Australian Gourmet Traveller - (04)April 2019 (1)

42 GOURMET TRAVELLER

A

t the end of the world – behind

the mountains of discarded

cat-eye sunglasses, Gen-Z yellow

dresses, chunky dad sneakers,

bike shorts once worn with blazers, bum

bags and Birkenstocks, past the unclothed

tables, chilled reds, skin-contact whites,

queues out the front, kingfish crudo and

jars of house-made XO sauce – we’ll still

have Est serving $45 entrées and offering

complimentary dessert with a $95 glass

of Château d’Yquem. The world could

be burning outside and the waitstaff

wouldn’t miss a beat, calmly pouring

flutes of Blanc de Blancs from the

Champagne trolley and checking the

creases in the linen to the very last.

Food and fashion can be a funny

thing. Knowing whether to stick or twist

isn’t easy when being new so often takes

precedence over being good. When Peter

Doyle, Est’s chef for 15 years, retired

from its kitchen last year, he wrote in

our pages that the best dishes were those

that transcended trends, proving that

good, clean-tasting food never goes

out of style.

At Est your entrée might be fillets

of baby snapper cooked, in a very early

2000s way, sous-vide in a steam oven.

They’re served on a (very 2000s) bed

of buckwheat and pearl-meat “risotto”.

The sauce is butter-based.

These choices are not fashionable.

But the snapper is sweet and fresh.

It flakes delicately under pressure

from a fork. Cooking fish in a bag may

have been superseded by more manual

methods – pan-frying, grilling, roasting –

but when something works, it works. The

butter sauce, a light and foamy emulsion,

coats the palate, with an edge from yuzu

kosho the slightest concession to the

times. Crisped puffed buckwheat piled

on top of the fish adds crunch. It’s

technical and pulled off with common

sense. What’s more, it’s good and

clean-tasting.

Jacob Davey, Doyle’s head chef

before Peter Doyle left and the man

Merivale installed as his successor,

couldn’t have asked for a better dictum.

And despite the challenge of succeeding

someone who’s been at the top of

their game for so long, he’s done well

to keep to the path.

But surely it’s a path that’s narrowing.

In this city, Est is one of the last of its

kind, a restaurant that brings together the

established codes of fine dining and sticks

with them because it believes that is the

way it should be done. Double-clothed

tables, the finest glassware, the most

classic of wine lists, salt on the table,

a fierce dedication to service. The room

itself almost demands it. Pressed-metal

ceilings soar, soft light spills through the

front windows, plush banquettes are

strewn with cushions. It’s comfort and

elegance all at once. Even the toilet paper

is branded Indulgence.

Whether Est presents in 2019 as

hushed or stifled, classic or stale, polished

or stiff, is probably in the eye of the

beholder. Near to our table, a solicitor

sits at a two-top with an off-menu order

of French fries.

Want to talk classic? How about a

meaty tumble of spanner crab topped with

trout roe and a chiffonade of cavolo nero

and underscored by lemon jam. Want to

As food fashions blow by, Est upholds the ideals of fine

dining and delivers in style, writesDAVID MATTHEWS.

Class act