Hot 50 list of Australia’s best restaurants revealed

Sydney leads the charge in a diverse dining scene but The Hot 50 list finds our chefs stretching the culinary boundaries.

Lamb’s udder. Blood grissini. Cow’s udder with crab custard. Ganache of lamb’s blood, rolled in maple oats. No, it’s not a menu for Nosferatu’s feast, just another night at Lume, a radical new fine-dining restaurant in South Melbourne. Or perhaps you’d prefer a slow-roasted cow’s head, to share between two at the fearless new Africola, Adelaide?

HOT 50 RESTAURANTS 2015: Full List

Welcome to the world of dining as an extreme sport, where ingredients such as tuna bone broth, grilled veal tongue and puffed (beef) tendon are popping up where once lamb cutlets and salmon fillets reigned. An esoteric pursuit, you might think, and surely a recipe for restaurant irrelevancy. You’d be wrong. Lume and Africola are just two of the many restaurants in this year’s Hot 50 list finding an eager audience for what can only be described as a very niche offer. And, increasingly, niche is going native.

At Attica, Melbourne — our Hottest Restaurant for 2015 — chef Ben Shewry sends out a tartare, not of steak but of salted red kangaroo, with native bunya bunya nuts. It’s arguably the best dish of the night, but there’s stiff competition from the likes of wallaby blood pikelets; marron, lillypilly and pearl meat; a dessert of “Jelly Whip” topped with salted sorrel; and not forgetting wattleseed bread served with silken macadamia cream and saltbush fronds. Interested? The waitlist for dinner at Attica is about a couple of months — for a weeknight; and this for a restaurant where the bill for two, including modest wine, will likely hover around the $600 mark.

At unlikely success story Orana in Adelaide, Jock Zonfrillo — the Bear Grylls of the food world — raids the native-ingredients pantry to come up with the likes of alexander palm, bush honey and green ants; pig tail, native XO and samphire; and mud crab, karkalla (aka pigface), sea purslane, codium and yoghurt. (He even offers Moreton Bay fig-tree shoots — pickled, of course.) At dinner, the set menu is $155 a head, food only.

Even at more seemingly conventional Hot 50 establishments, tongue-in-chic ingredients are becoming de rigueur. At sophisticated winery restaurant Vasse Felix, in Western Australia’s Margaret River, you can order emu tartare with a smoked oyster emulsion; elsewhere on the menu are nettles, mead and jowl. Sydney’s temple of wood-fired cooking, Porteno, offers veal tongue and blood sausage; while Bentley Restaurant & Bar, at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Sydney, has “raw WA honey bugs in a briny buttermilk and sea blight dressing” prepared by Brent Savage, our 2015 Hottest Chef.

Still, even extreme sports have their limits. Nowhere, on any of our Hot 50 restaurants’ menus this year, did we see kidneys. Maybe Hot 50 2016?