There are different schools of thought on what is the best food to eat the night before doing a major amount of exercise, but none of them involve platters.
The night before the Sydney half marathon, I’m sitting in the acclaimed Nomad restaurant in the trendy Surry Hills eating platters of house-made charcuterie, foie gras & chicken liver parfait, smoked wagyu tongue, and whole spatchcock.
You’d be a brave fitness trainer to recommend any of that the night before pounding out 21km.
But I don’t care, the meal is absolutely outstanding, and as I grind to a halt at the 12km mark for what turns into a fairly sedate shuffle-walk through the streets on central Sydney, I’m still happily recalling the flavour of that buttery parfait with Iranian plum paste and that glass of 2008 Bella Ridge Estate ‘GSM’ (grenache, shiraz and mataro). At the finish line I get a glimpse of the winner, Ethiopian Gebo Gameda, finishing in 2 hours 11 minutes. I spent longer working my way through Nomad’s menu.
I might have been underprepared for the run, but I’m in fine form to get a taste for the city’s garden-to-table aesthetic, and look into a few interesting foodie spots like Sydney Cooking School and The Eveleigh Farmers’ Market.
I get the chance to meet Nomad sous chef Julian Cincotta who was 2015 Josephine Pignolet Best Young Chef, an award which recognises Australia’s most promising young chefs.
Julian talks me through his rise from cooking in the family café to the kitchen of Aussie restaurant icon Neil Perry’s Rockpool restaurant then moving to work under head chef Nathan Sasi at Nomad. Pretty much everything on the Nomad menu is made in-house, from chacuterie to bread to the pastes, dips and sauces on the plates. Julian describes it as a great learning environment for a young chef especially in turning out quality cured meats like chorizo, mortadella, pork and fennel sausage, or pancetta. Nomad has a reputation for one of the best chacuterie boards in Sydney and the in-house approach is obviously paying dividends.
Paddock to plate, and its vegetarian cousin, garden to table, is all the rage in Australia and there’s probably not a better person to talk you through it than a guy with a TV show called Paddock to Plate, acclaimed chef and restaurateur Matt Moran.
Moran is best known in New Zealand as a guest judge on MasterChef Australia but more recently he’s been on traveling the length and breadth of Australia demonstrating his love of the land and the producers that make it all happen.
“In Australia, everyone wants to know what they’re eating, where it came from, and whether it’s sustainable,” says Moran.
“It’s not a trend, that attitude is here to stay.”
Moran has quite a few restaurants on the boil, notably his Aria fine-dining establishment in Sydney and Brisbane as well the casual, shared plate Chiswick restaurants in Woollahra and at the Art Gallery of NSW.
At Woollahara, Moran explains they use land attached to the restaurant to grow a range of seasonal vegetables. It’s not big enough for them to be self-sustainable but Moran says the advantage is that it makes chefs think about what is in season. If they’ve got the likes of broad beans, radishes, broccolini, artichokes or tamarillos ready in the garden, then they should be on the plate too – simple as that.
I ask Moran what’s the best thing to try at Chiswick, and he recommend the lamb shoulder – bred on the family farm in the Central Tablelands.
The next day, I’m happily taking Moran’s suggestion at Chiswick and ploughing through the tender plate of shoulder. It’s the night after the half marathon, so weary bodies also need a serious infusion of prawn popcorn with spiced mayonnaise, seared scallops, au natural oysters, snow crab sliders, and hand-cut chips – it was that kind of day.
We’re making strides creating cool eating precincts in New Zealand, but a visit to The Grounds of Alexandria proves Sydney has its nose well in front.
The grounds were thick with hipsters of all varieties and the queue to get into The Grounds Café was relentless. The Grounds is a former industrial warehouse, which has been skilfully transformed into a trendy foodie haunt, with a garden that grows produce for the café, an on-site bakery, a coffee roasting facility incorporating a testing kitchen and a boutique food school – there’s even a chicken coop for fresh eggs.
The seasonally-driven menu at The Grounds is rustic, wholesome and focused on a garden-to-plate philosophy. On the menu they have ‘our signature avocado’, which was hard to ignore.
It’s full of perfectly ripe avocado, heirloom tomato, feta, za’atar, garden mint and micro herbs, served with their signature bread. I also plump for a round of polenta chips, more to prove a point to myself than anything else – yes, polenta chips can be nice, but normal chips are better. However, the freshness and unadulterated flavour of the vegetables in the ‘signature’ highlight how quality fresh ingredients treated simply can make for a quality meal.
There are numerous good Farmer’s Markets in Sydney, but Eveleigh Farmers’ Market has a reputation as the best for fresh food and produce. It was started in 2009 and houses 70 stalls undercover in the old carriage works building.
The line at the Columbian Coffee Connection is long, so seems like a good advertisement for a decent coffee. They crank them out pretty quickly though, so a short while later, flat white in hand, I meet a few of the local stallholders like Jason Symington from Salad Direct who grows the green stuff on his 10 acre property.
His extensive range of pesticide-free micro salads, lettuces and herbs sit alongside wheatgrass shots flavoured with pear and lime juice.
The food options are extensive and top notch at the market: try ‘The Crooked Madam’ sandwich from the Breakfast and Stuff stall of chef Alex Herbert, or a pork bun drizzled with chilli from celebrity chef Kylie Kwong’s Billy Kwong stand, or even a Vietnamese grass-fed beef noodle soup from the Bar Pho stand.
At the Kitchen Green stall owners Kim, Cherie and Lyndi bake gluten-free breads and pastries on-site, using corn, potato and rice flours. They do excellent banana bread, which is dairy, sugar, and gluten-free, as well as a range of sandwiches and their popular pissaladiere, hot out of the oven.
It’s hard to drag yourself out of the market, and when you do, you’ll probably need dragging, lifting or defibrillating after a morning of over-eating. You can stock up for the week with fruit and veges between mouthfuls too.
It’s also worth stopping in at the Sydney Seafood School, if you want to brush up on your fish filleting, squid skinning and mussel debearding. Tutor Coraline Riordan, took a packed classroom through various BBQ seafood skills, then had us all in their huge kitchen space putting together a seafood lunch based on the lesson.
Working in groups, it was great fun and perhaps a salient lesson about why you need a decent hierarchy in professional kitchens. Our group of six, for example, featured no less than six head chefs.
After we’d shouted our way through the prep, we sat down to a great meal and a glass of wine. It’s a fun way to spend a morning and it’s worth understanding the correct way to do things like storing, and preparing fish and shellfish, as well as collecting a few tricks for marinating and barbecuing.
For more information on events, accommodation and eating out in Sydney go to sydney.com.
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