The Mouth: Fine dining at the Wine Library dumps tricks for simple luxury, gives caviar the bump

In a city obsessed with putting tasty morsels on the ’Gram before your mouth, The Wine Library is a study in luxurious simplicity. Even if The Mouth did hit a slight bump.

Sumptuous simplicity: Sommelier Louella Mathews at The Wine Library in Woollahra with owners Tim Perlstone and Matt Taylor-Watkins. Picture: Tim Hunter.

One of the funny things about human nature is that we often don’t think something is valuable until we see someone else desire it.

Pretty much the entire luxury goods industry is built on this idea: A few bells and whistles aside there is little functional difference between a Mazda and a Mercedes, yet people will pay five or 10 times as much for the latter.

The same thing goes for food.

Particularly in Sydney where restaurateurs and Instagrammers have locked themselves into an envy driven arms race, dragging us mere mortal diners along for the ride.

Hence we now have the spectacle of (among other things) the caviar bump, which for the uninitiated is where grown adults lick fish eggs off their hand like a tabby cat cleaning its paw.

The caviar bump. Picture: Supplied

It’s ridiculous, and yet we see everyone else doing it and say, what the hell, throw another $40 bucks a head on the bill and we’ll all garner likes on the socials.

This is an ancient phenomenon: The French philosopher Rene Girard called it “mimetic competition” and said this behaviour is the root of most of the conflict in this world since the start of time.

Of course, there is a way out of this mess. The other week this column enjoyed a lunch in the private dining room of Woollahra’s Wine Library. Not some gazillion-dollar fit out, it was just a nice upstairs room in a terrace house with shelves and a chimney breast in Oxford St.

The occasion was really to hit the wines hard, and the Library’s shelves are deep indeed thanks to owner Tim Perlstone’s discerning palate, but the food was notable because for once it wasn’t tricked up and in the way.

Oysters, scallops, beef, potatoes, simple, perfectly done, acting as foils for some truly great bottles. This column reckons this sort of luxurious simplicity, where the wine and food do the talking, should be the next big thing. After all, we are staring into an interest rates abyss and who wants to finance a million dollar dining room with Philip Lowe looking over their shoulder?

Ersatz rent-by-the-hour luxury of the sort on offer in too many of our dining salons is all about what other people think, whereas true luxury is the freedom to not give a damn. Hence the beauty of a nice and simple upstairs room with good food and friends and not a hashtag in sight.

By the way, in the interests of full disclosure, we did kick off the meal with caviar bumps. But in our defence we felt pretty silly, and no one put them on the ’gram.

— The Mouth is an anonymous critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.