Quay, Sydney

Overseas Passenger Terminal, The Rocks, Sydney
+61 2 9251 5600
www.quay.com.au

Australia's highest ranking restaurant on the World Top 100 list (No. 27), Good Food Guide Restaurant of the year, Gourmet Traveler Restaurant of the year and the list goes on. This is almost universally (I use that word in the American sense - to mean that nothing exist is better or could exist outside the nation/community/imagined reality one lives in. e.g. universal healthcare) touted as the best restaurant in Australia. I have been twice before - one really good  experience and one average.So, after Attica a week earlier, this was the test.

This one was going to be a family dinner - my sister's birthday. After having studied the menu a couple of times at home, the four of us made the sudden strange choice of not going for the 4 course meal as we had planned, but doing the Degustation. I am glad we did this, it really did give me a chance to taste a few dishes I had not before. I don't however suggest you do that if you go. Each section probably has some very good dishes and some average ones.

1. Sea Pearls (Sashimi tuna caviar, sea scallop, smoked eel & octopus, mud crab, Dashi & abalone). Five balls arrive on a plate differently coloured and textured. The sashimi was very good, the sea scallop was juicy & exceptional, the dashi and abalone was an explosion in the mouth, the smoked eel and octupus was nice and even now I can barely remember the crab. It was a good dish, but except for the dashi and abalone pearl, nothing blew me away. Points for innovation, but wouldn't run there to eat it again. 6/10
2. Mud crab congee - Hand shelled mud crab, palm hearts,Chinese inspired split rice porridge. Delicious. The smell of the congee was intoxicating, the crab was sweet, succulent and delicious. The palm hearts adding a little texture. I wouldn't mind another few bowls of that! 8/10
3. Crisp confit of pig belly, green lipped abalone, silken tofu,Japanese mushrooms, chive flowers - The first bite of this dish was completely disappointing: the pork belly meat was dry and flavour just didn't come through. The dish improved as I combined the pig with the wonderfully silken tofu and the juicy mushrooms.  The abalone of course is almost the truffle of the seafood world and it just added the oomph required to pull the dish through. Tasting the dish with my second piece of pork belly (you get two small ones) was a completely different experience. The pork was wonderfully juicy, the top mildly crunchy and when combined with the ample amount of other ingredients given, the result was a symphony in the mouth. Textures: crunchy, silken soft, meaty, soft & squishy, light & fluffy, chewy. Flavours: sweet, bland, savoury, abalone (umami?!).  All this going on at the same time! Wow! I would like to eat that again! This would have been a 9/10 dish,  but the inconsistency (my sister's also was not juicy and crunchy) meant I had to downgrade to an 7-8/10. We had a glass of wine seperately with this. Unusually matched with a William Downie Petit Manseng. A white wine with Pork, I thought? Indeed. Great match. It was sweet and a little textured. Downie usually makes amazing Pinor Noirs (wax sealed bottle with a elements like orange peel coming through - wow!), but due to the Victorian bushfires last year, he had to innovate and made some of this instead.
4. Butter poached quail breasts, pink turnips and onions, white lentils, morels,truffle custard, bitter chocolate black pudding, jamon de bellota, milk skin. Ok, now this is where the chef turned it on. Succulent quail breast - I don't think I have ever had as succulent quail meat - The outside was almost silken smooth and it's meat was perfectly cooked. It was deboned. When combined with the silken smoothness of the truffle custard, the intensity (but a little too much saltiness), slight crunch & roughness of the chocolate black pudding. Peter Gilmore's style seems to need one to combine all the ingredients, and when I did this, the result was stunning. 9/10.
5. Slow cooked pure bred Suffolk lamb loin, young vegetables, comté-infused fresh milk curd, roasted quinoa, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, hazelnuts. I seem to have become more averse to meat. I was not really cooking forward to this course after having two meat courses and perhaps it's because of this I was disappointed. It was juicy and perfectly cooked, and I really enjoyed the textures of the various seeds/nuts but after the amazing few courses of intense flavour and texture, nothing amazed me about this dish. I should note that my sister thought the dish was very good. 6/10
6. Strawberry guava and custard apple snow egg - Not a bad dish, the the "egg shell" which contained the custard apple was a little too sweet for me. The granitine at the bottom was really refreshing. Marks for innovation. Overall,  7/10
7. Eight texture chocolate cake featuring Amedei 'Chuao' Chocolate - Very, very (too) rich. Too decadent at the end of the meal. I didn't realise it has Amedei Chuao chocolate (the world's most expensive dark choc), but that doesn't make me want to try it again - and I love dark chocolate. My sister was looking forward to this, but really didn't like it. She doesn't eat dark chocolate and wasn't warned that it would be so intense. 6/10

Service: most of the staff, particularly the sommelier were very friendly. But, our main waitress had an upturned nose, was cold and make us feel generally a little uncomfortable. Luckily we did not have to deal with her all the time.

The bottom line: A very solid performance with some exceptional dishes. I can see why it is rated amongst the best restaurants in Australia. Did it beat Attica? In my opinion - No. Should it be rated that highly in the world? Debatable, although one thing to should taken into consideration: the location/view. Sitting at the end of the overseas passenger terminal at Circular Quay, the view looking to the Sydney Opera House and Harbour  is a delicious dish itself which would be hard to beat almost at any fine dining establishment.