Underbar’s menu is an abundance of riches and an act of endurance

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“I don’t know how you do it,” my dining partner groaned as we looked helplessly at the delicious dessert in front of us – freshly baked pull-apart rolls made from croissant dough, dusted with powdered sugar and served with small ramekins of chocolate for dipping. It was the second dessert of the evening, and the ninth course, and we had hit a wall. “How can you eat like this all the time?” my companion moaned. “I’m going to die of fullness.”

To be fair, I don’t eat like this all the time; only sporadically. The venue on this occasion was Underbar in Ballarat, the type of restaurant ambitious and special enough to draw diners from hundreds of kilometres away, where a meal costs $210 a head (paid in advance, upon booking), and so, I suppose, it bloody well better seem worth that price.

You certainly couldn’t complain about bang for your buck: there’s enough food served over the course of the nearly four-hour meal to make up a week’s worth of regular dinners. (I’m using “regular” loosely here – these dishes, individually and as a whole, are anything but regular.)

This is the second iteration of Underbar, having moved from a small storefront a few blocks away into the new boutique Hotel Vera.

The restaurant is slotted into the side of the building, a long room with high ceilings encircled with sheer floor-to-ceiling drapes. It would be hard to call the central counter and wall of high-tech cooking apparatus where chef Derek Boath and his one assistant do their work an “open kitchen”. The setup is more like a large loft apartment with a kitchen island – the whole room acts as a kitchen and an open-plan dining area, including seats along the island billed as a chef’s counter.

Boath’s menu changes each week, though themes and favourites have emerged since Underbar’s Hotel Vera debut in December. Recently, a trio of duck-themed snacks has set the meal in motion: a duck katsu sandwich, a doughnut cooked in duck fat, and a pani puri filled with duck parfait and raspberry. Boath, who previously worked at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York, is obviously thinking about texture and contrast and pure deliciousness, and his aptitude for all of these things is undeniable.

Tiny ama ebi (spot prawns) pop with sweetness, served with prawn bisque, celeriac and purslane. King ora salmon is served over a rich sauce made of salmon roe and verjuice, then topped with sliced grapes and dusted with dill.

There’s a pork belly course, a beef course, and a truly wondrous broth made from shiitakes that may be the purest expression of mushrooms I’ve ever encountered.

Individually, each of these dishes is beautiful, and there’s so much impressive technique on display that it’s hard not to be wowed by the brilliance of Boath’s cooking. But almost every dish is so rich that eaten one after another the meal takes on a different aspect, moving from indulgence to gluttony to discomfort.

And there are places where Boath adds fatty elements that I think detract from the success of the dish – chewy hunks of pancetta, for instance, added to an otherwise gorgeous and relatively light corn and crab chawanmushi, provide a textural contrast that, while obviously purposeful on the part of the chef, diminished the pleasure of the silky savoury custard.

You certainly couldn’t complain about bang for your buck: there’s enough food to make up a week’s worth of regular dinners.

I also found it slightly odd that Boath has put himself so front and centre in this endeavour, positioning his kitchen and its machinations as the focal point of the room and the experience, yet paying scant attention to guests seated directly in front of him at that chef’s counter.

Chefs need not be entertainers, and I know this is work for him, not play. But a greeting at the beginning of the meal would go a long way towards making guests feel more welcome.

That mood is lightened somewhat by the service staff, in particular sommelier Anthony Schuurs, who is professional but warm. This is one of those rare restaurants where the wine pairing ($125) is actually worth the price, as much for Schuurs’ smart and interesting picks, and the explanations that go along with them, as for the value of the juice.

That second dessert course, the fresh-from-the-oven croissants, says so much about the glory and frustrations of Underbar.

Just the fact that Boath has the training and skill to achieve such beautiful pull-apart buttery pastry, with such a lacquered shattery exterior, speaks volumes about the talent and work ethic of this chef. This guy can seriously cook.

But I wondered, as I sat and looked longingly at this beautiful food that I could barely bring myself to sample, if Boath has ever tried, in one sitting, to eat the meal he’s preparing.

If he had, he might find it a beautiful and frustrating and exhilarating act of endurance.