpool Bar & Grill to be the most laid back and the place I'd most likely go back to, followed by Quay for their a la carte. Sad to say, but Tetsuya's has the least re-visit value which relies on them changing their menu XDOh, there was an incredibly funny moment where one of the waiters tried to engage in what I think she expected to be a formal conversation when she asked us if we were chefs or serious foodies. One of our friends replied, "we're students" and at that point the waiter ran away. Actually, we had another waiter run away when we told her that we cooked with Pepsi Max. Note to self, don't be ridiculously silly in front of waiters! They will be embarrased for you! Luckily giving away the fact that this restaurant outing was how my brother and his friends were celebrating finishing high school, we actually got a special treat on our petit fours, that is, we got Congratulations! written very nicely and scarily neatly on our plate, which was a nice extra finishing touch to the night.
After writing this (it was way too much work), I don't think I can write coherently anymore... or maybe I've never been able to do so ever. But whatever, Trevor.Wheeee! Next stop, Rockpool!