Restaurant review: Amelia Park Lodge, WA

It is fascinating that restaurants like this are still created in 2017.

John Lethlean

2 min read

12:00AMApril 29, 2017.

Updated 4:43PMApril 29, 2017

Looks promising: but the menu is a letdown. Picture: Jessica Shaver

Promise hung thick in the air. The sky an autumnal, sun-kissed blue. The region a favourite. The new restaurant a striking, low-slung piece of 19th-century architecture, all chalk white with black trim, broad verandas and expansive lawns. The newest place to eat Down South ticked important pre-prandial boxes. So where do we start?

With a menu of outdated dishes that offers little flexibility for the diner? With food of the kind I hope never to eat again? (I blame Heston that there are now restaurants in country WA offering “complementary bread” with butter Thermomixed with Vegemite and chilled in spherical chocolate moulds.) Or with staff who don’t even remember to set the table with napkins?

So why are we even here at Amelia Park Lodge, a restaurant connected with WA meat millionaire, farmer, racehorse breeder and wine producer Peter Walsh?

The place has a back story as a fancy place to eat in previous incarnations. The area is a tourist magnet and gateway to Margaret River. A fortune has been spent restoring historic Newtown House and more on Amelia Park Tavern next door. The Amelia Park brand is promoted out west as premium lamb and beef. It’s a place tourism folk are talking up. They should pause.

The greater Margaret River region has some excellent restaurants. I’m thinking Wills Domain, Vasse Felix, Cullen, Leeuwin Estate… Amelia Park Lodge isn’t one of them.

After discovering the bread and Vegemite butter is “complimentary” and that the liquor licence is still in the mail, it’s time to get to grips with the menu at our small table looking out to a giant gas tank on one flank.

It’s a collection of dishes with no common stylistic thread. More to the point, if you’re not prepared to share double entrees or mains, it’s limited. Three discrete non-sharing starters, for example.

Eschewing lamb ribs as an entree (are we so in recession we need to serve lamb ribs?), the unlikely choice of “baby kale caesar” looms: it is a salad with the improbable combination of green leaves, large chunks of poached chicken, quail egg, pickled anchovy fillets, Serrano ham, wafers of crumbly parmesan, horrible, biscuity croutons called “crisp brioche” and the obligatory spicy emulsion drizzled everywhere. Jesus wept.

The other starter is a bouncy, bland rectangle of goat cheese pannacotta with undressed “frizze” (sic) and a pastry cigar of beetroot cream alongside a chewy rubble we’re told is “savoury nut brittle” (pictured).

Mains include beetroot risotto with macadamia salsa; Korean fried chicken; linguine with seafood and several meat dishes cooked on one of those gas grills (“The Grill”) that leave X-marks all over the meat. The latter are available with pink peppercorn sauce, creamed porcini, “Korean bbq” or coriander cashew nut pesto, so there’s an inducement.

A piece of Rankin cod is cooked in a pan and comes with prawns, a piece of potato and droplets of bisque sauce. And cooked fennel. And cannellini (white beans).

My inadequately trimmed porterhouse is OK, well cooked, sliced thick and served with a little salad of pickled veg. The porcini cream reminds me of that Vegemite butter. The seed mustard is commercial, French and delicious.

It is fascinating that restaurants like this are still created in 2017.

Dessert seems a risk too far. Balloon of promise deflated, we go to a cellar door and buy dinner. It was excellent.