Australian chefs plan having the world eating from their hands

One, strongly influenced by popular Thai, Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Indian food, boils down to a sophisticated blend of European and Asian flavours. The other uses Bush tucker from the Aboriginal larder of game like kangaroo, crocodile and emu, enhanced by native fruits and vegetables like riberry, quandong plums and the citrus flavoured leaves and stems of the lemon myrtle tree. But it seems the two are rarely served up on the one plate, because the chefs often express a marked preference for one as opposed to the other and rarely cook both.

Top chef Neil Perry, a pioneer of the European-Asian style, has been so successful with it in his Sydney restaurants Rockpool and Wokpool that his influence can now be found in half-a-dozen other Sydney restaurants.

Qantas recently engaged him as a consultant to prepare the menus for first and business class passengers in its 747s and he is currently negotiating for a site for a new Rockpool in London.

One of the pioneers of the Bush-tucker variation, award-winning French-born Australian chef Jean Paul Bruneteau, was so successful with it in his Sydney restaurants Rowntree’s and Riberries

that he has now exported it back to France.

As executive chef of a Paris restaurant called Woolloomooloo — an aboriginal place name which became a Sydney suburb — Bruneteau is now preparing exactly the same Mod Oz food using imported Bush-tucker. Among his better-known dishes are warna-mai, a sea-food entree made from a melange of barbecued crocodile from the Northern Territory, scampi from West Australia, Tasmanian scallops and Sydney’s Balmain bugs (a fist-sized shellfish), spiced with indigenous herbs and fruits.

His trade-mark main course is Banksia-smoked anabaroo, a barbecued fillet of water buffalo over banksia flower cones and served with bunya nuts (a large seed from the native Bunya Pine).

Another restaurant specialising in indigenous style food, Edna’s Table, recently won the contract to feed the 6,000 international journalists accredited to stay at the Olympics media village. Edna’s Table is owned by brother-sister team Raymond and Jennice Kersh, who first discovered the Bush-tucker, which has been feeding Aborigines for 40,000 years, during a visit to the Kimberleys of West Australia in the early 1980s.

Their signature dishes include roast loin of rabbit with riberries and jus naturale, steamed asparagus with tarro and palasami timbale, gumleaf smoked rainbow trout, roast fillet of kangaroo with grilled native vegetables and medallion of veal baked in paperbark.

British writer Michael Bateman caused huge offence here a few years ago with an article in the Independent on Sunday in which he talked patronisingly of the meat-pie as being Australia’s national dish. He also said the best restaurants in which he had eaten in Australia were Chinese but observed that a native cuisine was “beginning to emerge”.

He quoted an eminent British professor as saying in the 1950s that cooking even a potato stretched the cullinary resources of an Australian hotel. Michael Symons’ book, One Continuous Picnic, quoted a celebrated French expert from the last century as saying no other country in the world offered ore of everything needed to make a good meal more cheaply than Australia.

“But there is no other country where cuisine is more elementary, not to say abominable,” the Frenchman said. Australian food writer Cherry Ripe promptly savaged Bateman’s critique for its “out-of-date perspective”, arguing that Australia was now producing “some of the most exciting food in the world”.

International awards and plaudits, which have gone to Australian chefs in recent years, support her view, although it seems Australia still does not have a national equivalent to Scotland’s haggis, England’s pork pie or Italy’s pasta.

“I don’t think there are any dishes that you can put in a box and say that’s Australian,” Perry said in an interview.

“I think when you eat here you get a uniqueness that you don’t get anywhere else in the world. But that’s more because of the Australian attitude to cooking and the quality of the product, it’s not a matter of us taking something and making it our own. I don’t think you can put a finger on what an Australian dish is. But what you really notice is a freshness and a vibrance that I don’t think you get in a lot of other places because the produce is so fresh and the influence is so varied.

“Australian cooking is that multi-cultural melting-pot with different uses of techniques and products that would never normally be seen together.” But Perry agrees he shies off the indigenous ingredients. “I don’t use them a lot because they have not often come up to our expectations in taste and texture and flavour,” he said.

“I’d rather use lime leaf than lemon myrtle. I’d be using lemon myrtle just for its Australianism, not for its taste and aroma. We choose ingredients for the quality that they bring to the dish. I think what we have become immersed in is the wonderful seafood that we catch locally," he said.

Rockpool’s menu includes dishes like stir-fried squid with coriander noodles, slow-cooked abalone with black fungi and noodle salad, wok fried pigeon, chilli salt tofu, quail eggs and sea scallops and Hapuka cooked in a pot with garam masala and coconut milk. His own favourite is the roast blue-eye cod with herb crust, potato cake and roast tomato sauce, washed down with a nicely chilled chardonnay, Australian of course.