Swillhouse back with Barons
Rampart takes the first stab at Sydney's new British dining room.
If you grew up in England in the 1990s, as I did, you tend to have a reflexive terror of English cuisine. Grey roasts. Limp prawn sandwiches. Appalling crimes inflicted upon meat at barbecues. The only way I survived was by smothering almost everything I ate in some kind of pickle or relish to disguise the food's baseline misery.
Barons, the latest opening by restaurant group Swillhouse (Hubert, Alberto's Lounge, Le Foote, Caterpillar Club) serves English food, but mercifully not as my teenage self remembers it. It's much more St John's restaurant than St Trinian's school dinners. A sweep of gentleman's relish is a respectful dance partner to fat oblongs of hay-smoked trout, rather than a desperate masking agent. Scotch eggs, their yolks sticky and fudgy, arrive with a little tub of assertive roman bean chutney, whose flavour echoes the heroic Branston pickles that rescued many a ploughman's platter of my youth. A skewer of bouncy chicken hearts, brilliantly spiced with a light British Indian-style tikka masala, gets a delightful vinegared lift from a near-perfect piccalilli.[[Perfect in flavour, at least. Texturally it's smooth rather than chunky, and one of the great joys of a true piccalilli is biting into sharp little bits of crunchy vegetable. But I accept that I am more of a piccalilli purist than most thanks to the aforementioned childhood English food traumas so I'll allow it.]]
None of this cleverness is surprising, considering who's working the stoves. Alex Haupt, a former Michelin Guide young chef, and group executive chef Brendan Fong, who brought a tonne of sass to the French food at Hubert when he joined Swillhouse in 2023, are the brains in the kitchen. Fong, in particular, is also the brains behind some actual brains: a very good dish called "Hearts and Minds", which is a salad of crumbed brains and sliced lamb's heart on a creamy splodge of tartare. It's a touching, and very tasty, tribute to one of Fong's mentors, the late and loved ex-Merivale chef Jeremy Strode, who died in 2017 and cooked this exact dish at his own Surry Hills restaurant, Bistrode, circa 2005.
