Magill Estate: the lap of luxury
TRUFFLES and caviar are on tap and the cellar is unbelievable. For those who can afford it, a night at Magill Estate is like nothing else in town.
THE weekly shopping list for Magill Estate Restaurant would provoke different responses depending where you work in the building. In the kitchen, it would be fist pumps and high fives, while over in accounts they must have palpitations.
Truffles are scattered like autumn leaves. Beluga caviar is dolloped by the spoonful. There is lobster, mud crab and abalone, brook trout roe from the Yarra Valley and top-grade Mayura wagyu.
The rare and the exclusive come thick and fast during dinner at Magill Estate, a restaurant that exists, first and foremost, as a showcase for the luxe labels of Penfolds. If you have travelled from afar to drink one of the world’s most revered wines in its spiritual home, you’d expect nothing less.
But how do the rest of us, who are paying $190 a head for the food alone, fare? Wine lovers with deep pockets will be thrilled by what can be found in the magnificent house cellar of back vintages and other rarities. That includes Grange by the glass but also the chance to compare, say, the St Henris of 2008 and 1977 (superb, by the way).
The view across the city skyline and a broad sweep of suburbia to the coast is breathtaking. Tables are well spaced and the latest refurbishment, now five years old, still stands up well. The loos, with their rows of carefully rolled hand towels, are the plushest in town. And the staff on the floor, a little stilted in the early days, are far more poised and self-assured now.
The tasting menu format has changed, we are told, to offer two choices in each course, rather than the kitchen calling all the shots. We are handed sheets that offer a single word representation of each dish, so the decision is “crab” or “scallop”, “chicken” or “pork”, “artichoke” or “lemon”, without any further clues. It’s a little like picking a life partner based on “blonde” or “brunette”.
First, however, come the snacks, delivered in such quick succession that we struggle to keep up. Squid tube is shaved into a sheet so thin and supple it can be used as the wrapper in a Vietnamese-style cold roll. A snappy crispbread is loaded with bluefin tuna tartare and black pearls of caviar. Crumpets come topped by a quenelle of trout butter and equal measure of roe. A chicken double-act features the skin turned into a tart shell holding potato cream and a frizz of shredded truffle, while the boned wing is stuffed with prawn and scallop meat like a dumpling case.
My dearest and I pick one side each for the next phase, so we can have a competition between each pair of dishes. The sea-kissed simplicity of raw scallop, sliced and topped with dashi jelly and a spoonful of Beluga, is a unanimous choice over mud crab that is subdued by its rich kombu butter dressing.
The abalone, while hard work to slice, has a delicate sweetness and rewarding chew that is a natural bedfellow for the smooth, savoury rice porridge beneath. Not to everyone’s taste, it splits the points with the more mainstream luxury of big lobes of lobster meat in a bearnaise sauce.
The truffle plates, each with preposterous amounts of shaved Western Australian fungi, pit a pressed slab of plum-glazed pork jowl with turnip, pear and top-grade Spanish ham against cubes of celeriac and heritage-breed chook leg that don’t have the crisp skin or big chicken flavour expected. A win to the pig.
And a seared cylinder of gorgeous ruby-coloured Hahndorf venison loin shades the lamb option, if only for the accompanying baby beetroot that has been roasted, hollowed out, filled with a puree of the insides, dusted in sugar and blow torched. So much effort for a teeny veg sphere.
The two desserts — a sunny bowl of cheesecake ice cream, lemon curd and buttermilk foam on one side, a darker, more challenging arrangement of Jerusalem artichoke ice cream with linseed, rye and unsweetened coco crisps on the other — are both winners in my book.
Still, despite all the extravagance and clever tricks, this dinner feels like the wow moments occur mostly at the beginning and end, that a few times through the mid-stages the momentum is lost, the inspiration dries up. And all the truffle in the world can’t disguise that.
MAGILL ESTATE
78 Penfold Rd, Magill, 8301 5551, magillestaterestaurant.com
OWNER Penfolds CHEF Scott Huggins
FOOD Contemporary TASTING MENUS $100 (Wed), $135 (Fri, Sat lunch) and $190 (Thu-Sat dinner) DRINKS An extraordinary cellar of Penfolds older and rare labels, best experienced in the icon or Coravin matches, if you can afford it.
Open for
LUNCH Fri-Sat
DINNER Wed-Sat
SCORE 8.5/10