Our Chinese New Year feature recipe from Spice Temple - Rockpool’s January 2010 Newsletter

We have a beautiful new range of teas at Rockpool Bar & Grill Melbourne, Rockpool Bar & Grill Sydney, Rockpool in The Rocks and Spice Temple – each restaurant with their own selections.  Following is the selection on offer at Rockpool Bar & Grill Melbourne.

After water, Tea is the most consumed beverage on the planet…clearly an important beverage worth of as much consideration as the finest of fine wines.

It is curious that such ‘staples’ can often be overlooked in restaurants. In searching for a tea that has all the delicate detail and unique expressions of fine wine we have found Jing Tea. 

Jing sources its exceptional teas from the most prestigious tea growing regions in the world; China, Japan, Taiwan, India and Sri Lanka.

We have selected several teas in the range that we feel offer a broad range of flavours and textures to suit various palates, occasions and dishes.

We have chosen three Black Teas. Assam is the world’s largest tea growing region and is located in the North of India. The Camellia Sinensis Assamica bush yields a robust, malty flavoured, and honey scented tea known as Assam Breakfast

From the Yunnan province in Southern China, comes Yunnan Gold, striking a balance of power and delicacy this tea shows a complex range of brown spices; cinnamon, nutmeg and clove all given elegance by highlights of ginger and liquorice. Earl Grey, Jing source the finest Ceylon tea, season with Bergamot and some Cornflowers to create a richly flavoured, highly fragrant, visually appealing tea that is well suited to the addition of milk.

The Green teas from Jing encapsulate the freshness of the mountains on which they are grown. Dragon Well is one of the most famous teas in China, this one comes from Cedar Hill in the Zhejain Province and is delicate and bright with hints of stone fruit layered with soft floral and earthy tones. Coming from the Jiande area of the same province is Jade Sword, this is as bright and lively as the Dragon Well, but with more earthy, mineral flavours taking centre stage and the delicate floral notes providing a supporting role.

Silver Needle White Tea, is harvested from the first spring buds in the Fuding province. This has gentle honeydew melon sweetness with a delicately astringent cleansing texture, this tea suits a number of our more delicate dishes.

Iron Buddha Oolong Tea is a truly engaging tea that shows the freshness of a Green tea, with the detailed complexity of black tea. This is a journey of a drink with enough volume of flavour and layers of texture to match any Grand Cru glass of wine. 

Much work goes into the production of these teas, we aim to protect this work, preserve and heighten your experience. We use specific tea pots designed to hold the perfect amount of water, and highlight the visual appeal of these infusions. We make sure that your Tea is served at the right temperature, poured and steeped at your table so the extraction can be to your liking (although 3-5 minutes is recommended depending on the Tea). 

It’s true that many of us have been seduced by coffee, but should you crave a warming drink to match you mood, or food during or after a meal; the satisfaction of the ritual of these leaves will be intensely rewarding.

I would like to wish everyone a great Christmas and New Year. 

Rockpool Group employees, thanks heaps for an amazing year, particularly the last few weeks. You slaved away and made the restaurants better.

To all our wonderful customers out there, thanks so much for all your support, I hope you have a wonderful day tomorrow.

To all those tuning into the blog have the best time, I know I will be relaxing, so hopefully you will be doing the same.

 Lots of love to everyone this holiday season!!!

~ Neil

Back to school of the seafood kind with the upcoming Neil Perry class at the Sydney Seafood School on Saturday 28th  November from 11am until 3pm.

When Rockpool opened in 1989 (the same year as Sydney Seafood School) ‘modern Australian’ cuisine was in its infancy – and many credit Neil with its inception. Since then he’s championed premium Australian seafood, revolutionised modern Asian cooking and steakhouses, written cookbooks, made television shows and revamped Qantas in-flight menus. At this hands-on lunch class you’ll master the techniques and flavour combinations that make his cooking as revolutionary now as it was 20 years ago.

