Fresh oysters and fine dining on the NSW South Coast
Precious finds abound on the NSW South Coast.
Look down,” says Tom, my kayaking guide from Region X tours, as we glide towards the Batemans Bay bridge on the Clyde River. I do as he says and see the water filled with pulsating jellyfish, each around the size of a teacup. Jellyfish are a fairly unremarkable sight in NSW’s salty waterways, but they signify something special. After unprecedented bushfires, which filled the rivers with burnt logs and ash, then the bucketing rains that washed even more debris and destabilising fresh water into streams, the presence of jellyfish in the Clyde means life — at least in the water — has returned to normal.
It’s a good thing for oyster farmers such as Jade Norris from The Oyster Shed on Wray St, one of hundreds of similar businesses on the NSW South Coast. She sells her river-fresh oysters, farmgate-style, from the banks of the Clyde. By February she had finally started to see trade pick up again after the fires when COVID-19 struck. She kept things ticking along with takeaway sales but is now back in the swing, getting ready for the summer hordes.
We pull up to the jetty in front of her cafe and she shucks a fresh mollusc for me to try. “Oh this is a pearler,” she says excitedly before handing it over with a squeeze of lemon. I quickly understand she means an A-grade oyster rather than one containing a pearl.
She laughs when I tell her she sounds as if she’s trying them for the first time.
“Oh, 100 per cent,” she replies. “Nothing better than opening a perfect oyster. We call it oyster porn round here.”
It’s plump and briny with a long, lingering mineral finish, and I’m reminded once more that a good Sydney rock oyster, especially the ones found along the pristine NSW coastline, is one of the finest raw ingredients Australia produces.
That said, there’s a lot of competition for good food in the southern NSW region of Eurobodalla, centred on the towns of Batemans Bay, Bodalla, Tilba and Narooma.
Following my kayak outing, I return to my hotel, the waterfront Esplanade Motel, to prepare for a French-Japanese fusion dinner at The Sandbar. I’ve heard a lot about this restaurant; local friends rave about it. When they began serving takeaway during lockdown, many customers ate it every week.
“We can’t believe how lucky we are to have something like it in Batemans Bay,” says one mate, a former Sydney chef. But when I approach on foot — it’s less than a kilometre from my accommodation — I can’t help wondering if I’m in the wrong place. The address Google leads me to is a featureless motel, the monotone grey of a submarine. After a few false starts I find a tiny entrance at the top of a set of outdoor stairs, with a sign advising me to ring the bell.
I do and it’s like stepping into another world; a warm, humming dining room is furnished in soft grey and cream with a mix of standalone tables and banquettes. The six-course menu is another bait-and-switch; on paper, the dishes sound like chef David Tinker — who trained under three-Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire in London — has accidentally fused four or five meals together. “Smoked trout rillettes, duck gelee, grape, freshwater salmon caviar, Geraldton wax, pickled blackberry and zucchini flower, brioche” is one extravagant example. But on the palate it’s one of the most exquisitely restrained and imaginative plates of food I’ve eaten in a long time, as is each successive course.
The next day I drive south to the Bodalla Dairy Shed, where former journalist turned cheesemaker Sandra McCuaig, tells me she won a swag of awards at this year’s Royal Easter Show (although this year’s public event was cancelled, the prizes were still awarded), including gold for her Tasmanian pepperberry-flavoured cheddar and silver for three ice-creams. During the many months when the doors of her old-fashioned diner-style milk bar, cheese factory and guest rooms were closed, the practical McCuaig used the time to re-evaluate what she wanted the business to be.
“We were doing big breakfasts, steak sandwiches, that sort of thing, and I decided to ditch it all and do what we do best — just beautiful dairy products,” she explains, gesturing to the blackboard menu of cheese toasties and a thrumming milkshake machine. Now she sends the brekky crowd to the pub over the road (“I’m happy, and he’s happy,” she says of the publican) and she’s built a takeaway window so passing traffic can pick up a toastie or a thickshake for the road.
Lunch is a laid-back plate of sardines and salsa on sourdough at The Quarterdeck in Narooma, a bayou-style crab shack festooned with vintage American flags and tiki-bar curios, with Cream and The Doors on the stereo, and 180-degree views of the sand flats and Wagonga Inlet. A lone figure is digging for pipis outside the wood-framed windows, watched closely by pelicans and sandpipers. Then it’s on to the night’s accommodation, one of the two perfectly formed tiny houses at Tilba Lake House. Each discreetly spaced, self-contained oblong contains a loft bed and kitchenette and has sweeping views of the surrounding dairy pastures and the long, low Mount Dromedary. I have the whole verdant view to myself, save for a couple of horses nosing languidly at a boundary fence.
That night I head into the charming, historical town of Central Tilba, for a huge chicken parmy and a chinwag with the locals at the character-filled Dromedary Hotel, or The Drom, as it’s known round here.
Manager Wendy Corfield pours me a glass of house white and tells me about the February day the hotel hosted a party for locals to celebrate the end of the fires, and what they had hoped would be the last of the terrible 2020 luck.
“They called me up on stage to say a few words, much as I tried to get out of it,” she says. “But then when I got on stage, I looked out at everyone — all these friends who’d been through so much — and I burst into tears.
“There was complete silence while I cried. ‘Why doesn’t one of you buggers say something so I stop feeling like such a dill’, I thought. No one did. When I could finally speak, I looked out at the crowd and I could only get one thing out: ‘Welcome home’.”
More to the story
Few South Coast businesses have had such a wild ride this year as Mogo Wildlife Park, best known as Mogo Zoo. The property sits between the tiny townships of Mogo and Tomakin and is home to 200 animals, including lions, tigers, gorillas and giraffes. The zoo was nearly lost in the terrible fires of New Year’s Eve, and director Chad Staples, along with his team, defended their precious residents as the flames closed in on all sides, an act of extraordinary bravery.
“There were a lot of moments when people broke down — everyone’s human,” Staples says of his tireless team. “But this is a pretty special group. They rallied around that person while they were flat and then that person would get back up again.” The local community also did what it could to support the zoo after it was forced to close for months during the COVID crisis. Now, Staples says, visitors are streaming through the doors again, eager to meet some of the park’s newest residents, including a not-so-little lion cub, Phoenix, who was born at the height of the bushfire season and named accordingly.
In the know
Tilba Lake House has two luxury glamping pods, Bonnie and Clyde, that each accommodate two adults in a queen bed. From $250 a night in Bonnie (two-night minimum), with optional extras such as local breakfast hamper, oysters and sparkling wine, and picnic supplies.
Region X runs two-hour oyster tasting kayak tours around the Clyde River Estuary in Batemans Bay; from $89 an adult ($59 for children) with a minimum of four participants.
The Esplanade Motel has a Beach Road King Suite with king bed and complimentary Wi-Fi from $225 a night.
Alexandra Carlton was a guest of Destination NSW.