The Press Club II

Last night Greg & I went to The Press Club for a belated anniversary date.  We decided to go there since I had enjoyed the lunch that I had there so much & Greg was keen to go after hearing me raving about it.  Since we were having an expensive meal anyway we decided to go for the degustation menu.  I love a good degustation menu, I think because I decide what we eat every night I love that someone just brings me lots of food & I don't have to think about what I want to eat.

To start with, we were given complimentary pickled vegetables, Dench olive bread & Dench sourdough bread (not pictured).  The olive bread is so good & the breads were served with kalamata olive oil & organic black salt.  Greg says that I always use too much salt but he even loved the black salt.

 

Our first course was 3 salads, they were a dried tomato salad, a skewer with watermelon & roasted capsicum & olive bread salad - all deliciousness.  The dried tomato salad was particularly good - it was really intensely flavoured & I loved it.  Although at this point Greg was concerned that he was going to be hungry which he really should not have been worried about.  It is a terrible photo, but you get the general idea.

Next course was supposed to be "fish and chips", they normally serve chips with taramasalata, but for us they did chips & hommous with olive oil couscous.  The olive oil couscous is olive oil that has been frozen in liquid nitrogen so it looks super impressive when it is served up & also looks like couscous, but melts into delicious liquid olive oil on the hommous.  Our lovely waitress instructed us to dip the chips into hommous & eat which we did & it was really, really good.  The chips were quite possibly the best chips ever.

Next course was steamed Zucchini flowers, watermelon, pickled watermelon rind and daikon.

Next up was pasta with lemon, olive oil & fresh herbs with shaved Tasmanian truffles - simple & ridiculously good, although by this stage I was getting pretty full!

Then came out baby vegetables with celery gel, crumbled carrot cake & sunflower seeds.  Again it was another course of deliciousness.  I am not sure but I think there are purple carrots in there which were my favourite.

Then came dessert & I was really, really full but could not say no when presented with vanilla rice pudding with candied walnuts - I would like to eat this every day it was so good!

At this stage I was really hoping that the meal was over because I had eaten way too much, but we were then presented with our final course - poached pear with orange gel & pistachio praline with blackberry sorbet on crumbled pistachios. The blackberry sorbet was amazing!!  I am not a huge fan of sorbets but this was incredible!

It is certainly not a cheap meal at $125 each, but we were there for 3 hours, had amazing food with impeccable presentation & fantastic service - I think it is great for a special occassion.  And I am still full this morning!