Royal Mail Hotel, 98 Parker St, Dunkeld. www.royalmail.com.au
My very thoughtful brothers had given me a gift voucher for accommodation at the Royal Mail for my birthday back in March, knowing that I had been dying to go there to try chef Dan Hunter’s 10-course degustation menu.
To get both a dinner reservation and accommodation, you need to book a few weeks in advance if you want to go on a weekend – I called early June and was told they were booked out on Saturday nights until August(!). So we took Friday off work and drove down.
We were seated for dinner at 7.30pm and were offered a choice of the “Menu Omnivore” ($150) or “Menu Vegetarian” ($110). We chose the Omnivore – natch. We were also offered shaved truffles as an addition to the second course, and of course, when someone offers you truffles, you say “hell yes”. (They didn’t tell us how much extra it was, but we overheard a different waitress telling another table that it was $20 extra a head.)
The wine list at Royal Mail, developed by their wine director Lok Thornton, is something else. It comes out in a leather-bound folder, 72 pages thick, chock full of an incredible range of local, vintage and international wines. I think you’d need a week’s worth of dinners (with at least four or five boozy companions) to do the thing any justice at all. (You can download a PDF of it here.)
Fortunately there are three matched-wine options: “Village” (local wines) for $80, “Vintage” (a mix of local and international wines from the older depths of the cellar) for $135, and “International” for $275. I was a little hesitant to go the matched wine route (after a less-than-impressive experience at Press Club), but our waiter assured me it was the best way to experience the food – and I am very glad I acquiesced! We chose the Vintage option and loved it.
The meal began with house-made sourdough bread rolls, a choice of rye or whole-wheat, with smoked butter. I tried really hard not to eat too much bread (in anticipation of the 10 courses coming) but it was goooood. Our first wine was champagne: Philipponat Reserve Rose NV.
The first course arrived: sardine fillets with jamon, teeny tiny radishes and a smoked tuna broth:
The broth was poured ceremoniously into the dish at the table. (I do like a sense of theatre.) The flavours of this dish were very delicate – not overly fishy as sardines sometimes can be – and very fresh and light tasting. The matched wine for this dish was a dry sherry: Sanchez Romate Palo Cortado.
Next up – truffley goodness! An egg yolk hidden beneath toasted rye sprouts and lovely shavings of truffle:
Third course was calamari with black cream, cardamom and the tiniest baby carrots I’d ever seen:
(Apologies for the blurriness of some of these photos, by the way – the lights were very dim in there and I didn’t want to annoy other diners by using the flash. Nothing to do with having 10 glasses of wine, I SWEAR.)
I really liked this dish. The calamari were very tender and delicate. The black cream reminded me a little bit of Vegemite, but not in a bad way – there was a nice contrast between the juicy-sweet of the calamari, the salty cream and the crunchy carrots. The matched wine for this was, I’m pretty sure, not usually on the Vintage menu: a premier cru white Burgundy, Olivier Leflaive ‘Le Charmois’ 2001. I am drooling just remembering it.
Course number four was probably my favourite: slow cooked pork belly with scallops, fennel, eggplant and maple syrup.
Nomnomnomnom. The pork belly was so tender that it was practically melting. This dish was matched with a 2001 Crawford River Riesling – it had that only a tiny bit of the kerosene-y scent of an aged riesling, still plenty of fruit and zip.
And the food kept coming. Course number five was very unusual – cool climate vegies with a cocoa and coffee powder and cream. “It’s like cookies and cream with vegetables,” remarked my partner, and it was.
Dan Hunter seems to be quite enamoured of sweet/savoury juxtapositions; many of his dishes feature combinations of things that don’t sound like they’d work, and yet there you find yourself, scoffing them down. The matched wine for this was a 1998 Riddoch Shiraz from Coonawarra, and you know, I think it made the dish work even better by adding another peppery savoury note.
At the halfway point, I was still feeling good. The dishes were just the right size – enough that you got a few mouthfuls, but not so much that you couldn’t get through it all.
Course six was certainly out there. A chlorophyll-smeared plate was dotted with blobs of bone marrow and several different kinds of mushrooms, and then sprinkled with a few pine nuts:
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I couldn’t quite decide whether I liked this one. The mushrooms were certainly very very tasty, especially when put with just a tiny sliver of marrow; but you had to be careful not to mistake one of the marrow blobs for a mushroom and take a big fatty mouthful (as my partner did) – the lighting was really not very bright! I think upon reflection that I liked the flavours, but having the plate covered with green goo was a little too weird for me.
The matched wine was a 1988 Chateau Chasse-Spleen from Bordeaux.
Course seven, while a meat course, was almost a segue into dessert. Roast pigeon was teamed with tiny baby beetroot, white chocolate powder, and rose petals:
At first bite, I thought “this is too sweet”. And then I took a sip of the matched wine – 1999 Best’s Pinot Meunier – and it all completely made sense and I loved it. If you go there and have this dish, you MUST have a glass of the matching wine with it.
Course eight, and we’re now officially into dessert. Apple, triple cream, chamomile and caramel:
The little “twigs” were actually like little spiced grissini. This was a really beautiful winter dessert. It was matched with Primitivo Quiles Moscatel from Alicante, Spain.
Course nine. Starting to get pretty full now, and am hoping at this point that the desserts stay light instead of getting all chocolatey or cheesecakey. Fortunately they do – rhubarb with licorice, almond and citrus:
(again, apologies for the photo. Dim light. Not wine. Promise.)
The licorice flavour was in the syrup, and was too overpowering for my partner’s tastes. I quite liked it though. There was no wine match for this course.
The final course was a sort of pistachio sponge cake with delicious chocolate hazelnut icecream, crunchy shards of honeycomb, and pistachio and chocolate crumbs:
Still not a heavy dessert, although I struggled to get through it! I loved the icecream and the honeycomb especially. The matched wine was Sanchez Romate Cream Sherry.
All in all, a pretty stunning meal. The staff were absolutely perfect – very knowledgeable, genuinely friendly, and attentive without being suffocating. I asked them for a list of the matched wines at the end of the meal (as there was no way I could have remembered everything), and they had already prepared for us a typed list of every course with its matching wine – bless them.
The bill – gulp – came to $638 for two people (plus tip) – I also had a cup of tea to finish, while my partner simply had to have another glass of the Best’s Pinot Meunier. Certainly not a cheap meal but very memorable, and therefore excellent value.
KATE