Underbar brings Melbourne-style fine dining to Ballarat

A HIDDEN restaurant that seats just 12 people, is open two nights a week and books out a month in advance is surely found down a Melbourne laneway ... or is it?

THERE’S no signage. It seats just 12 people and is only open two nights a week. There are funky skin-contact and amphora wines on ice and a good line in local gins. The chef uses small local producers and forages for much that adorns the no-choice, multi-course set menu. And though that will set you back $150 a head, a month of bookings are snapped up as soon as they are released.

This most zeitgeisty of Melbourne restaurants is found in the hip suburb of — Ballarat?

Yes, the ‘Rat is a-changing.

MORE DAN STOCK:

THE 32 HOTTEST DISHES & PLACES TO EAT RIGHT NOW

13 AWESOME VICTORIAN DRINKS AND PLACES FOR A TIPPLE

DAN STOCK’S BEST RESTAURANTS IN MELBOURNE AND VICTORIA OF 2017

Inside Underbar Ballarat.

The Ballarat lamb rump with black and white garlic, romesco, tomatoes. Photo: Jo O’Kelly

Artist David Bromley’s Pub with Two Names is almost complete, there’s a new distillery (Kilderkin), a craft beer mecca (Hop Temple) and the funky Moon & Mountain that adds cool Chin Chin vibes to the city’s longstanding Catfish that’s still serving up some of the best Thai food in the land.

This thriving food and wine scene is helping the city shake off its ugly duckling status by finally making use of the same brilliant local produce that put Daylesford on every eater’s map.

And there’s no one making better use of that hyper-local produce than Derek Boath at Underbar.

Pronounced oon-de-bar, it’s a Swedish word meaning wonderful.

A chef with 20 years’ experience, from South Yarra’s Bacash in the early 2000s through New York’s temple of gastronomy, Per Se, Derek returned to Australia five years back with the hope of not only owning a house but a restaurant. But like an avocado, he found those property dreams duly smashed. So he headed up the M8 and Ballarat became home.

Saturday night pop-ups at local café Fika transformed into this permanent home last July.

Tete de veau (pig's head terrine), smoked cream cheese with English pea powder, Parfait with beetroot.

Spanner crab, sweetcorn, zucchini and purslane.

Here, a single, simply set communal table runs the length of the room to the white-tiled open kitchen at the end. It’s intimate, comfortable and as homely as a dinner party.

It starts out with a small selection of snacks, which includes a tricksy take on siu mai – where prawn tartare is hidden under puffed pork scratchings – parfait dusted with beetroot and raspberry powder with hidden beetroot jam underneath, and a brawn-rich tete-a veau (pig’s head terrine). While less instantly likeable than the dishes that follow, they showcase high-end technique in approachable fashion, with the English pea-dusted smoked cream cheese served with trout roe call-for-more crackers good.

A simple amuse of chicken consommé poured over truffled brown butter provides a few delicious sips of warming comfort, but it’s the pretty bouquet garni of freshly picked wild fennel, thyme, lavender and sage, that clearly telegraphs the kitchen’s just-in-time approach to plundering the garden that’s the hallmark of the meal.

This night that means the most incredible sugar plums picked that afternoon from Derek’s next door neighbour’s tree. And glorious, perfectly sweet golden Midas plums from two blocks away. Tomatoes, likewise. And ice plant, purslane and other leaves harvested in the morning and dropped off by mates to the kitchen.

These palpably vibrant ingredients then shine bright in clever combinations.

Underbar Ballarat chef/owner Derek Boath.

Spanner crab, sweet corn, zucchini, pursulane.

Those plums join nectarines and cherries to surround a cloud of lemon-and-sumac spiked sheep’s yoghurt that’s the bed for crisp pancetta-wrapped chicken ballotine piped with chicken mousse.

The salty pork, the sweet acid of the fruit, the creamy sumac and a dreamy mousse combine to create a cracking chicken dish.

Those tomatoes turn up in the final savoury dish and are every bit as juicily redolent of summer as you imagine country tomatoes could be. A blushing hunk of lamb rump glazed with black garlic and served with a white garlic cream is the star attended to by an entourage of pickled onion and pepper, garlic flowers, a fabulously punchy romesco sauce and peeled tomatoes that positively pop.

Earlier there’s a terrifically fun — and terrifically tasty — take on a Waldorf salad, where fat sashimi scallops come with celery, grapes, cold-pressed apple juice and walnut oil, while sweet corn three ways — in custard, blanched, and chilled soup form — joins a summer patch of veg, the lot hiding a generous amount of spanner crab. It’s outrageously good.

The wine match is just $40 — a 50ml splash with each course that keeps drivers under the limit — that this night included a Bendigo Bress cabernet franc cleverly served slightly chilled with the lamb, the golden acid crunch of a Loire chenin blanc paired with the Waldorf, and the tropical hit of the Alsatian gewürztraminer with the chicken.

The three-plus hours pass easily — due in no small way to the exceptionally comfortable felt-padded chairs — and while the music turned disco loud long before the boozy Pedro Ximinez jelly and chocolate crackle petit fours to finish, there’s an approachable softness and endearing humility to the whole experience.

It’s fine dining without the fuss, cool but never cold. I think it’s pretty wonderful.

15.5/20

Underbar

3 Doveton St North, Ballarat

underbar.com.au

Open: Fri-Sat nights

(Reservations for April open at 9am on March 1).

Go-to dish: Sweet corn and spanner crab