pork | Eatsydney

Sitting by luxury appartments and super yachts in the water 50 meters away you could think Lumi Dining is just another power lunch Italian restaurant. The food is Italian and it is degustation. What impressed me the most was high level of thought and technical application while the food remains tasty and comfortable, trademarks of Italian food.

Crab

Sometimes I feel degustation meals get caught up in themselves. A couple of dishes can come out and be more about showing the technical prowess of the kitchen or dishes to test your capacity as a food lover. Raw diced oysters served on a sphere of crushed ice ( Murgaritz, San Sebastian ) Raw razor clams ( Bodega 1900, Barcelona ) are two dishes from high end degustation menu’s that confronted my nerve and left me thinking why? Why not make something hot and delicious?

Oysters & caviar

The Agolotti at Lumi dining come covered in a foam sauce and remains hot tasty and technically astute. Foam serving to keep lightness in the sauce has a purpose, it’s not foam to show us the smarts in the kitchen. A moorish pasta dish, smart, comforting and delicious.

Potato

Wagyu steak

Uni Gunkan

Mushrooms

Chef Federico Zanellato

Pie

Oysters are packed with Sydney rock mineralality, can come with caviar, are one of the raw items on the menu. We had to upgrade on a few. Ceviche of scallop comes with a fresh zesty citrus and celery juice, lip smacking sensation leaves your tongue tingling. Italian Gunkan of uni is also raw, salty on sweetish rice is brilliant start. Simple and technical, Italian Japanese fusion that sits easily in the menu lineup, is tasty and kind of obvious but i’ve never seen this anywhere before.

Cabbage

Potato says the menu. Yes, mashed, fried and served with bone marrow and caviar. Hot, tasty and well delicious. Mushroom reduced and reconstituted into mushroom wafers is a fun snack, the crisp texture perfect at that time in the course line up. Pumpkin seed tart is a crunchy nutty snack working with a wet egg and crab and bowl of macadamia & crab also sits perfectly in the gourmet lineup of courses. Brioche and butter lands about now and is devourable.

Scallop

Tagliolini Black Truffle is an add on menu item. Firm buttery noodles covered in shavings of earthy truffle. A combo available worldwide and a dish made to perfection at Lumi Dining. A contender for best noodles in town. I wish you could just buy pasta without getting the degustation, so I could go and smash it a dozen more times just to Pepsi challenge the best noodles in Sydney rating i’m working on.

Truffle pasta

Hapuka, wrapped in daikon with a light foam sauce is delicate, subtle and is warm and light, big flakes of white fish fall away, crunch and light acid from the root veg and a foam that keeps it all moist and delicious.

Hapuka

Pork

Hot pork belly next, a thin sliver with a dot of Lumi chimi churi. Another option add on is wagyu. Both hot tasty mouth fulls on the home straight of the meal.

Egg

Desserts of White Chocolate & Sudachi has the right amount of sweet and sour, served like a cracker, keeps the tail end of all the eating light and fresh. Buffalo, another light number, creamy and nutty, foam and crunch. Italian and unlike any Italian food i’ve ever had, delicious.

Buffalo

Chef Federico Zanellato is making exciting and inspirational food. Italian food has now been redefined for me and i agree with Good Food, 2017 Chef Of The Year is a deserved accolade. We spent about $350 per head including all the drinks we wanted, three bottles of exceptional wine found with the assistance of the young gun Som Fabio Sercecchi.

Lumi Dining is an Italian degustation restaurant producing some of the best food in the world. Being hot, delicious and moorish it’s easy to miss the technical wizardry performed in the kitchen for each plate that lands on the table, over and over again. And serving a pie, an Australian staple, you could eat a pie everyday if desired, here delicious, out of context and fun. Plus sitting by the water is beautifully peace full and makes this spot a great lunch option. Simply, dining at Lumi is one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

Breaking down perceived conceptions about dining, Master is a Chinese restaurant. Watch the video on their website, breaking down the walls and they are breaking dining ideals in the restaurant. It is a clean grungy space with magnificent food and wine, hip urban beats jam the airwaves, spice and flavour run rampant. The menu is made from many small share dishes. Many restaurant do this now, just like the original neighbourhood Chinese restaurant. The menu at Master has traditional elements but is serving modern Chinese food.

Beef Tendons

Puffed Beef Tendon with Haidai Salt is a light crispy number. A fun play on the most old school Chinese restaurant snack, the prawn cracker. Chicken skewers loaded with flavour and covered in nuts is a simple and delicious starter. Scallops silks confused us to what they actually are, perhaps noodles made from scallop somehow, with XO, light and refreshing, a perfect vehicle to get saliva moving.

Scallop silks

When you see Noma, Quay and Momofuku Seiobo on a resume of chef John Javier expectations run ripe. I did not know any of this of course, I’d seen photos of the food from Master on social media and managed to score a table before the word gets out in a big way. I anticipate it will be much harder to get a table soon. I love Instagram for finding hot new restaurants, just follow the right people.

Eggplants that is fried crisp, sweet and salty, this is not a brand new sensation, it is just delicious.

Eggplant

Spicy crumbed sweetbreads pack some heat. Deep fry is a great way to cook these little nuggets, they arrive on a plate loaded with chilli. Luckily, we were warned about the license restriction after 10pm and quickly ordered more wine,

Sweetbreads

I wonder if legislation will extend to amount of chilli served on a plate soon! If Sydney wants to truly be a considered an international city this legislation must stop and restaurants need to be prepared to stay open later. Too many times I’ve been turned away from a restaurant after 10 pm leaving me only with fast food options.

Buttery cabbage

The buttery burnt cabbage is gloriously rich. It is charred black on the outside with fish butter, the soft juicy cabbage takes some slurping when eaten. We then had smoked pork jowl with Peking pancakes. All tradition is abandoned as the pancake is large, texture as if the love child of naan and roti. The jowl with a section of fat that keeps the meat gloriously juicy, delicious smoky strips of pork and it is fun eating with your hands.

Pancakes

And you’ll need those hands if you tackle the crab. It was spanner crab on our visit, I have also seen images of mud crab from Master’s Instagram account. So much moist sweet crab flesh dripping in sauce which we devoured in an instant. What Chinese feast would be complete without a festival of crustacean and this was the Burning Man of a Chinese meal.

Spanner Crab

The deserts are divine. The potato flour dust on the deep fried ice cream is light and sweet, the shell to the ice cream firm and crisp. Immaculate. This is the best version of this dish I have ever tasted. Deep fried ice cream is the most famous Chinese desert in Australia and done here nothing like my childhood memories. Congee, pear and coriander is the other dessert, the bright green is spectacular. My body tries to deny me carbs this late at night but the fresh flavours here won the fight. I could eat this for breakfast any day.

Congee

There is still so much left on the menu for me to try and I will be back, I’d just better be quick, before word gets out and I can’t get in.

Deep Fried Ice Cream

Eatsydney

Eats & Adventures

Tag Archives: pork

Lumi Dining

MASTER Restaurant