A Pretty Sixpenny

Are you looking for pioneering Australian fine dining in high-definition, served with low-key cool? Pat Nourse presents the case for Sixpenny.

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Out come the snacks: bang, bang, bang. Your fingers fly to the pumpkin scallops but they’re too hot to bite into straight away, so you go for the quarters of tomatillo. No salt, no cooking. Nothing except the smarts of a chef who thinks a piece of weird fruit complements all this other stuff beautifully. And he’s right. Then the gougères. The teeth go through a drift of Coolea cheese, shaved fine and piled high and fluffy, and then meet choux pastry, which gives way under the incisors to reveal green tomato. Bliss. Fine tart shells – little wafery biscuits of things – bear a ricotta filling topped with broccolini blossoms, sharpened with chardonnay vinegar: crunch, crunch, crunch. Circle back for the scallops, hot pucks of pumpkin in a crisp, dark batter. Clink the Champagne glasses, wave your hands in the air and cry hallelujah, this is how it’s done.

Sixpenny is here to remind us that the thing that makes fine dining fine is the quality and elegance of its ideas. It’s not simply a matter of inserting enough damask, crystal and foie gras into the equation. In a time of abundance, richness and excess alone do not a celebration make. Conspicuous abstention is yet to supplant conspicuous consumption (in restaurants at least), but there’s more suspicion of waste than there was a decade ago, and a renewed appreciation of asceticism, however subtle. In a society where we seek to avoid calories, variety is valued over volume. It’s freshness, invention and originality that mark out the greats today, and it’s economy of gesture that we prize.

Economy of gesture, that is, and pieces of pumpkin deep-fried in classic chip-shop style. Call it milk-bar Zen.