Loam

Loam is a restaurant that is excellent, regional and very very trendy. It is a 'two hat' restaurant. Hats are Australia's equivalent to Michelin stars. There are very, very few three hat restaurants in the country -- so two hat restaurants are AMAZING.

Loam is located on an olive farm about 2 hours' drive from Melbourne, on the Bellarine Peninsula. (See my previous post with map.) I had booked this family dinner about five months ago, That's the waiting time for a reservation on a Saturday night. The restaurants holds only 40 people. So, here we are arriving for our dinner, and the view across the olive groves as the sun sets.

We take our seats. The menu arrives. We are going to have the nine course dinner, with matched wines. There are no choices -- you get whatever the chef decides -- but we do get a list of ingredients. If there is a particular food that you don't like, it will be omitted. Suz: no oysters. Lee; no olives. (What?! No olives or oysters?! Outrageous!)

Now, this is not the menu. This is the little memento that you get as you leave. It reflects what you ate. But I'm popping this in here so you have a sense of the total experience. Each line on this list refers to a particular dish.

I'm not including photos of every dish but here are some. This is the sand whiting, cod skin, sourdough, wild garlic, celery.

This is the chestnut beef (i.e. beef from cows that eat chestnuts so that the meat has a nutty flavour), yolk, squid, beef fat, chervil. One of the best steak tartares we have ever had (and we are BIG steak tartare fans).

Unusually delicious for a vegetarian dish: broccoli heart, fermented millet, red mustard leaves.

This is chicken wing, shitake mushrooms, kohlrabi, shaved scallop.

Pork tail, pigface, native spinach, lemon. This was offered as an optional extra dish, but we are all such huge pork fans that it was an easy decision! The pigface is a succulent plant that grows wild near the beach. It's very common in South Africa -- is it called pigface there too?

This was one of the two desserts. This is apple in molasses, served on sichuan pepper custard (yum!) with mint and dried olive oil. The white powdery stuff is dried olive oil. It's light and fluffy and super-delicious.

The second dessert was a brown rice pudding with mandarin pieces and seaweed icecream. The seaweed icecream tasted a bit like sushi. Interesting.

Yes, we thought we had reached the end of the meal but we got some extras: these are Earl Grey tea jellies ...

... and lemon curd tartlets with lavender flowers.

Here we are, noticeably larger than we were before the meal. But very very happy!