It’s coming up to that time of the year when things are incredibly busy at work, so I don’t think I’ll be getting as much of a chance to write about the restaurants I’ve been visiting, or the cookbooks I’ve been leafing through and recipes I’ve been trying out. By the time I make it home, I’d much rather be watching a little TV (So You Think You Can Dance had me in stitches this week. The ‘swing guy’ in particular, stole the entire show) or listening to Rufus in anticipation of the concert we’ll be going to in January!

Here however, are a couple of restaurants that we visited recently.

Salon Blanc

As I walk along the wharf, admiring the parade of restaurants, I am struck by a thought : any one wishing to open a restaurant in this precinct will surely have to compete with the ever increasing (both in size and wow-factor) complexities of light fixtures. Salon Blanc cleverly sidesteps this instead by having a wall, in a sea of white furnishings and coverings, featuring a most gorgeous and covetable Missoni print.

We don’t get to sit anywhere near the print. Instead, on a clear but chilly night, we’ve been persuaded by the maitre d’ to dine al fresco. He strategically positions some heat lamps near our table and as the evening progresses, checks on them occasionally to make sure we’re not too warm or too cold. As a bonus, every time I turn to my right, I can marvel at the explosion of colours on said Missoni wall.

With such a great start to the evening, you can’t help but like Salon Blanc. The food is beautifully presented and expertly cooked (highlights include the light but creamy Gruyere souffle) though I feel for my money (especially on Surcharge Sunday), I could be eating much better, for less or equal what the bill ended up being. The dessert menu didn’t really inspire, so to my sweet-toothed horror, the evening ended there.

Salon Blanc
2/6 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo 2011

Oscillate Wildly

It’s not often I find myself in Newtown. A decade ago, a visiting journalist friend was told that she simply had to see Newtown because it was considered such an eclectic and artsy suburb. She obliged but was rather disappointed, finding it more depressing than exciting. These days, I think Newtown has been on the up, and has become the eclectic, vibrant suburb that it was always meant to be.

One reason to visit Newtown, apart from being home to Sydney’s only Taqueria, and the nearby Enmore Theatre where I’ve seen many great gigs such as Ross Noble’s Fizzy Logic, The Flaming Lips and Sigur Ros, is to eat at Oscillate Wildly.

All you have to do to get there, is firstly, manage to secure a booking. We had to book a table months ago, because of the long waiting list and I know someone who is booked in for November (the earliest date they could be fitted in). Then on the day, make your way in great anticipation, past the throng of black-clad bongo drummers, the APEC protestors handing out leaflets in front of the train station and the odd person walking down the street covered in fake blood (I hope), across King Street, down Australia Street to the small front door of Oscillate Wildly.

What you get when you cross the threshold is a cosy little restaurant (the dining area seems to be the size of a modest living room), with very warm and friendly service and innovative food created by Chef Daniel Puskas. At $55 for 3 courses, it’s also incredibly good value.

A sense of fun pervades the dishes. The use of ‘soils’ and foams in particular, create a sense of wow with every dish that arrives, and the unexpected textures and flavours have you playing a guessing game with its components. I liked my main of venison with broccoli heart, pumpkin soil and amaretto-spiked pumpkin puree. It works well together and the colours are great. My only criticism would’ve been that there wasn’t enough sauce on the plate, and seeing as I’m not a great rationer, I ended up with nothing else but several slices of rather raw venison and no other flavour to help me finish the dish.

The dishes we liked best were the muesli-crusted lamb entree and the complimentary dessert taster which paired chocolate and passionfruit – something I’m not usually fond of, but in this case, upon a single spoonful, sparked pictures in my mind of a dark chocolate button and a passion fruit seed skipping hand in hand across my tongue. Bliss.

Oscillate Wildly
275 Australia St
Newtown 2042.

Nu’s

Last weekend, we found ourselves at Nu’s for a family dinner. Despite it being a Sunday night, Nu’s was packed with groups of diners. Clearly a place that has been well and truly embraced by the locals – always a good sign!

I had read criticisms of this restaurant in the past, in particular, the chef’s tendency to mix (unsuccesfully) Thai flavours with French and Mediterranean influences, but didn’t really see any of that in the menu or in the dishes we had, this evening. Apart from the oddity of naming the appetisers, “tapas”.

Our choice of dishes ranged from crisp and crunchy salads (soft shell crab with green papaya, and fat juicy prawns with shredded mango) to a curry (green curry with wagyu beef) and something a little inbetween (snapper fillets with soft rice noodles). The common factor in all the dishes we sampled was the use of quality ingredients. Although in the case of the green curry, the use of wagyu beef seemed a bit redundant as the meat had been well cooked to the point where it was somewhat lacking in all the tender and juicy characteristics usually associated with wagyu. The balance in flavours was also tilted towards a tendency to be quite sweet, like most suburban Thai restaurants, and could have done with a little more heat. Unlike most suburban Thai restaurants however, the dishes were alive with vibrant lime and fresh coconut flavours that were pleasingly light, rather than rich and heavy.

For dessert, I would quite happily revisit the simple yet tasty dish of Banana fritters with palm syrup and vanilla bean ice-cream – one of the better versions I’ve come across, in fact.

The explosion of flavours that I have come to associate with Thai food, isn’t quite there, at Nu’s, but it’s still a very good restaurant.

Nu’s
178 Blues Point Rd
McMahons Point 2060