Bentley Restaurant & Bar – Let’s Do Lunch
Posted by D on 2 November, 2009 in Contemporary, European, Sydney | 4 comments
One last Let’s Do Lunch last week to close off on a month of good eating thanks to the Sydney International Food Festival. This time, we decided to head towards Surry Hills and gave Bentley Restuarant & Bar on Crown Street a try. The restaurant is housed in a refurbished pub which has an unassuming aura about it. In that respect, it’s almost too easy to forget that this restaurant has been awarded two chef’s hats for several years running.
The set menu this time for the Let’s Do Lunch special was a roast spatchcock with sweet corn polenta, pistachio and aspagarus. On the face of it, the dish sounds rather simple. However, I found out after this visit that a variant of this dish was recently featured on this season’s Celebrity Masterchef* and was touted to be “most difficult dish ever attempted in the MasterChef kitchen”. In hindsight, it gave me a lot more appreciation on the skills required to make this.
Roasted Spatchcock with Sweet Corn Polenta, Pistachio and Asparagus
The roasted spatchcock ball was prepared by first skinning the entire spatchcock and deboning it. The meat is then balled up in the skin again and poached. Once this is done, it’s then shallow fried. The result was a most delicious ball of sweet meat that was crisp on the outside while being moist and tender on the inside.
The accompanying sauce was rich while the corn kernals gave the dish a very nice sweet note which was echoed in the rich corn puree. The only disappointing aspect of the dish is that it wasn’t very filling due to the fact that the dish lacked a substantial carb component which was not fulfiled by the fried polenta baton. No complaints from the girls, but the portion we were given only served to whet the apetite of the boys and had them wanting more.
| Bentley Restaurant & Bar
320 Crown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia P: 612 9332 2344 F: 612 9332 4421 |
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 This work by BeTheFoodie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
aw man ive always wanted to go to bentley! their food always looks so prettily presented and man that spatchcock looks awesome!
Looks really nice. Having watched the episode in question, it goes to show that a rather simple looking dish may be far from simple in execution.
For an otherwise tasty meal, was the cost worth the lack of hunger satisfaction? Did you go out for a second meal afterwards?
For me, it was okay hunger-satisfaction wise, but I couldn’t resist getting a takeaway creme brulee from Swiss Bakerz on the way back to the office. But yeah, my bf had to buy a sausage roll on the way back… :) In terms of value for money, it’s definitely a bit on the expensive side considering the size of the other Let’s Do Lunches that I had. The dish is available as a regular main meal for the same price so it’s a bit of a disappointment that they didn’t bring something special to the plate for SIFF.
I love Bentley! I’ve been to both their lunch and dinner degustations and they are both great; the lunch is especially good value if you have the time ($50 for ten courses including dessert but it takes over an hour). Their chickpea chips are fantastic and to die for!