John Lethlean’s garlic prawns: a taste of the Costa Brava

Garlic prawns are due for a comeback.

Garlic prawns. Picture: Kate Lethlean.

It was an innocent chalkboard outside a seaside “pizzeria”. I use that term carefully, because a pizzeria is a noble thing when the crusade is unblurred. But when the pizza chef wakes up one morning and decides the day’s special is “Moroccan spiced braised beef, cherry tomato, spinach and basil” with “blue cheese sauce”, well, he’s doing you a favour, isn’t he? Especially when management advertises the chef’s disturbing thought bubble out on the footpath.

These are the undeniable signs of A Restaurant to Avoid. There are lots of these “Avoid” lists out there, some of them quite earnest. One warned us off places with “condiments on the table”. Really? I’ve had some of the best food of my life in places with Sriracha and fish sauce on the table. Ditto pictures of food on the menu.

Now, I’d be horrified to rock up to a restaurant like Quay in Sydney for a significant dinner only to find a pic of chef Gilmore’s raw scallops and oyster cream on the menu, possibly with a number beside it. But context, please. Quite likely the best pad Thai, laksa or bánh xèo you ever tasted had a number and a lurid pic.

So, menu items that fall into the “buyer beware” category come in three varieties: Frankenstein mash-ups, absurd “creations” and Old School classics that have come to be so bastardised as to be synonymous with horror eating.

Our chalkboard represents the first variety. The same might be said of a certain cafe in NSW where the words “Indian Italian Fusion” on the window may do it for you (and if they don’t, items such as “butter chicken lasagne” and “malai kofta and pasta” almost certainly will).

When it comes to “absurd creations”, my mind springs to the post-molecular fallout that followed the rise of certain chefs in Spain at the beginning of the century and a dish called “Canadian sea scallops with shiraz glaze, strawberry jelly and peanut butter parfait” that graced the menu of the appropriately named Tender Trap in suburban Melbourne.

And isn’t it a pity that bona fide scrumptious things have come to represent a whole class of restaurant you don’t want to eat in? Garlic bread, for example: Lygon Street Carlton’s wealth was built on the stuff. Caesar salad – itself an Italian/Mexican mashup originally, and so good – frequently augmented/ruined with smoked protein.

And garlic prawns. Unless it was somewhere achingly hip, dripping with irony, you wouldn’t touch them, would you? My last excursion down this torrid path was at the late and unlamented Perth institution Witches Cauldron, where the “famed” garlic prawns swam valiantly upstream in a river of cheap oil amid a flotilla of food-service garlic – that is, minced and packaged in five-litre tubs – that has its own unique smell, quite unlike freshly sliced, diced or crushed garlic. Oh, the horror.

Adding cream to the mix – a frequent misstep – is a crime on par with some of Neddy Smith and Roger Rogerson’s worst. But garlic, crustacea, a little chilli, olive oil, white wine and parsley, with some good quality bread? It’s a taste of the Costa Brava and a foolproof way to bring out the best in whole tiger prawns (the best you can buy will have been snap frozen raw). In Casa Moro, the second Moro book by London restaurateurs Sam and Sam Clark, it’s called gambas al ajillo.

Good prawns, whole, go into very hot quality olive oil – about one tablespoon per two prawns – with some salt in a frypan until they blister. Turn, add thinly sliced garlic (same ratio as oil, one clove per two prawns) and some crumbled dried red chilli or sliced fresh, quantity subjective. When the garlic turns golden, add roughly 100ml of decent white wine (for eight prawns), give it a minute for the alcohol to burn off, throw in a handful of chopped parsley and season. Serve with, or over, crunchy-crusted bread and some cold white wine. Brilliant.

Remember the renaissance of the prawn cocktail a few years ago? I reckon garlic prawns are on their way back. You heard it here first.

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