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Australian cuisine stars at Invite the World to Dinner

Sarina Lewis

Top team: (From left) Peter Gilmore (Quay), Ben Shewry (Attica) and Neil Perry (Rockpool) revel in food Down Under.
Top team: (From left) Peter Gilmore (Quay), Ben Shewry (Attica) and Neil Perry (Rockpool) revel in food Down Under.Supplied

Eighty of the world's leading food innovators and influencers are bound for Australia this November. Why? Because chefs Peter Gilmore, Ben Shewry and Neil Perry are inviting the world to dinner, the grand finale of Tourism Australia's Restaurant Australia campaign, aimed at acquainting the world with the food Down Under.

Notables include Californian chef Alice Waters, critic A.A. Gill and Lorenzo Cogo, the youngest Italian chef with a Michelin star – they're part of a hand-picked list of food and wine writers, commentators, broadcasters and celebrity chefs.

The international influencers will take part in personalised tours throughout Australia, from Melbourne's rooftop bars to Sydney's Asian hotspots to Central Australia's bush tucker, culminating with the Invite the World to Dinner gala at MONA on Friday, November 14.

''For me it's about expressing the freedom of cooking that we have here,'' Gilmore says.

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''We don't have a very traditional, laid-down set of rules around our culinary culture, so we are able to take our multi-cultural influences and infuse it in our food in a very subtle and intricate way."

Like smoked and confit pig jowl served with blacklip abalone and koji rice grains with shiitake mushrooms and seaweed – the cross-cultural main dish Gilmore will present alongside Shewry and Perry.

What Gilmore refers to as a ''subtle Japanese-Chinese influence'' will also be evident in Perry's contribution, starting with canapes cooked over an open flame at the Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park, before moving across to MONA for the main course and dessert.

Food and wine experts will taste the fusion in the kombu butter dousing the coal-fired Tasmanian lobster eaten outdoors, while taking in the view of mountains and water.

The same multi-cultural influence will be present in the seared wagyu beef from Japanese cattle bred in Victoria by David Blackmore, who Perry considers one of Australia's finest producers.

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Like Gilmore, Perry is keen to reference the spirit of the place as much as provide an exploration for the palate.

''I would imagine our guests will expect to taste our amazing lobster and marron and abalone, and to experience that Asian influence,'' he says, noting that all three chefs will present two canapes, a main course and two tasting desserts, ''but that incredible geography and sense of the spiritual in the landscape is just going to blow people away.''

New Zealand-born Shewry, known for his foraging of local seaweeds and grasses, intends to showcase indigenous ingredients – think South Australian red kangaroo served with bunya nuts sourced from Melbourne's Ripponlea Estate, red pepperberries from Tasmania and red carrots from the Mornington Peninsula.

''Society here is a big melting pot – Melbourne has the largest Greek population outside Greece and the largest Italian population outside Italy – but one thing that is really important to me is to recognise the tribal owners of this land,'' he says.

''In a small way, I would like this dinner to pay homage to them – to represent those fantastic native products here that are less well known in our society and certainly not well known internationally at all.''

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