A restaurant in volumes. Twelve courses, one seating, four times a year.
The first course of the autumn menu is a thin slice of snapper, cured for thirty-six hours in a mix of Tasmanian sea salt, raw sugar and the zest of two lemons. It is laid flat on the plate, dressed with a single spoon of green almond purée and three drops of fennel oil.
We started serving this in mid-March. The fish is firm and almost translucent — the cure draws out the water but leaves the flavour intact. The almonds are picked young, before the shell has hardened. The oil is made in our kitchen on the morning of service.
One bite, possibly two. The accompanying glass — a champagne by Anselme Selosse — is the kind of wine you'd pour on its own, if the dish weren't there to meet it.
One marron tail, cooked in foaming brown butter with a single sprig of native pepperberry. The butter is from a farm in Tasmania and we use it the day it arrives. The pepperberry is foraged from the highlands by a forager we have worked with since 2019.
The marron comes from a fishery in Bremer Bay that supplies us once a fortnight in season. Each diner gets exactly one tail. We have considered serving two and decided against it every time.
It arrives at the table with a small spoon of the brown butter and one piece of charred lemon, with the instruction to use both.
The closing course is an apple from a single tree in Wandin, poached in calvados and laid on a spoon of buckwheat cream cultured for seventy-two hours in our kitchen. A drift of toasted buckwheat groats over the top, then nothing else.
The grower, John Carmichael, has been sending us his Spartans for six autumns. They arrive on the Wednesday of every fortnight in a single wooden crate, twelve apples to a layer, three layers to a crate.
The cidre de glace is from Quebec — one of the rare wines we import ourselves. There are eleven bottles in the cellar tonight.
The beef is from O'Connor in Gippsland, the same producer we have been working with for nine years. We hang each rib for one hundred and twenty days in our cool room before cutting. The flavour at one hundred and twenty days is mushroomy, deeply funky, and entirely unmistakable.
We cook a single thick slice over ironbark embers for three minutes per side, rest it for fifteen, and serve it with a spoon of bone marrow and one charred leek.
The wine — a Marc Colin Saint-Aubin — was bought on a single trip to Burgundy in 2020. We have nine bottles left.