Leigh Griffiths
When you eat a meal cooked by Khanh Nguyen, executive chef of Ashe, the Bentley Group’s new Southeast Asian grill in Sydney’s CBD, there’s one guarantee. Your palate will never get bored. Nguyen, who also oversees the menu at sibling venue (and 2024 Gourmet Traveller Best New Restaurant) King Clarence, layers flavours, textures and techniques like he’s composing a mad, magical rock opera. Any bite might involve makrut lime, fried dill, chilli and Geraldton wax. Hoisin, satay, Thai basil and saltbush. Restraint? Go find some well-behaved brasserie or farm-to-table place for that. Here, flavour is so in-your-face that the dishes practically leap into your mouth of their own volition.
That might sound chaotic but Nguyen’s skill with flavour is anything but, especially backed by the steadying hand of chef and co-owner Brent Savage. Few Australian chefs know how to wrestle with so many big ideas at once and balance them into something this beautiful.
Take the crispy rice. It riffs off three dishes from three cuisines: Vietnamese fried fish, and Malay- and Thai-style rice salads. Rice seasoned with coconut oil, shallots and spring onions. Showers of Vietnamese mint, dill, betel leaf, lemongrass and salmon roe and a dressing with an ingredient list the length of a family’s weekly shop. It’s a meal in itself as well as a rowdy team player with the rest of the menu.
If you pile it onto your plate with a bit of kangaroo jerky papaya salad, a piece of torn wood-fired sesame flatbread topped with LP’s smoked mortadella, sticky chilli jam and big cloud-like layers of Laughing Cow cheese (a combo that triggers the same senses as a 1990s bowl of wedges, sweet chilli and sour cream but better) and maybe a scoop of cuttlefish and pipi curry, it’s a lot. But it’s also enormously fun, as is Nick Hildebrandt’s equally energetic, spice-friendly wine list.
The deep house soundtrack hums low, there’s a purring jungle energy – palms, low lighting – and you feel like you’re in a polished Bangkok backstreet.
Nguyen eases you back to earth with his desserts. The pandan tres leches cake, torn to pieces inside a hollowed-out young coconut with coconut sorbet, gets a lick of juiciness from native river mint oil and apple granita. It’s like a dip under a waterfall. For a final palate cleanse, head next door to sibling bar Vespertine for a bittersweet Chartreuse slushie. Sydney has no shortage of restaurants doing “careful”. Ashe trades exclusively in “carefree”. And it feels like exactly what we’ve all been waiting for.
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