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The Montpellier Public House

Terry Durack
Terry Durack

The one dish you must try ... roasted thirlmere chicken, peas French-style, bread sauce and roasting juices, $42 for two.
The one dish you must try ... roasted thirlmere chicken, peas French-style, bread sauce and roasting juices, $42 for two.Fiona Morris

British

There's a new aphorism in town and it's long overdue. Moving on from the over-used ''you are what you eat'' is ''you are what you cook''. Because how many of our chefs eat the food they cook? There's often a gap between the fancy food they cook and the simple food they eat.

The so-called exodus from fine dining to its more casual incarnation is a chance for some chefs to do the sort of food they like to eat, instead of food I suspect many of them secretly find a bit baffling. Which brings me circuitously to Randwick, where fine diner Balzac lies buried under a pile of marrow bones and hand-cut potato chips with bearnaise.

Matthew Kemp, who forged his reputation cooking crafted French food at London's The Square and Sydney's Banc before opening Balzac in 2000, recently rebranded Balzac as a casual, British gastropub-influenced bar and dining room called the Montpellier Public House. I'm getting a little tired of chefs claiming to go simple then putting fancy food on planks, but Kemp has done it.

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Downstairs in the newly revamped bar, with its mix of high stools, benches and table seating, everyone's eating Welsh rarebit, ''Scotched'' egg, pork pie and fish and chips.

Upstairs in the dining room, walled with golden sandstone and set with widely spaced tables, the food is fancier, but only just. There are still things such as potted river trout and, for the brave, a strangely compelling take on the traditional east London ''pie, mash and liquor'', that combines smoked eel and braised beef, with a chimney of bone marrow emerging through a roof of mash.

There are also whacking great share plates that have whole tables abuzz with chatter and anticipation. Think pot-roasted pig's head, and whole roast chicken. And when they say whole roast chicken, they mean it.

A good free-range Thirlmere bird of a decent size ($42 for two) comes trussed-up with a large serving fork protruding from its breast ready for some DIY carving action.

It's great stuff - cooked through without being crucified, nicely seasoned and smelling of garlic and thyme.

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On a second board stand jugs of creamy bread sauce and runny cooking juices and a bowl of buttery peas cooked with lettuce and shallots. It's totally charming seeing people carving chicken for each other in public (but, please, can we have warm plates?)

The Eurocentric wine list upstairs offers a fruity, floral and very chick-friendly 2008 Brezza Santa Rosalia Barbera ($69). Downstairs, it's more about beers and ciders and wine - mostly old world and organic - coming in four different sizes from 150 millilitres to 750 millilitres. A bipartisan couple, for instance, can settle in with 375 millilitres of white and red and live happily ever after.

There's a cold pork pie ($10) with an excellent hot-water pastry crust and piccalilli; and a half-pint of Tassie prawns ($15) that's a nice idea, but the prawns are a little pasty. There's also a very show-offy warm pigeon and foie gras Scotched egg ($14), that oozes runny yolk when pierced with a knife.

Upstairs there is even more to like. A little pot of soubise-like onion and garlic soup shares its wooden plank ($20) with a fabulously rich and flaky duck sausage roll and a skewer of chewy-but-who-cares confit duck heart and gizzards. Another board carries a single slab of brawny terrine (richly flavoured but where's the jelly?), teamed with grilled bread and crunchy, crumbed pig's ears and tails ($18) that together constitute ideal drinking food.

Mr Kemp still has a few twirls and flourishes in him, as in a delicate, creamy, smoky kedgeree ($14) that's almost a soup of smoked milk, rice and house-smoked blue eye and eel, topped with chopped egg. For me, the apple crumble ($14) is a flourish too far, the bed of firm-cooked apple topped with a loose crumb and a scoop of salted caramel ice-cream.

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So often, food this ''simple'' is done by the casual and the careless. It's lovely to see it done by the professional and the painstaking instead. Matthew Kemp is cooking the food he likes to eat; and guess what? The rest of us like it, too.

tdurack@smh.com.au

Montpellier Public House

Address 141 Belmore Road, Randwick, 9399 9660, montpellierpublichouse.com.au.

Open Bar, daily noon-midnight; dining room, from 6pm Tues-Sun

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Licensed Yes. BYO in dining room Tues-Thurs (corkage $10 a bottle).

Cost Upstairs: about $100 for two, plus wine. Downstairs: about $70 for two.

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

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