Two weeks ago we were lucky enough at Spice Temple to cook for Fuchsia Dunlop and Yu Bo, the great chef from Yu Family Kitchen in Sichuan.

I was also lucky enough to see his master class at the Sydney Food Festival, it was so insightful and exciting. He enjoyed his lunch and then gave us a master class in the Spice Temple kitchen. What a generous and wonderful man.

We were so fortunate to have so many other great chefs from around the world at that lunch that day and subsequent demo. Again chefs sharing and enjoying. God I love this job.  

Sydney’s Best Chefs Help Feed Millions For OzHarvest

OzHarvest, the official charity partner of the Sydney International Food Festival (SIFF) and NSW’s exclusive food rescue charity, is launching the One Million Meals Campaign at the Paddington Uniting Church on Monday, 19 October 2009. 

Arguably Sydney’s best chefs Neil Perry (Rockpool, Rockpool Bar and Grill, Spice Temple), Matt Moran (Aria), Steve Manfredi (Bells at Killcare), Robert Marchetti (Icebergs Dining Room and Bar), and Jeremy and Jane Strode (Bistrode), will join forces for one night only to help OzHarvest kick-start their One Million Meals Campaign where they hope to raise $1 million dollars to feed one million people by July 2010. These chefs have a total of 10 Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Chef’s Hats between them.  For most it is the only time they will cook during the Festival. 

This invitation-only fundraiser, held at the Paddington Uniting Church, a beneficiary of OzHarvest, will see major corporations and supporters of OzHarvest cook alongside Sydney’s greatest cooking talent in what could be Australia’s poshest soup kitchen. Not only will the participants don aprons and clean up afterwards, they will also assist each chef with their chosen course. So imagine a CEO assisting Neil Perry with his three-shot chicken and rice, or his or her CFO plating up Matt Moran’s slow-cooked rib of beef? Priceless. 

All money raised on the night goes to OzHarvest, a not-for-profit organisation that rescues unwanted food from restaurants, retailers, food outlets and corporate kitchens across Sydney, Canberra and Wollongong to feed communities at risk. Each ticket costs $500 and the event is already sold out. The MC for the evening will be SBS Food Safari presenter and OzHarvest ambassador, Maeve O’Meara. 

Since 2004, OzHarvest has delivered a staggering 4.2 million meals with 5000 meals distributed every day to 162 charities. Not only does OzHarvest help the disadvantaged, it also diverts good food from being dumped as landfill. 

Corporate heavyweights signed up for the soup kitchen extravaganza include Macquarie Group, AMP, ANZ, Aldi, Coca-Cola Amatil, Gadens Lawyers, Minter Ellison, and Toga Hospitality, Vodafone and Woolworths. Each company will send along a group of ten who will cook at each chef’s station.

 OzHarvest ambassador, Neil Perry, who is leading the brigade of chefs, is delighted to be involved. “OzHarvest is doing an amazing job helping the hungry, homeless and needy. Just one dollar feeds one person so why shouldn’t we all help a young person falling through the cracks?”

How to donate and support the One Million Meals Campaign

Simply SMS FOOD TO 1991 1121*

By donating just $3.50 you are providing three meals to three people in need 

You can also donate by going online at www.ozharvest.org 

OzHarvest Founding Director, Ronni Kahn, said this week, “By July 2010, OzHarvest are determined to raise $1 million to feed one million people. This event will certainly give us the headstart we will need – bravo to the chefs of Sydney!” 

For more information about OzHarvest, or to arrange an interview with OzHarvest Founding Director, Ronni Kahn please contact: Sally Lewis at Liquid Ideas on sallylewis@liquidideas.com.au, 0410 311 501 or 02 9667 4211.

Spice Temple menu change is in full swing from today. Some really delish dishes. Love it when a plan comes together!

