Rockpool Bar & Grill
Steakhouse$$$
The summary Neil Perry shows the old chef still has a few tricks left with a superb, smoky steakhouse where excellent seafood is a bonus.
Value Reasonable, depending on your economic status, but not cheap.
Chefs Neil Perry and Khan Danis.
Owners Neil Perry, Trish Richards and David Doyle.
Service Sharp.
Wine A staggering array of costly, global heavy-hitters, spread across various vintages, plus a strong US presence; 25 by the glass.
Vegetarians If you must.
Noise The electric hum of the power elite.
Wheelchair access Yes.
LET'S get the obvious out of the way. This is Sydney's most beautiful dining room. A breathtaking, thrilling, dramatically gorgeous mix of art-deco panache and sleekly understated modernism with clever lighting, soaring three-storey-high columns, shiny dark leather and sculptural towers of thousands of Reidel glasses. They simply don't make 'em like this any more, especially in a city too eager to trash its heritage for a developer's next shiny bauble.
Even in the open kitchen, the wood-fired grill has an ethereal shimmer as spotlights cut through the smoke.
Thankfully, Neil Perry's multimillion dollar roll of the dining dice has the brains to match its beauty. Rockpool Bar & Grill is the expression of a mature wisdom. It's about uncompromising excellence, wealth and discernment - perhaps a touch of braggadocio, too. Money is not an issue. Roast chook for two for $78? No worries. This is a defiant stand against the new austerity drive.
It's also a clever premise: if you're loaded enough to blow thousands of dollars on the classic labels on this stupendous 3500-bottle wine list (just 10 per cent are under $100), then you don't want it upstaged by fancy-pants fare. But what do you eat with an $89,510, 1945 Romanee-Conti, allegedly the world's greatest wine? A rival business?
The Rockpool Bar and Grill concept has evolved in Melbourne over the past four years and, like most products, version two has the bugs ironed out. It integrates Rockpool (fish), Perry's misguided rebranding of his Rocks restaurant, while the bar and grill part tags it as a steakhouse, with 11 beef cuts as the headline act. Yet seafood is often the show-stopper.
Perhaps the pony-tailed baby boomer, after three decades of high-pressure and high-wire cuisine, is taking stock. This expansive 60-plus-dish menu is scattered with childhood reassurances. Think creamed corn ($9), macaroni and cheese ($9-$11), mushy peas with a slow-cooked egg ($9) and onion rings ($9). The son of a butcher has returned to his roots and nostalgia tastes better than we remember.
Are the steaks any good? Perry suggests sharing a few, from four producers, grass- to grain-fed, to taste the difference. However, when priced between $39 and $110 each, that's an expensive experiment. All you get is meat, albeit deftly char-grilled, plus condiments. They're not always the softest cut but the depth of flavour from the on-site dry-ageing process is revealed in the Blackmore 220-gram wagyu skirt ($39) and Greenham's grass-fed yearling 480-gram on-the-bone rib eye ($65).
The menu's alternatives range from wood-grilled quail ($24) with smoky tomato and salty olives to a slightly stringy duck ragu on flabby, wide pappardelle ($19), annoyingly described as "noodles".
Luminous gravlax-style dill-cured ocean trout ($19) with clove-scented red onion to layer on bruschetta yourself is as delightful as chilli, lemon and parsley marinated king prawns (3 for $30) with a sweetly smoky scent from the charcoal roast.
Even leatherjacket, a criminally under-rated fish, is given a new eloquence when lightly battered and served on "crazy water" ($29), a light Neapolitan fisherman's stew of tomato and garlic, infused with basil. Tuna tartare with Moroccan eggplant, harissa and cumin mayonnaise ($29) is as smoky, complex and mysterious as Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. My only disappointment was black-lip abalone meuniere ($99). It's not bad, just insipid in comparison.
It's surprising to see so many of the old Rockpool team here, including maitre d' Tom Sykes. They're snappily dressed in black and white, with jackets and ties, yet seemingly more comfortable in these surrounds.
On my first dinner, desserts fail to excite. Second time around, Catherine Adams belts a home run with an apple galette, brown-butter ice-cream and candied hazelnuts ($18) that's pure pleasure. Black forest trifle ($20), inspired by The Fat Duck's BFG, is a decadent climax that goes pretty close to also causing one.
An artist's rise is often aided by an indulgent patron and Neil Perry found one in the US multi-millionaire David Doyle, who underwrote this bold $35-million venture, which includes Spice Temple downstairs. Doyle's $9.5 million personal cellar underpins this as a world-class restaurant. It's not too elaborate, yet it's deeply pleasurable, which is the point, after all. And amazingly, it's ours.
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