Pilot, Ainslie review: Some turbulence, still climbing

If you’d told me 20 years ago I’d be sitting in a fashionable Canberra restaurant, I would have laughed.

Pilot, Ainslie, Canberra. Picture: Tess Godkin

If you’d told me 20 years ago I’d be sitting in a fashionable Canberra restaurant in 2019 next to a guy in a beanie, T-shirt, jeans and Birkenstocks with black socks, I would have laughed and asked for whatever you were drinking. But there you have it. Many rules have gone out the window with the democratisation of dining. We’re an informal bunch, but as long as we’re respectful to our hosts, what matters is an appreciation of the restaurant experience, not whether we dress like our dads.

Pilot is a young restaurant in many senses: wines, clientele, ideas, owners. The food is young, too. Light on meat proteins, emphasis on vegetables, plenty of fermented flavours, acidic notes, salt. Interestingly, no indigenous ingredients. It fits a Scandinavian/post-Noma narrative, which means a lot of people won’t exactly love it. Respect, perhaps, but not lust.

Yet there are beacons for those who favour the familiar: service is warm, attentive, smooth and gladdening, the kind of approach you’d expect when you find two owners on the floor doing their best to protect their investment. Systems are solid, the handshake between kitchen and floor firm. Wine knowledge is intrinsic, enthusiastic; while the emphasis is on low-intervention winemaking, there’s no obnoxious zealotry. Keep an open mind; you may be surprised. For all its youth (the restaurant opened in October), the product is already quite refined.

As for food, you can dip a toe à la carte or dive in head-first with a (vast) $90 prix fixe approach. The menu errs a little towards listicle yet the staff don’t have that po-faced, chef reverence thing going on.

Snacks on a freckled plate include a rice cracker with torched bonito, fermented pumpkin cream and pickled mustard seeds; slugs of carrots crusted with burnt honey and a rosemary dominant zaatar; and nuggets of dehydrated beetroot with an intriguing sweet salt.

The golden/crunchy whitebait cracker with nice gribiche sauce and shaved bottarga lobs another volley of intense savouriness. Quality focaccia with tarama is a course in itself, but you keep some for the small, seasonal pine mushrooms that follow with a salted egg “jam”, citrusy parmesan cream and fried parsley (not sure about the last bit).

Charred broccoli stem at Pilot. Picture: Tess Godkin

Charred broccoli stem (pictured) comes with almond cream, mint oil, mint dust and a kind of chilli/garlic pangrattato of the florets, cooked to the point of subtle, almost burnt, bitterness. Seared/roasted kingfish comes with a buttermilk sauce; an intriguing, almost fruity pastiche of cacio e pepe is made with fermented cabbage and buckwheat noodles. And that’s just starters.

Flank beef is served in pink slices with roasted celeriac and a Japanese-ish tamari sauce; a superb butter lettuce salad is let down by excessive vinegar; thick battens of sweet and sour eggplant come with an almond-based romesco-like sauce. Interesting.

A pre dessert consists of salty corn mascarpone, blowtorched Italian meringue, olive oil and freeze dried mandarin; the final dish pairs rice cream, milk granita, pistachio ice cream and crushed pistachio, plus a meringue wafer, to sensational effect.

There’s a lot of food, and you wonder if the chef and owners have sat down and eaten this procession of dishes, in this order. There is inventive, professional cooking but texturally not enough variation and a fairly relentless theme of very savoury/umami, acidic notes. The balance is slightly out. Or maybe I’m just too old?

Pilot at a glance

Address: Shop 1 Wakefield Gardens, Ainslie, Canberra

Contact: [phone]; pilotrestaurant.com

Hours: Dinner Wed-Sat; lunch Sun

Typical prices: Small $18, larger $36, sides $10, dessert $15

Like this? Try this … Franklin, Hobart

Summary: Some turbulence, still climbing

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars