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3 Weeds

Terry Durack
Terry Durack

Go-to dish ... pork belly and chorizo crepinette with radicchio salad.
Go-to dish ... pork belly and chorizo crepinette with radicchio salad.Edwina Pickles

14.5/20

Contemporary$$

Now that pubs are never just pubs any more, the 3 Weeds, otherwise known as the Rose, Shamrock & Thistle, is a rare treat indeed. Mondays are schnitzel nights, Wednesdays are trivia nights. Fridays feature happy hour, and Sundays promise a Sunday roast. And hurrah, Thursdays are curry nights, ''back by popular demand''. So what's a nice chef like Lauren Murdoch doing in a place like this?

Fresh from the hurly burly of the Merivale Group's Felix bistro, where the kitchen turns over a crazy 2500 diners a week, Murdoch could be forgiven for looking for an easier, less frenetic gig. She may not have found it.

As a popular local pub, the Weeds has dragged itself up by its bootstraps from its working-class watering-hole roots 132 years ago, to be hailed as a mecca of good food, with some serious chefs working in the kitchen in the past few years. But still, schnitzel night?

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A pub that's nice ... the 3 Weeds.
A pub that's nice ... the 3 Weeds.Edwina Pickles

I doubt a schnitzel would faze Ms Murdoch, whose kitchen demeanour and style has always seemed less ego-driven and more mature than many of her flashier, louder male compatriots. It's the same with her menu, which reads like a simple list of modern classics.

Take the pea tortellini ($18), which comes neither as a tortuous artist's palette of dabs and daubs, nor a big, carb-heavy dish. Instead, it's a gentle collection of little parcels of very fine pasta filled with pea puree and strewn with peas, a touch of chilli and translucent furls of guanciale (pig's cheek bacon); cooked and assembled for flavour first, looks second.

Crumbed lamb's brains ($18) is a bit of a Murdoch signature; the three meticulously trimmed, creamier-than-cream brains perfectly encased in a crisp, golden shell, served on discs of steamed daikon and topped with a piquant caper and gherkin sauce ravigote.

But it's not all pigs' cheeks and sheep's brains. My vegetarian guest is happy with her clever, flavour-first dish of broccolini topped with melting raclette, poached egg and brown butter crumbs ($18), although she was hoping for more from a main course of eggplant and ricotta roulades ($32), which soon became too much of the same thing. Unexciting, was the verdict.

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Exciting, however, is the wine. It's always good to see someone who loves what they do, and bright, young sommelier Stuart Sanders clearly jumps out of bed in the morning talking enthusiastically about semillon. He talks me into an intense, elegant, intriguingly fruity 2009 Torbreck The Loon Shiraz/Roussanne ($68), for which I am grateful.

With a highly honed ability to spot a meatball on a menu at 20 paces, I zero in on the pork and chorizo crepinette ($30); a meatball by another name, and a glorious one at that. It's as big as a cricket ball, and as rich as hell. Crepinette refers to the fact that the shreddy meat and spicy sausage is gathered up in caul fat, a net-like membrane that has the advantage of holding things in shape while simultaneously rendering its fat and disappearing in the heat of the pan. The dish is a good lesson in balance, the chef lightening the weight of the meat with a punchy salad of radicchio, cornichon and nectarine. The same happens with a simple dish of roasted, golden-skinned spatchcock ($30), which comes with batons of lightly marinated cucumber and a wedgy chunk of iceberg lettuce, given interest by an intense little puddle of coriander puree.

A dessert of hung cardamom yoghurt ($14) is zipped up with a sticky cardamon, lemon and vanilla syrup, countered nicely by the crunch of sugar and cinnamon-dusted fried Lebanese bread. It comes from the same line of intuitive, restorative, deliberately uncomplicated cooking as the rest of the meal.

The actual restaurant is screened from the rest of the pub, which will either make you feel relegated to the boring grown-ups' precinct, or grateful for the distinction. Soft Armani-olive walls, double-clothed tables and view of a lush courtyard garden mean you can ignore the fact that you just walked through a pub to get here. Unless, perhaps, it's curry night, and you never make it to the restaurant proper, in which case you'll probably do OK too.

The low-down

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Best bit It's a pub. That's nice.

Worst bit I'm guessing Friday nights, see above.

Go-to dish Pork belly and chorizo crepinette, $30.

Terry Durack is chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and senior reviewer for the Good Food Guide. This rating is based on the Good Food Guide scoring system.

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Terry DurackTerry Durack is the chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and Good Food.

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