Fine Dining Restaurants: Cucina Locale

This week we head to a totally unexpected, but amazing discovery we found back in June when Tara came up here the weekend when I bought my wedding dress.

We were looking for a fine dining restaurant close by so Tara could finally take me out for my birthday (which is in February... haha).  We try and do two fancy restaurants a year, and we hadn't been to one yet!

We were on Google, and it said there was a fine dining restaurant in Blacktown.  Of all places, Blacktown.  And a revolving restaurant at that.  So SO random!  We were so intrigued that we couldn't not go and check it out.

So to Cucina Locale we went.

And it was amazing!

We ordered a different dish each for each course, and then ate half of each, so we could try more of the dishes.  Such a good plan!

So here we go - the a la carte menu we sampled when we went there back in June.

 Old fashioned - yes it's on fire!

 Pan roasted scallops with artichoke puree, truffle oil, pork crumb

 Beetroot carpaccio, balsamic, goats cheese, walnuts

 Duck breast, pumpkin, honey, fennel, orange, jus

 Wild caught snapper en papliotte

 Lemon meringue tart

 Chocolate brownie, Greek halva, pistachios vanilla gelato

Affogatos to finish it off!

What did we think?

Loved. It.

Seriously.  Sometimes I think going somewhere with absolutely no expectations can be a good thing.  Every dish was delicious, the cocktails were delightful, and yes we had two desserts!  The ambiance was also lovely, with a guy playing the piano.  The service staff looked a little lost at times, but they were friendly and professional.  I would definitely recommend ordering a la carte - they did have some tasting menus, but they were meat, or seafood or vegetarian, and they didn't have a combination tasting menu.  Which was a little weird.  But anyway.  We made our own tasting menu and it was great.

Would also recommend checking the sunset time on the day you are going.  The revolving restaurant has quite a view, which we would have been able to enjoy a lot more if it had been light upon arrival and we could have watched the sun set :).

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Fine Dining Restaurant Mini Review:

Was it worth the money (around $300 for 2 people): yes!
Did I love every dish: Loved everything

Matching wines: They don't have this option available

Anything I didn't like: the service could maybe have been a little better, but it wasn't detrimental to the experience - also should have gone before sunset!

Would I go again: Yes!  We actually are going again in November :)

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This series takes a hiatus - it will be back after our next fine dining adventure (which I think will be O Bar in Sydney, but watch this space).

Hx

Travel Tassie: Wrap Up

We have come to the end of our Roadtrip Tasmania series!

If you're here because you are planning a trip to Tassie sometime soon, I hope it has been useful to you.

This post is just to pop all of the links to each blog together.

The Travel Tassie Series:
- Intro
- The snapshot itinerary
- The detailed itinerary part one and two
- Our accommodation challenge
- Tasmanian wildlife
- How much to budget for fuel
- Navigation around Tassie
- Local food recommendations

Some quick fire questions to finish off.

Favourite place:

That's a tough one!  I loved the middle of Tassie actually.  Around the Great Lakes.  It was just so untouched and lovely.
If you are planning a winter adventure, I would highly recommend Dark Mofo - absolutely loved it!

If I was going to move to Tassie, where would I live:

I would be inclined to go to Sheffield or surrounds - great little towns with enough infrastructure to function day to day, and not too far from Burnie for the big chain stores etc.

Least favourite place:

Tasmania as a whole is beautiful.  Least favourite places would be the big cities, like Launie or Hobart. That being said, they were nice too.  We just prefer less people haha.

Local food place that would be a regular if I lived nearer:

The Bean Barrow in Lilydale - loved it!

Favourite photo taken:

So hard to choose...

Here are three of my favourites :)

Thanks so much for joining me on this adventure.

Until next time.
Hx

Fine Dining Restaurants: Dinner By Heston

How many times can I say I absolutely love Heston Blumenthal?!  Or that his food just totally blows my mind.  Haha.

This week we travel to Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, in both London and Melbourne.

I ventured here for the first time in 2014, when I was trying to get to The Fat Duck in the UK but couldn't get a reservation.  I went with my friend Chris, and we had the most amazing time.  It is located in the Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park.

The second time was just last year in Melbourne, when Tara and Tim got married (extravagant wedding meal for 4!).  This one is located at the Melbourne Fat Duck site, in the Crown Towers.

This restaurant is a la carte, rather than degustation, and you can select entree, main & dessert from the menu, and then add some liquid nitrogen ice cream to finish.  Wines you then select from a menu - when I went there in 2014, I asked them to match my wines to each of the courses I had selected, and that worked really well!

