Page 13 - foodservice magazine September 2019

DINING
13
Ihave a friend who went to Mary’s Underground on one of its first nights, a 60 or so year old woman who commonly frequents Potts Point restaurants with linen napkins. I was
eager to know what she thought of two dudes, famous for deluxe McDonald’s and metal, taking over the Basement space, so I asked her, ‘how was it?’
“It’s a fine-dining restaurant, but how they used to be.”
When I hear the words fine dining I think about tablecloths thick enough to blanket a body, waiters who greet you as if there’s a class divide, and food that resembles scientific innovation and ego more than any ingredients you’d find on a grocer’s shelf. How they used to be? I had no idea what she meant until I went myself.
Kenny Graham and Jake Smyth’s restaurant is not a fine diner. It’s got the prices and ingredients of a fine diner, but in every other way it’s completely different, and completely unique.
However contradictory this may sound, it looks and feels like
a harmonious fusion of the OG Mary’s in Newtown and the historic live-music venue that was here before. It’s red, black and timber. Carpet lines the floor (when was the last time we said that about a new restaurant?), and the walls are crimson and textured from stucco and bar-style back-lighting. The bar is timber, as is the furniture, besides a few plush velvet banquettes. It’s dark and loud enough to know this isn’t a venue that opens before 5pm; it’s one that’s open until 1am.
Then there’s the stage, filled every night with an energetic ensemble spewing sometimes experimental jazz and other times purely instrumental hip hop.
But this isn’t a bar or a live music venue. Those bands are just the support act to what head chef Joel Wooten and Group exec Jimmy Garside put on the table: whole rotisserie ducks, dry aged and lathered in mandarin sauce; a lobster split down the middle, heavily buttered and embraced by chips golden from duck fat; and a chestnut and cabbage pithivier disguised (for accessibility’s sake) on the menu as a ‘vegetable pie’.
“We didn’t want it to be modern, we wanted to lean on the rich culinary traditions of Europe but with a unique Australian take. That was important to me. I didn’t just want to roll out the hits of Escoffier and Fernand Point, it was about thinking about if those guys were in Australia, what would they have served a rotisserie duck with?” says Smyth.