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Sean's Kitchen and Velero, Sydney restaurant review

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Sean’s Kitchen does outstanding chips. Actually, it does two versions of chips, both of which are pretty damned good. Casino dining hasn’t really hit the heights in Sydney in quite the same way as gambling capitals such as Las Vegas, Monaco and Melbourne. What good there is here we owe to Sean Connolly, the chef who has steered Star City’s flagship fine-diner Astral to renown over more than a decade. And now Connolly has opened Sean’s Kitchen, Astral’s more casual little sister. Or sisters.

Sean’s is really two kitchens. Standing with the casino’s winking, clattering heart a floor below and behind you, there’s the tapas zone (officially The Patio) to the left, with its bar seating, its fringe of carmine curtain and ration of natural light. To your right is the much larger, more grandiose restaurant section, broken up by an island bar and a large statue of a charging bull.

Where Astral has some of the most interesting views this side of the city, Sean’s Kitchen, in true casino style, exists for the most part in the permanent twilight of smoked glass and mood lighting. It’s hemmed by shelves of dummy bottles, windows looking onto the gaming floor, a private room and a quite stupendous-looking seafood station. There are denizens enough from the octopuses’ garden on ice here to restock the minor sea of your choice. The King Island crab topping it off could very well be on loan from the Museum of Ridiculously Large Pincers. The tapas bar does, well, tapas, and does them largely in the traditional Spanish mode, while the restaurant is more your contemporary European caper.

But back to the chips: the tapa version is called ‘egg and chips’ on the menu, and marries Spain’s old and new with the union of patatas Bravas-style potatoes and one of those eggs poached to a fine jellied consistency at 62 (or whatever) degrees. The restaurant offer is several degrees more outrageous: hand-cut chips cooked in duck fat, salted and served in a cone of paper. They’re not French fries and they’re not those deeply annoying big, squared-off numbers you see stacked like Jenga in steakhouses. They’re chips, right and proper, and you have to have them.

The restaurant menu is divided by entrées, ‘ocean shelf starters’, main courses, grills and ‘ocean shelf platters’. The last are seriously over-the-top, great teetering affairs of oysters, octopus, raw fish and scallops, cooked prawns, bugs, dressed crab and pretty much everything else that swims or slithers and can be stacked on ice over three tiers. Yours for a cool hundred bucks a head. The regular entrées and mains aren’t outrageously priced. Between the fairly tame take on the Niçoise, with seared tuna and soft quail’s eggs, the fair steak tartare and the chicken and sweetbread terrine, those entrées seem more about comfort than excitement. I found myself wondering about the seasoning, too, and reaching more than once for the salt.

The mains are gutsier. The ‘chicken brick’, a whole Burrawong chicken roasted in its own juices in a heavy, sealed ceramic vessel, is already a big hit with the TV execs who have claimed the place as their own at lunch. They pair it with sides and just-one-more-bottle of Cloudy Bay for a fancy take on chicken ’n’ chips. ‘Bangers and beans’ translates as wagyu sausages on a braise of borlotti beans – it pretty much swims in liquid fat – while the Macleay Valley rabbit pie presents as a tall cylinder of pastry filled with tarragon-touched braised bunny. They’re gutsy, but balance isn’t their strong suit. (The sides, though, are knockouts. Beyond those amazing chips, the onion rings are crunchy, airy and highly addictive wonders.)

Desserts bring things back into focus, whether it’s the huge and syrupy crema Catalan, made all the richer for the use of duck eggs in place of the usual googs, or the interestingly salty crumble of caramelised apples and Quickes cheddar. Service is many-faced and variable; the wine list is a little directionless, though the bar is well stocked and one of the few venues in the land to carry Estrella, the Spanish lager, on tap.

