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Vulcans

Vulcans is no ordinary restaurant. For one thing, with its concrete floor and unclothed tables, it more closely resembles a café. It’s not every café, though, that takes its hundred-year-old woodfired bakery oven as the point of departure for its menu, and that’s where it becomes clear that Vulcans is very much a restaurant, and an exceptional one at that. A short list of entrées showcases Phillip Searle’s bowerbird approach to cuisine, marrying Indian flavours and Cantonese textures in an unusual salad of two kinds of tofu. Mains are typically meditations on the merits of meat cooked very slowly in the bakery oven: the perfect mix of fat and lean in tender pork is set against an Asian-style cucumber salad dressed with fish sauce, say. Searle’s desserts are famously exquisite: upside-down quince cake, dense with almonds, hazelnuts and coconut, is in a class of its own. Make the pilgrimage.