Pulp Kitchen flair for Canberra Good Food Month dinners

Daniel Giordani's nothing if not committed to a theme. And that's how he found himself splashing about the dam at Eden Road Wines trying to catch yabbies for a Canberra Times Good Food Month dinner.

"There's a lot of produce that's available in Canberra that people might not really go for or don't know is right on their doorstep so we want to try and focus on that and give people a bit of something different," he says. And did the yabbies bite? "We got a couple! I don't know whether it's going to be enough," he says with a laugh.

Giordani is the co-owner of Pulp Kitchen in Ainslie, which is holding two Regional Table dinners for Good Food Month. Each dinner focuses on a specific winery, Eden Road and Collector Wines, and each features as much local produce as Giordani can find or catch in a dam.

He says the list of local providores includes The Cheese Project, truffles from Terra Preta in Braidwood, and "we are getting some eggs for the Collector dinner where the hens are grazing on the sangiovese vineyards." It's all going into a dinner that features slow-cooked eggs and fresh pasta with truffle butter, and venison with goat cheese, carrots and pears.

The Collector dinner on Monday, October 20, is sold out but there is a waiting list. Giordani says he chose the wines in collaboration with the winery in an attempt to show off some special vintages. "Collector have got two different reserves of shiraz [2011 and 2008] so the idea is to showcases the same wine in two different vintages, and show people how in three years the wine can be different," Giordani says.

There are still bookings available for the second dinner, on Monday, October 27, with Eden Road Wines. This dinner is features a few special wines that aren't usually in the winery catalogue. There's a sauvignon blanc that's described as "funky". "We also have some nice pinot grigio which has a beautiful nearly rosy tint to it, it's almost pink, very fruity. So we tried to pick wines which are different from what you normally get," Giordani says.

Eden Road's winemaker Nick Spencer agrees. When creating the 2014 Long Road pinot grigio, "we kind of straddled this line between being a white wine and a rose and my intention was to produce a wine that was as close to the variety as possible. So naturally you should see the colour of the grape [in the wine] it looks beautiful in the bottle, it has a salmon pink tint," he says.

Spencer says some of the wines come from an Eden Road range "where all relatively standard winemaking is thrown out the door and we just have a bit of fun". The funky sauvignon blanc, which goes by the proper title Bunched Wild Ferment sauvignon blanc 2014, is produced in the same way as beaujolais - the grapes aren't pressed, they're all fermented whole in bunches in the vat. "The reason it's interesting is that it has all these funky, bunched, interested characters, but it's not grippy and phenolic like you'd see in an orange wine," he says. "It's made from sauvignon blanc so it's much more fruity."

The Good Food Month dinners are all part of Giordani's "perpetual evolution" of Pulp Kitchen, the rustic French-style brasserie which is a favourite haunt of the Ainslie population. He started in the restaurant under then-owner and chef Christian Hauberg and when Hauberg decided to sell, Giordani and business partner Nathan Brown bought it from him.

Giordani has Grant Kells to thank for coming to Canberra - they'd worked together previously and went into business together to open Flint in the former Diamant Hotel at NewActon. When it was destroyed in the huge fire of June 2011, Giordani went to work at Pulp Kitchen while Kells moved on to open Smoque in Civic. The French-born Giordani says he's settled in Canberra - it's familiar to him after coming from a small town in Brittany so small he says it's probably not on a map. "It's very reminiscent of home, it's a city but in the country, it's just beautiful, you can drive five ks in any direction and there's the most beautiful scenery," he says. And Pulp Kitchen is a restaurant he's put a lot of himself into. "I like the spirit of the place and if I'm going to do something it might as well be French, and I wanted to be comfortable."

Pulp Kitchen's Regional Table dinners for the Canberra Times Good Food Month are on later this month. Monday, October 20, with Collector Wines. 6pm. $85-$125. Sold out. Monday, October 27, with Eden Road Wines. 6pm. $85-$125. 1 Wakefield Gardens, Ainslie. Bookings 6257 4334. Good Food Month runs until October 31. See the full program at canberra.goodfoodmonth.com.