Thursday 22nd December 2022
We’re in Sydney for Christmas and New Year and intend to do a fair bit of cooking over the festive season, rather than eating out all the time. We’re staying in the Silkari Suites at Chatswood. It’s about an hour out from the city centre by public transport, but does mean there’s loads of shops and supermarkets nearby and we’ve got a small apartment with a kitchen. It’s not huge (the hob only has two rings), but does have an oven and a huge fridge freezer. Which means we can do a proper roast dinner on Christmas Day, which we’re very excited about!
This morning, we therefore went to Aldi to stock up on groceries. We’ll need to do a second trip as we couldn’t carry everything we wanted (in hindsight we should have bought more bags with us). We also stopped off at the nearby bakery to buy some fresh bread.
We walked back to our hotel, and had a brunch of scrambled eggs on the bread we’d bought from the bakery, while we did some laundry (our apartment also has a washing machine).
We’d discovered there’s a small French farmers market on today, at Laurelbank Willoughby. It’s about a 30 minute walk from where we’re staying, so we decided to check it out.
We bought some saucisson and olive tapenade at the market (which we’ll have as an aperitivo on Christmas Day), along with a bottle of sparkling red wine (also for Christmas Day).
On the way back, we stopped at Cole’s, a large supermarket, to do the remainder of our Christmas food shopping. By the time we got back to our hotel it was mid-afternoon, so we got changed and ready to go out.
The train into the city took about 45 minutes, and we walked to the Rocks then continued along the quay. At this point, we got our first glimpse of Sydney opera house!
We only had about an hour or so at the harbour, as we had an early booking for dinner at Quay. We’d been given a gift voucher as a wedding present, but you need an Australian phone number to activate it. So we had to wait until we arrived in Perth a couple of weeks ago to do so, which meant it was fully booked by the time we tried to book a table. Luckily we got a spot after signing up to the waitlist, but 6pm was the only available time.
We were lucky to get a table by the window, with an amazing view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. After being seated, we were given a welcome cocktail and amuse bouche. The cocktail was excellent, very festive with hints of cinnamon and spice. It was gin based, but even Pete (who’s not a gin fan) really enjoyed it. The amuse bouche was interesting – a kind of savoury seaweed chocolate filled with oyster cream, followed by a bite of cucumber with lime.
Next followed a couple of fish dishes. First, marron (an Australian crayfish) topped with various types of caviar and some edible flowers. Next was scallops, pipis, and squid in XO sauce. The latter was my favourite, with a very deep and savoury flavour.
It was then a surprise course of homemade crumpets with truffle butter. Definitely the best crumpet I’ve ever tasted and the truffle butter was divine with a creamy, very subtle flavour. You could tell how much we liked it, as the waitress commented on how she’d never seen such clean plates when she cleared our table.
The bone marrow noodles with mud crab that followed were ever better. Definitely the star dish of the evening, both Pete and I would love to have an entire meal of just those noodles.
The main courses were roasted pasture raised duck, followed by confit pig jowl. Both were very enjoyable dishes.
Dessert was stone fruit fantasy. It was a bit like a very fancy version of a trifle, and I really enjoyed it. Finally we had a bonus dessert of miniature honey tarts and salted caramel caneles (the caneles were especially good!) and a chocolate ganache tart thing to share.
We were only meant to have our table for two hours (as it was an early sitting with a complimentary cocktail), however they didn’t rush us at all and it ended up being gone 8.30pm by the time we left. We were just in time to catch a Christmas drone show over the Sydney Opera House, which was very cool to watch.
We then caught the train back to Chatswood and walked back to our hotel. The streets of Sydney were looking beautiful after sunset, and it was also starting to feel quite festive.
Emma and Pete’s Asian Adventure 