Class Act

As food fashions blow by, Est upholds the ideals of fine dining and delivers in style, writes DAVID MATTHEWS.

- David Matthews

At the end of the world – behind the mountains of discarded cat-eye sunglasses, Gen-Z yellow dresses, chunky dad sneakers, bike shorts once worn with blazers, bum bags and Birkenstocks, past the unclothed tables, chilled reds, skin-contact whites, queues out the front, kingfish crudo and jars of house-made XO sauce – we’ll still have Est serving $45 entrées and offering complimentary dessert with a $95 glass of Château d’Yquem. The world could be burning outside and the waitstaff wouldn’t miss a beat, calmly pouring flutes of Blanc de Blancs from the Champagne trolley and checking the creases in the linen to the very last.

Food and fashion can be a funny thing. Knowing whether to stick or twist isn’t easy when being new so often takes precedence over being good. When Peter Doyle, Est’s chef for 15 years, retired from its kitchen last year, he wrote in our pages that the best dishes were those that transcended trends, proving that good, clean-tasting food never goes out of style.

At Est your entrée might be fillets of baby snapper cooked, in a very early 2000s way, sous-vide in a steam oven. They’re served on a (very 2000s) bed of buckwheat and pearl-meat “risotto”. The sauce is butter-based.

These choices are not fashionable. But the snapper is sweet and fresh. It flakes delicately under pressure from a fork. Cooking fish in a bag may have been superseded by more manual methods – pan-frying, grilling, roasting – but when something works, it works. The butter sauce, a light and foamy emulsion, coats the palate, with an edge from yuzu kosho the slightest concession to the times. Crisped puffed buckwheat piled on top of the fish adds crunch. It’s technical and pulled off with common sense. What’s more, it’s good and clean-tasting.