The tapas menu has much going for it. It’s more Spain via MoVida and Bodega than Madrid and Barcelona, and there’s the odd touch of Connolly’s Yorkshire (the braised tripe with black pudding, the egg and chips) in there for good measure, but the jamón is cut to order, and if the chef’s selection plate is any indication, the hams (Fermin serrano, Joselito paleta Ibérico gran reserva and Joselito Ibérico de bellota) themselves are well chosen and cared for. The memory of the duds I’ve picked – bland stuffed artichokes, banal salted blue-eye toasts – is eclipsed by the thought of the airy crispness of the jamón and potato croquettes, the rich and dense grilled house-made chorizo, and the little iron pot of mushrooms sautéed with sherry. Churros (and that duck-egg crema Catalan) make a fine coda, the churros in a coup-de-grâce pairing with salted chocolate ganache.

On the other side of the city skyline we find Velero. Décor-wise, it’s pretty much diametrically opposed to Sean’s Kitchen, being all air and view and not much restaurant. It has popped up on the site formerly occupied by Salon Blanc on the land-lubbin’ end of the Woolloomooloo Wharf. Gone are the Missoni and the muddled menu, but the cocktails are still very good, and the cushy garden furniture vibe has been retained. The food is half-Spanish and half-Italian but mercifully not often on the same plate. Mining the Iberian side of things, you may wonder why they bother with the Italian stuff, given that there’s no shortage of upmarket Italian around the place (Otto is only a few doors up, for one thing), whereas good Spanish-inflected eats remain a relative rarity. The unspeakably generic music has got to go, but the wine list offers interest and the staff, while not a crack team, are polite and enthusiastic.

Keith Higginson, former head chef of the Tilbury Hotel and now exec chef for the group which owns Velero, tells me that one of the aims he and chef Craig McFarland have for Velero is to introduce the idea of cheese as something you can have at the beginning as part of a meal rather than as its conclusion. The selection presented between the cured meats and tapas includes Garrotxa, the Catalan goat’s milk cheese, as well as Taleggio, Murcia, Manchego, another Spanish sheep’s milk cheese and more, and makes his argument persuasive, especially paired with some gordal green olives, or a little spicy salamanca or revilla picante.
 
The tapas are impressive. Barring incursions from gorgonzola-stuffed roast dates and a take on insalata Caprese (with sherry vinegar!), it’s all habla Español, whether it’s jamón-bound prawns, salt-cod fritters (aka the salt-and-pepper squid of 2008) or the pan-fried chorizo with piquillo peppers. While many of the excellent Spanish-style cured meats are from Yagoona’s Rodriguez Bros, the kitchen makes the morcilla – the Spanish blood sausage – in-house. Fried crisp and served whole, it’s surprisingly light, and the accompaniment of roast red capsicum and eggplant and a squirt of aïoli drag the idea of blood sausage out of frosty farmhouses and place it firmly in the sun-drenched Mediterranean tradition. Ditto the salad of mojama – called ‘tuna ham’ on the menu: pink shavings of the air-cured fish with micro cress and a broad bean/salsa verde mix bound with a quivering poached egg. It looks great and eats better.

Italy has more of a hold on the main courses – risotto with ‘wild’ greens, gorgonzola and black pepper, say, or stracci with braised lamb and fried breadcrumbs. The blue-eye, though, with its crisp skin and pearly, meaty flakes, takes slivers of chorizo and more of those red peppers as its accompaniment. The description of this dish on the menu also mentions chickpeas and olive oil. They’re there, too, but in a seemingly odd ratio: a scant scattering of the legume, but a veritable sea of oil. A side of peas, flavoured with sobrassada, another Spanish sausage, and mint, is good enough to stand alone as a tapa.

Churros and crema Catalana appear on the same plate among the desserts, though it’s just the one churro, its texture not quite nailing the chewy/crunchy mix, and the crema is chocolate and bruléed crisp. Chalk up one for Italy: in this kind of weather the cocktail glass of coffee granita, simple and elegant, is the clear winner of the sweets round.

Velero and Sean’s Kitchen – two very different locations and two distinctly separate approaches linked by good, upmarket takes on tapas and the inspiration of Spain. Each has their strengths and is worth your time, though Velero makes a pretty strong play for the sunshine months. Whichever you prefer, one thing is for certain – tapas aren’t going away in a hurry.

PHOTOGRAPHY TENY AGHAMALIAN

This article appeared in the November 2008 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.