I really love the concept of this restaurant.  They take the historical origin of the recipe, and turn the concept into a new modern dish.  When you read the menu in the restaurant, you can see the year of origin and the back story to the dish, which is just magical.

Their website description:

Dinner takes its creative inspiration from our historic and nostalgic culinary past...Following years of research, the culinary exploration of chefs Heston Blumenthal and Ashley Palmer-Watts has resulted in a modern menu of dishes that have been inspired by historic recipes and history books. Some elements date as far back as the 13th Century. Working with food historians in Australia and the UK, as well as endless hours of library research, the two chefs have created a unique and original dining experience.

I don't know how often they change their menu, but you can find the current menu here.

Below are the photos I took at each experience - London first, then Melbourne.

I will label the dishes if I can remember which one it is :)


London

 Frumenty: grilled octopus, spelt, leek & chervil emulsion & sea broth

Chicken & Cauliflower

Black Angus Rib Eye with mushroom ketchup & triple cooked chips

Goats cheese cheese cake with poached pear

Melbourne 

Note: I didn't take a photo of every course here... by this stage, we were just enjoying the elopement and not as focused on food photography as I would normally be!

 Meat fruit

 Rice & Flesh: saffron, kangaroo tail, red wine

 Tipsy cake

Liquid nitrogen ice cream

So what did we think?

Both locations are just fabulous.  The service is sensational, the drinks delicious, and the food, although didn't tell a continuous story the same way a degustation would, still managed to take you on a journey, in a way only Heston's food can.  So spectacular.  My experience in both restaurants was relaxed and exciting, which such an importance placed on guest experience.  Loved it.

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Fine Dining Restaurant Mini Review:

Was it worth the money ($30 - 90 per person per course - London cost 450 pounds for 2 people): yes, definitely

Did I love every dish: yes!

Favourite dish: If you go to Dinner, at least one of you needs to have the meat fruit for entree. Just do it.  Trust me.

Matching wines: ask your waiter to match wines to your course - it worked well!  You would be fine getting a bottle for the table though.  Equally amazing.

Would I go again: absolutely yes

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Join me next week when we take a trip to Cucina Locale.
Hx

Travel Tassie: Navigation

So sorry for accidentally skipping a week on this one, and I'm a little late this week too!  I forgot I hadn't finished writing this one...

When we head out on roadtrips, we at least try to have a rough plan on where we will be heading and when.  Our Tassie trip this year really lacked that kind of plan haha - I just didn't have time to make one,  and we just winged it (is that even a word?).

The things we took with us navigation wise were:

- Our Hema HX1

- The Spot Gen 3 (I have talked about this many times before)

- Google Maps (on our phones)

- Wikicamps (links to Maps for directions)

- An old school paper map

So what did we use the most on this trip?

Honestly, for general cruising around and heading from town to town, and also for 4 wheel driving tracks, the Hema was amazing.  We used it every day to get us somewhere.  The 4 wheel driving tracks were fairly accurate as well, which is great!

Something to note.  I feel like I have written this in another blog, but just quickly saying it again haha.  In Tassie, you have A, B & C roads.  A and B you can guarantee is a fairly well kept, sealed road.  C roads are a little bit of a free for all!  They can go from sealed to gravel and back again, and might not be good quality, graded roads either.  Just drive with caution!

If we wanted to go somewhere specific, though, like a camp site where we only had GPS coordinates or something, we used Maps.  Hema maps just weren't accurate or updated enough.  That being said, even Google struggled sometimes - missing roads, or not being sure where we are, or where we are going. 

Actually, even with Spot.  We have it set to drop a pin every 2 minutes so we can track our trip.  But around Tassie, it would sometimes only drop a pin every 20+ minutes, and even when it did, it wasn't always accurate.  We once checked in at a campsite, and it thought we were in some random person's back yard.

It was weird.

It was like Tassie is a little bit of a satellite black hole in some places.

When you're travelling around, I would definitely just use common sense when following maps - if it doesn't look or feel quite right, maybe try a different navigation device to see if you can get something more accurate.

For example - getting directions straight from Wikicamps into Maps was more accurate than going to Maps directly.

I wonder if there is actually a reason for GPS being so inconsistent and inaccurate in Tasmania?  I don't know.

It didn't affect us at all, as we just roll with things as they happen.  But it is certainly something to be aware of as you travel around!

