Multisensory Dining at Attica

Attica executive chef Ben Shewry harvests Australian saltbush. Photo ©Colin Page Photography.

For a restaurant with a Greek name, a New Zealand–born chef, and a location in the unassumingly hip Ripponlea neighbourhood just outside the city centre of Melbourne, Attica’s unpredictability is more than part of its charm.

Here, multi-award-winning chef Ben Shewry crafts a homeland-inspired menu in homage to his childhood spent on a rural New Zealand farm. A grand idea in theory, it’s also one that he executes exceptionally well. This past April, Attica made the coveted S.Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants list for the second year in a row, and The Age Good Food Guide 2011 crowned Shewry their Chef of the Year. Unsurprisingly, Attica’s Saturday night wait-list has grown, currently sitting at six weeks.

Food is an emotional experience for Shewry and his diners—and it helps that each plate is presented with a backstory. Take his dish of fresh snow crab, bursting with the crisp, clean flavours of freeze-dried coconut, horseradish powder, and trout roe. Plated in a delicate white mound, it was inspired by the snow-capped peak of Mount Taranaki in New Zealand.

Shewry’s dish of fresh snow crab.

For the poetically named Simple Dish of Potato Cooked in the Earth it was Grown, Shewry cooks the potatoes in a similar style to a traditional Maori hangi: carefully wrapped and buried in trays of damp soil. Once unearthed, they’re served atop a dollop of goat’s curd and sprinkled with dried fish, ground coffee, and saltbush leaves. Shewry’s most famous dish, Terrior, is grated beet mixed with crunchy freeze-dried berries, yogurt sorbet, kiwi, avocado oil, and flecks of ice flavoured with sorrel. It’s a multisensory reminiscence of colours, scents, and tastes from Shewry’s childhood farm.

Attica’s menu changes seasonally, but the final course always remains the same. Just after dessert plates are cleared, a nest with a small bird’s egg appears on each table. Thankfully, this is not an unusual Kiwi treat; with one adventurous bite, the egg is revealed to be one of the caramel-filled, chocolate variety.

Photos ©Colin Page Photography.