It was one of those horrible, blustery, wet nights. After a 30 degree, famously sunny Sydney Spring Friday, Saturday was miserable. I had been working all day and was immensely looking forward to the impending dinner reservation at Orto Trading Co in Surry Hills. I. Ate. So. Much. And I had good reason to. The menu is fresh and fabulous and is one of those menus where it pains you to choose something over something else, as everything on it sounds utterly delicious… Luckily, I was dining with a chef who wanted to try a big smack of everything, so we made a fairly decent dent in the menu… Dent in the menu, bulge in the tummy.
From the bites menu we had oysters. They were the creamy, oceany goodness of Sydney Rock oysters.
Next were the smoked eel and crispy pork cheek witlof bites. Drool. This dinner was a big deal for me, as after nearly a decade of being vegetarian, or vegequarian to be more precise, I am back on board the meat train… why? Well, it’s all part of my training for Masterchef. I applied for the next series and if I have any chance of doing well, I need to be eating and cooking all foods. Anyway, I digress, this witlof bite was amazing! Smoky, salty, fatty, crunchy awesomeness. If you go to Orto, you must get this!
From the starters menu we had cauliflower fritters with a curried pear sauce. These were punchy. Golden, gnarled morsels of spicy cauliflower and a piquant dipping sauce to make them pop. Yum.
Ordered mainly for the name, the Kipper Finger (with smoky potato puree, grilled sweet corn and a pea shoot salad) was the stand out dish of the night. Everything worked a treat here. Wish I was eating it now. There is just something I love about pungent fish… (insert joke of choice here)
Still from the starters menu (that’s right, all this food and we hadn’t even arrived at the main yet) we had the Scotch Egg with house-made pork sausage and pear piccalilli. This dish is so 60s! It makes me want to throw a retro house party… Kind of like the parties Kevin and his family attended on The Wonder Years. The egg was cooked beautifully. Thumbs up.
Ok, now for the big gun… We ordered one of the mains to share… Just a light 800g Twice cooked yearling beef rib eye with crispy horseradish and potato dumplings, bone marrow and rich mushroom sauce. Boom! And now for a quick round of Spot the Vegetarian… What? Nowhere in sight? Dean carved it in half and it was game on. I ploughed through this baby, leaving Dean shaking in his emasculated boots… Not that it was a race… The meat was delicious. Meaty meat. I had never had bone marrow, but the rule for tonight was that I’d try anything. I tried it. I didn’t like it. It was too fatty, or too bone marrowy… George from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf may have enjoyed it…
No matter how much you eat, there is always room for dessert. When Dean asked if we should share one, I looked at him with disgust. We ordered two. This was called the Orto Spring Garden. It was so whimsical with its planter box of lemon-thyme cake, chocolate soil, and flowers of pineapple and lavender marshmallow… The cake was zesty and moist and that lavender marshmallow… utterly delightful. I wanted to take home a big ol’ bag of them.
I can’t remember the name of this dessert, but it involved a melange of tea flavoured cake, panetone, some sort of jelly and a gorgeous jar of iced tea. This iced tea was summer in a glass. Speaking of glasses, we drank to accompany all of this food, cocktails (great inventive list of cocktails) and of course, Shiraz. How I was still standing at the end of the night, and not collapsed, gutter-side in a food coma is beyond me. I was full. I had just eaten the world, but I didn’t feel horrendous. It was a strange feat of engineering… Or at least that’s what I am attributing it to…
