Silvereye

Dessert Eat & Drink Modern Australian

DJ Hookie
November 11, 2015

Entering Sydney’s latest fine dining hotspot made me feel more like James Bond than a food writer. Buzzing through the entrance, we’re ushered through a passageway of the fully restored yet still antiquated Old Clare Hotel, and placed in an elevator bound for the floors above. Silvereye, aptly named after an Australian native migratory bird, is the brainchild of ex-Noma sous chef Sam Miller. It offers tasting menus: Short ($140/head) and Long ($175/head), ten or seventeen courses respectively. Obviously, I order the long, and so should you. Nods to local Australian flora are detected throughout the meal with dishes such as sunflower & geranium crisp bread, and the exquisitely presented peas with broad beans & seaweed; and any chef who can make a parsnip dish that I love, is instantly forgiven for serving it to me on a slab of fucking paperbark. The vegetable-based dishes were the stars here, with standouts like beetroot & blackcurrant raising my eyebrows even higher than the juniper smoked lamb. Fear not though evil sweet-toothed diners! Courses to satisfy your black heart’s desires include the textual and well-presented big raspberry, and the flavour of the celeriac & beer will prove as divisive a dinner conversation as Sean Connery versus Roger Moore. These guys have a license to kill it.