We are stir frying Mark Eather’s scallops with  cat’s ears noodles and hot bean paste. Sweet and sour pork ribs are a great chew off the bone.  The hot and numbing dry Wagyu is chewy, silky and succulent as well as hot and numbing all at the same time – its destined to be a classic here as it is in Sichuan – only they don’t use David Blackmore’s full blood Wagyu to make it.

Flounder with black beans and salted chilli, spicy, soft and sexy – a real treat, the flesh so juicy by the bone.

Egg noodles tossed with a dressing of dried chillies and black vinegar, great crunch to the noodles, lots of peanuts, really hot and impossible to stop eating.

Hot and fragrant prawns. Yes, eat the whoel prawn, crunch away at shell for a yummy Hunan style dish that rocks.

A great morning’s work!  Now it’s off to Rockpool to finish playing around in the kitchen with Phil, working on the new salt crusted lamb dish, this is really starting to look good.

All up a great week of menu changes in the restaurants.  Don’t forget to swing by and see us, and be the first to taste the amazing new dishes.

~ Neil

Good Living Cover Story – Huon Hooke
Sydney Morning Herald – Tuesday 28th July 2009

David Doyle in the wine room at Rockpool Bar & Grill Sydney

One man’s passion for wine has resulted in a staggering $40 million private collection.

David Doyle is an understated, quietly-spoken man who dropped out of a university computer science course before going on to build a software business that made him fabulously wealthy.

Over the past 10 years, he’s spent $40 million of his fortune buying wine for a collection that must rank as one of the world’s largest in private hands.

Part of the 60,000-bottle collection is in this country.  The remainder is in London, New York and southern California, where he has a commercial cellar for his own wines and room for other collectors to rent space.

“I started out with zinfandel.  It goes great with pizza but it’s not a really long-keeping wine,” says the 48-year-old American, who came to Australia courtesy of a charity auction and now spends half the year here.

His collection includes some of the world’s great wines.  Among them is a 1945 Romanee-Conti, one of the greatest vintages in France’s Burgundy.  He bought it for $30, 100 – the most he’s paid for a bottle.  As yet, it’s unopened.

Doyle grew up in a home where his father “was into food” and his parents drank wine but it was “cheap stuff in large bottles”.

He did three years of a four-year university course but quit out of boredom.  “The school was way behind where the industry was,” he says.

While building his business, Quest Software, which specialised in problem-solving software, his life was all work.  His outlet was to go out and have a good time.  He liked fine food and wine and his formative wine experience occured in a San Diego restaurant.  “The ‘75 Taittinger Comtes de Champagne was my first great wine.  The sommelier there took me under his wing and showed me some great wines.  One night at dinner, I was sitting next to a guy who showed me the 1970 Chateau Latour and I was hooked,” he recalls.

In 1992, he successfully bid $40,000 at a charity auction for a personal tour of Australian vineyards with wine legend Len Evans.  It also led to an entry to the Single Bottle Club, probably the most exclusive wine-lovers’ club in Australia, whose dinners are eleborately constructed around the world’s greatest and rarest wines.

With his company floated for millions and a new-found love for Australia, Doyle entered another phase of his life – as a restaurateur.  He owns the Rockpool Bar and Grill restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as Spice Temple in Sydney, with Trish Richards and chef Neil Perry.

Doyle’s wine collection forms the backbone of their wine lists.

The wine list at Rockpool Bar and Grill is unlike anything  this country has seen before.  Its depth and breadth of European wines is the equal of any other in the world and superior to some French venues with three Michelin stars.  It lists 3700 wines from a cellar of 7400.  Doyle has about 10,000 wines in this country and 48,000 in California.

He doesn’t blow his own trumpet but he confesses to a good memory for vintages.  “Memorable wines from great years really stick with you”, he says.  “It may be part of being a computer guy but I do have a memory for vintages.”

“Variety is one of the best things about wine, especially the ability to go back over vintages to see how they age.”

Purchasing a few large, private wine cellars boosted his enormous wine collection.  About one third comes from auctions, including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Acker Merrill & Condit in New York with the remainder from merchants.

