Simon Wilkinson reviews The Tasting Room, Mayura Station

WITH a stockyard just out the window, the distance between paddock and plate is smaller than ever at Mayura Station.

Rump cap at The Tasting Room, Mayura Station

VEGETARIANS and vegans please look the other way. At a time when meat-free eating, either as a permanent lifestyle or sensible balancing act, gains ever-greater momentum, a visit to the high temple of carnivores might seem provocative, more grist for the mill, so to speak. But, for the rest of us, The Tasting Room at Mayura Station is a unique dining experience that reduces the distance between paddock and plate to a matter of metres. And considering the entire meal, at least until dessert, is based on beef, the cooking is surprisingly sophisticated, the flavours varied, the plating refined.

Of course, this isn’t any beef. Mayura’s wagyu are the Rolls-Royces of the cattle world, the herd’s pure lineage and eating quality bringing eye-watering prices in export markets across the globe. Like any prized asset, these cows are endlessly pampered, including a diet bolstered with chocolate and lollies, until the very end.

Wagyu beef at Mayura Station Tasting Room

There’s no getting away from that part, really, not when you are sitting at the stainless-steel kitchen bench in The Tasting Room, looking out over a stockyard, while a chef dissects precisely measured portions from a large lump of rump. There are no curious bovine faces at the window, thank goodness, but it doesn’t take much imagination to make the connection.

If that sounds too confronting, and the insight of watching a chef at work holds limited appeal, there are more traditional tables in a separate room where you will also be spared the roar of the industrial-scale extraction fan above the grill.

You’ll be asked to choose where to sit when making a booking, as well as how many courses you want, and even between finishing with sweets or cheese, which is hard when you don’t know how much red will be left in the bottle. Then you’ll need to find a room in Millicent and work out how to book a cab unless someone volunteers to drive the 10 minutes or so there and back through a rolling rural landscape.

The pay-off is a food experience that, rather than being butch, comes across as delicate or even feminine. Flowers, leaves, streaks and splotches are carefully arranged on each plate by chef Mark Wright, while he keeps up the banter for his “audience” at the bench. Flavours build in volume but never challenge the hero status of the trio of beef cuts that each have different characters.

The first is oyster blade, still raw, rolled in a dried nori (seaweed) dust and sliced into a tissue-thin carpaccio that is crisscrossed by veins of fat.

When one of these slivers hits your tongue, the fat melts and the whole thing seems to dissolve, leaving an ethereal waft of mushroomy savouriness. Add a dab of roast sesame dressing, or an edible bloom or two for a subtly different effect.

Next is “zabuton” or, less romantically, chuck tail, a cut revered by the Japanese, Mark explains, partly because such small quantities come from each cow. The other reason is an off-the-chart level of marbling.

Small bricks of the meat are seared over a ferociously hot charcoal grill, then given a few minutes to cook through in the oven. Break through the black, barbecuey crust and the flesh beneath peels away in lobes that are so juicy, soft and sensual it is almost indecent. The floral accompaniment this time is nasturtium, including a pickled pod that is like a crisp caper.

A selection of steak knives are produced only before the last meat course, a rump cap that does indeed need to be cut and even chewed, not that this is a trial. The cut is more recognisable beef territory, though still with extraordinary flavour, and given more substantial sides including pumpkin puree, asparagus and a mushroom medley including enoki, shiitake and black fungus.

The two options to finish – panna cotta topped by a lid of blood orange jelly or three cheeses with house-made lavosh and a fancy fanned apple – don’t reach the heights of what has come before.

The panna cotta topped by a lid of blood orange jelly

Mayura Station won’t be for everyone but it would be hard to find a purer expression of produce and place. Chef Mark reports he has even catered for vegetarians. Go figure!

THE TASTING ROOM, MAYURA STATION

941 Canunda Frontage Rd, Millicent , 8733 4333, mayurastation.com

OWNER de Bruin family CHEF Mark Wright

FOOD Contemporary THREE COURSES $110 FOUR COURSES $130
DRINKS The regional focus extends to a wine list in which only three bottles aren’t from local producers. Look out for back vintages at reasonable prices. BYO $25

Open for DINNER Thu-Sat

Score 7.5