Join me next Tuesday one last time for a little Tassie wrap up/summary.

Hx

Fine Dining Restaurants: Vue de Monde

Another restaurant that had been on my list for a long time was Vue de Monde.  This is Shannon Bennett's restaurant in Melbourne, and because it was all the way in Melbourne, I hadn't ventured there yet.  But then Tara moved to Melbourne, and suddenly it was a little easier to get to!

The booking process was really easy, and again, didn't have to book months in advance.

I also really enjoyed that they sent a PDF of my menu and my matching wines (customised with my name and date) after the dinner; a lovely touch I think.

Matching wines I would recommend here.  I think with yummy food, matching wines really enhance the experience.  Only when the food is exciting and confusing enough as it is would I not match wines haha.

The sommelier here was amazing as well - loved our experience with him taking us on a little wine tour.

And then the menu.

A 14 course degustation - the chef tasting menu that was on in October 2017 (I'm pretty sure the menu changes very regularly).

Eggplant with eucalyptus, wattle seed pollen and emu jerky

Raw Flinders Island lamb with spring peas, finger lime and lemon myrtle

Matching wine: 2015 Vanguardist CVR,Clare Valley, Australia Pea, celery, parsley and lime

Paperbark smoked green asparagus from Jonella farm with seaweed and Rusty wire oyster

Moonlight flat rusty wire oyster with Jonella farm asparagus and salted riberries

Matching wine: 2016 Prager Hinter der Burg Federspiel (Gruner Veltliner), Wachau, Austria

Port Philip Bay scallops with blue lip mussels, spring shoots and flowers

Matching wine: 2016 Jim Barry (Assyrtiko), Clare Valley, Australia 

Schultz dairy milk curd with broad beans, rosella flowers and lilly pillie

Matching wine: 2013 Le Rochers des Violettes Montlouis, (Chenin Blanc), France

Mud crab with pickled kohlrabi, marigold and squid ink

Mud crab snags with kohlrabi coleslaw and tarragon emulsion

Matching wine: 2016 Bass Phillip Vue de Monde (Chardonnay), Gippsland, Australia 

Beer and fennel bread with butter

Barramundi with smoked koji, sea herbs and desert lime

Matching wine: 2016 Domaine de la Pépière Sur Lie (Melon de Bourgogne), Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine, France

Davidson plum sorbet with celery and apple Roo with muntari berries, pine and red cabbage

Matching wine: 2015 Philippe Alliet Vieilles Vignes (Cabernet Franc), Chinon, France 

Roasted marshmallows Avocado on toast

Matching wine: 2015 Urlar Noble (Riesling), Gladstone, New Zealand

Chocolate soufflé

Matching wine: 1987 Toro Albalá Don (Pedro Ximenez), Montilla-Moriles, Spain

The menu also wrapped up with a final wine, and a trolley of cheese, which was super yummy (there is also a beef dish somewhere in there but I don't appear to have a photo of that).  They also provided us with a muesli and loose leaf tea in a little takeaway bag, in preparation for breakfast, which was a little bit cute.

What did we think?

Honestly, I was a little disappointed.  The food was delicious, and the view was spectacular, and the matching wines were great, but the experience as a whole just felt so rushed.  Bookings here are a 2 hour sitting, but even with the waiters being like hey hurry up I need your table, and even with us rushing to eat slightly to try and hurry, it just isn't possible.  A 3 hour sitting would be plausible, but yea.  If I'm paying $500 per person, I want to feel special.  I want to enjoy the experience and I want to be taken on a journey, and here I was constantly reminded that they need our table sometime soon.

They did eventually move us to a table in the bar, and served our cheese trolley and final wine there, which was nice (and by which point we were pretty drunk anyway - 14 matching wines anyone?).  But it didn't really make up for the rushed feeling I had all night.  I really am one of those people that can have the most sensational food and wine, and excellent company, and all of the makings of an amazing evening, but if the service is sub par (which in this case it wasn't, they were actually pretty great) or the evening is really rushed, and the focus isn't on making our evening wonderful, they totally lose me.

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Fine Dining Restaurant Mini Review:

Was it worth the money: honestly, not really, no
Did I love every dish: I did

Matching wines: highly recommend

Anything I didn't like: the service, and the constant feeling that we were in the way and we needed to hurry up

Would I go again: No, I wouldn't

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Join me next week when we take a trip to Dinner by Heston.

Hx