Previous SlideNext Slide

Like many buildings in Newcastle East, Bistro Penny’s Edwardian-era site has a varied history. Ghost signs on the frontage spruik insurance sales. At one point, it was a bank.

A cafe openly ripped off Bill Granger’s ricotta hotcakes at the address when I was enrolled at high school nearby and, in the early 2000s, it was hatted fine-diner Restaurant II. Today, it’s home to one of the best tomato salads in the state.

Owner-chef Joel Humphreys has enlisted local grower Dylan Abdoo from Newcastle Greens to help out on salad duties; he supplies Ferrari-red oxhearts that are doused in enough chilli oil to hold your attention without it ever overpowering the fruits’ heightened tomato-ness. Pickled onion and lovage add further punch.

(Yes, lovage – the mysterious umbellifer named Australia’s Most Underappreciated Herb for the past six years. It tastes a bit like celery, a lot like vegetable stock, and should be mandatory in every Bloody Mary.)

Scallops ... come appropriately chubby and pooled in the shell with a chicken-fat bearnaise that I’d love to swish fries through.

After working in Sydney restaurants, such as Rockpool and Bistro Moncur, Humphreys moved to Newcastle with his family five years ago. He partnered with long-time chef mate Nic Wong to open Bistro Penny, which came about after the blokes realised they were both looking at the same Bolton Street site for a solo venture.

After significant renovations, the dining room reopened in November and it’s a bona fide looker, all brooding leather, original terrazzo sandstone and cedar. Exposed steel beams hold up a high ceiling.

Wong is mainly on the floor, leading a young (read: a little green, but very friendly) team with restaurant manager Amy Evans-Bird. Humphreys is on the tools in an open kitchen, shuffling coals and turning cranks on a mighty grill that can cook anything from a scallop to a whole pig.

The French-forward menu doesn’t list a whole pig at the moment, though, suckling or otherwise. Perhaps it will come when the private dining room opens upstairs later in the year.

Scallops, however, yes, chef: they come appropriately chubby and pooled in the shell with a chicken-fat bearnaise that I’d love to swish fries through. But it’s too early in the evening for that kind of behaviour. Merimbula oysters are up first, textbook-shucked and served with grilled peach mignonette. They’re in remarkable nick for the height of summer.

That tomato salad is great friends with Humphreys’ boudin noir – a warmly spiced slab of blood and pig’s head pudding with a coal-black exterior that may remind you (and I mean this in a positive sense) of the blackened crust on a backyard barbie rissole.

Served with soft fromage blanc, salsa verde and confidence, it’s reminiscent of the borderline-austere plating at St John (if you’ve ever eaten in London’s Shoreditch). It turns out that Humphreys worked there, too.

Meanwhile, steak is a beefy, shaggy onglet covered in a righteous helping of Cafe de Paris butter (now we can get stuck into the frites), and duck à l’orange translates to a cinnamon-suffused bird, steam-roasted and sympathetically grilled.

Barbecued king prawns are the highlight of the mains, swimming in a long-flavoured saffron and fish stock sauce that asks for another hunk of thick-crusted baguette.

The only flubbed dish: a rum baba with smoked peanuts, banana sorbet and crème diplomat. On one visit, it was boozy, sharp and creamy – everything a baba should be – but overwhelmingly sweet on another. I would, and will, roll the dice on that again, though.

Bistro Penny is a certified charmer with real talent in the kitchen. How good to have a proper restaurant back in the heritage space.