Restaurant review: Momofuku Seiobo, Pyrmont, Sydney

For food that crosses culinary frontiers look no further than Momofuku Seiobo | REVIEW

John Lethlean

2 min read

12:00AMApril 15, 2017

Intimate: take a high chair at the bar, face to face with the chefs. Picture: Jane Dempster

You wanna hear the drunken sailor playlist that reels from AC/DC to Billy Joel and round again via Pearl Jam? Stay home with a bottle and Spotify for a fraction of the price. You wanna eat delicious food? That’s not hard in Sydney, either.

Maybe your primary focus is food you’ve never tried before, food that crosses culinary frontiers, such as Paul Carmichael’s haute Barbadian beach hut barbecue…

And if it’s all of the above? You need to find Momofuku Seiobo Mark II, a restaurant that is so radically different to its predecessor as to surprise even those with a little inside knowledge. Seiobo came to town in 2013 amid much hype, all built around Korean-American chef David Chang’s New York empire. And for its first few years it sang from the Momofuku songbook. But now, the creative carte blanche extended to executive chef Carmichael is extraordinary; the Barbadian has basically taken the restaurant’s format of many small and informal pan-Asian dishes built with premium ingredients, all in an environment of close interface between kitchen and diner, and adapted it to the flavours and traditions of the Caribbean. Who would have thought we’d ever be sitting in this place eating gnocchi-like nuggets of springy cassava dough with crab stew, or steamed barra with Caribbean fried rice?

Inevitably, the hype has died down and on this Tuesday night there are more staff than diners. Have a drink first (the sommelier is fantastic and his list both broad and deep) then take a high chair at a bar face-to-face with the chefs.

I love Carmichael’s flavour-first, refinement-second agenda. By the time you’ve picked through a barbecued, split kingfish head smothered in tangy lime/tamarind/green chilli curry sauce, and burned your fingers on his version of roti, you’ll want to go over to this guy’s back yard for a barbecue, a beer and a little dub-mixed Marley.

Much of that Korean reserve of old has gone. Getting through a long, occasionally rich but for the most part balanced meal with Carmichael at the helm is to glimpse something with real roots... I want to eat with my hands, sweat, slug drinks, dance, laugh and be taken to the heart of his people. He’s like a dreadlocked ambassador.

It starts gently enough: crisp corn wafers with caviar alongside a glass teacup of snapper consommé laced with bay oil. Yes please. And it goes from there… meaty sea snail with escabeche purée in a plantain tart shell; a kind of warm and gently jerked chicken mayonnaise with more aggressively jerked wing skin wafers; that delicious, red pepper-laced rice on salt-cured barramundi fillet; and that roti you eat with sweet, taupe-coloured onion purée and pickled muntries alongside deliciously rich charcoal-grilled marron with young coconut and koji butter (pictured). Shy it is not. Mud crab in an intense spiced tomato stew conceals those glorious cassava “dumplings”: a peasant staple gone way uptown in this case. I just love them.

There’s so much more: ajowan-spiced salty/fruity roasted pork loin; pumpkin glazed in pork fat and something fruity; that sensational fish head revealing so much delicate meat. Cutlery is redundant.

It’s not all pleasure: Carmichael’s banana leaf-flavoured conkie – a traditional Bajan sweet potato dessert – ain’t my thing (his coconut granita sure is, though). A tiny blemish on a large, unique and exciting meal? All of the above.