“They source a lot of great stuff and steer me away from stuff that might be dodgy,” he says.  “You have to have a relationship with them.  I make every purchasing decision myself.  I inspect bottles.

“I have never bought for investment purposes but only to share with people.  You never want to open a great bottle of wine by yourself then tell other people about it.  You always want to share.

“There were certain great wines I wanted to have but my spending has dropped off sharply.  You can’t go on doing it endlessly.”

He aims to get through about 20 percent  of the collection in his lifetime.  “I’ve got lots of friends,”he says.

Expert Opinions
Wine he would like to buy 1870 Chateau Lefite magjnum.  “There are probably only a dozen or so left in the world.”
On wine write Robert Parker “I’m not a Parker palate…not into high-alcohol wines.  Wines all start to taste the same at high alcohols.
His greatest recent food and wine experiences “I tend to remember the wines but not so much the food.  In a restaurant in Santa Monica I had the 1978 Domaine de lal Romanee-Conti Grands-Echezeaux, which was so perfect.  We also had La Tache and Romanee-Conti of ‘78 but they were not quite at their pinnacle.”
Favourite Australian wines Grosset Riesling (“I’m a riesling lover”) and Mornington Peninsula pinot noirs.
Other passions? ”Music: I have more than 1000 CDs.  But I just love wine.”
Best recently tasted wine 1949 d’Angerville Volnay.  “It’s just a village appellation but one of the greatest wines I’ve had.”

Bar-style dining at Rockpool, Spice Temple and Rockpool Bar & Grill Sydney

With what we consider to be close to perfect locations…3 restaurants wedged nicely between and within a hop, skip and pirouette of  The Sydney Opera House, The City Recital Hall at Angel Place, The Sydney Theatre Royal, State Theatre and of course The Sydney Theatre Company at Walsh Bay…could there be better options for enjoying a quick pre-theatre bite to eat (or a slightly elongated post theatre meander) than The Oyster Bar at Rockpool, the increasingly popular bar at Rockpool Bar &  Grill Sydney, or our elegant and sexy dungeon of a bar at Spice Temple?  All three venues offer quick bar bites – from the new Lobster Roll and Fish Tagine at The Rocks; the Wagyu Burger or a selection of small plates at Bar & Grill; or lamb and fennel seed dumplings and spicy pork and fermented chilli with noodles at Spice Temple. 

All venues are open til late, with the bar at Bar & Grill trading non stop throughout the day.

The Oyster Bar Menu at Rockpool, The Rocks, Sydney.

The Bar Menu at Rockpool Bar & Grill, Sydney – 66 Hunter Street.

Spice Temple Bar Menu - 10 Bligh Street, Sydney.

Simon Thomsen Review, SMH Good Living, 05 May 2009

Neil Perry creates a deeply pleasurable dining experience all our own.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.  This is Sydney’s most beautiful dining room.  A breathtaking, thrilling, dramatically gorgeous mix of art-deco panache and sleekly understated modernism with clever lighting, soaring three-storey high columns, shiny dark leather and sculptural towers of thousands of Riedel glasses.  They simply don’t make ‘em like this any more, especially in a city too eager to trash its heritage for a developer’s next shiny bauble.

Even in the open kitchen, the wood-fired grill has an ethereal shimmer as spotlights cut through the smoke.

Thankfully, Neil Perry’s multimillion dollar roll of the dining dice has the brains to match its beauty.  Rockpool Bar & Grill is the expression of a mature wisdom.  It’s about uncompromising excellence, wealth and discernment – perhaps a touch of braggadocio, too.  Money is not an issue.  Roast chook for two $78?  No worries.  This is a defiant stand against the new austerity drive.

It’s also a clever premise:  if you’re loaded enough to blow thousands of dollars on the classic labels on this stupendous 3500-bottle wine list (just 10 percent are under $100), then you don’t want it upstaged by fancy-pants fare.  But what do you eat with an $89,510, 1945 Romanee-Conti, allegedly the world’s greatest wine?  A rival business?

The Rockpool Bar & Grill concept has evolved in Melbourne over the past four years and, like most products, version two has the bugs ironed out.  It integrates Rockpool (fish), Perry’s misguided rebranding of his Rocks restaurant, while the bar and grill part tags it as a steakhouse, with 11 beef cuts as the headline act.  Yet seafood is often the show-stopper.

Perhaps the pony-tailed baby boomer, after three decades of high-pressure and high-wire cuisine, is taking stock.  This expansive 60-plus-dish menu is scattered with childhood reassurances.  Think creamed corn ($9), macaroni and cheese ($9-$11), mushy peas with slow-cooked egg ($9) and onion rings ($9).  The son of a butcher has returned to his roots and nostalgia tastes better than we remember.

Are the steaks any good?  Perry suggests sharing a few, from four producers, grass-to grain-fed, to taste the difference.  However, when priced between $39 and $110 each, that’s an expensive experiment.  All you get is meat, albeit deftly char-grilled, plus condiments.  They’re not always the softest cut but the depth of flavour from the on-site dry-ageing process is revealed in the Blackmore 220-gram wagyu skirt ($39) and Greenham’s grass-fed yearling 480-gram on-the-bone rib eye ($65).

The menu’s alternatives range from wood-grilled quail ($24) with smoky tomato and salty olives to a slightly stringy duck ragu on flabby, wide pappardelle ($19), annoyingly described as “noodles”.

Luminous gravlax-style dill-cured ocean trout ($19) with clove-scented red onion to layer on bruschetta yourself is as delightful as chilli, lemon and parsley marinated king prawns (3 for $30) with a sweetly smoky scent from the charcoal roast.

Even leatherjacket, a criminally underrated fish, is given a new eloquence when lightly battered and served on “crazy water” ($29), a light Neapolitan fisherman’s stew of tomato and garlic, infused with basil.  Tuna tartare with Moroccan eggplant, harissa and cumin mayonnaise ($29) is as smoky, complex and mysterious as Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.  My only disappointment was the black-lip abalone meuniere ($99).  It’s not bad, just insipid in comparison.

It’s surprising to see so many of the old Rockpool team here, including maitre d’ Tom Sykes.  They’re snappily dressed in black and white, with jackets and ties, yet seemingly more comfortable in these surrounds.

On my first dinner, desserts fail to excite.  Second time around, Catherine Adams belts a home run with an apple galette, brown-butter ice cream and candied hazelnuts ($18) that’s pure pleasure.  Black forest trifle ($20), inspired by The Fat Duck’s BFG, is a decadent climax that goes pretty close to causing one.

An artist’s rise is often aided by an indulgent patron and Neil Perry found one in the US multi-millionaire David Doyle, who underwrote this bold $35-million venture, which includes Spice Temple downstairs.  Doyle’s $9.5 million personal cellar underpins this as a world-class restaurant.  It’s not too elaborate, yet it’s deeply pleasurable, which is the point, after all.  And amazingly, it’s ours.

Rockpool Bar &  Grill
17/20
The summary Neil Perry shows the old chef still has a few tricks left with a superb, smoky steakhouse where excellent seafood is a bonus.
Value Reasonable, depending on your economic status, but not cheap.
Chefs Neil Perry and Khan Danis.
Owners Neil Perry, Trish Richards and David Doyle.
Service Sharp.
Food Steakhouse.
Wine A staggering array of costly, global heavy-hitters, spread accross various vintages, plus a strong US presence; 25 by the glass.
Vegetarians If you must.
Noise The electric hum of the power elite.
Wheelchair access Yes.
Prices Entrees $15-$30; mains $26-$110; desserts $6-$19; all cards.
Where 66 Hunter Street, city, ph 8078 1900.
When Lunch Mon-Fri, noon-3pm; Dinner Mon-Sat, 6-11pm.