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At $185 for a fixed price 10 course menu with no a la carte option, Momofuku Seiobo is special occasion dining.
The food is described as inspired by the flavours of the Caribbean and celebrating the best Australian produce. They don’t include even a sample menu on the website so you are taking the food somewhat on trust, although they do ask you to specify any dietary requirements and are happy to make menu modifications to suit.
On the night we dined the restaurant was fairly full even though it was a Monday, the dead zone of Sydney dining and even more surprising given there is no signage at the front of the restaurant, making it very difficult to find. The majority of the diners appeared to be tourists where either staying at the Star or had been visiting the casino.
The website indicates you need to allow 2 1/2 hours for the meal, although on the night we were there the courses arrived with little or no break in between and so it was much closer to 1 1/2 hours.
The menu leans very heavily to vegetarian and seafood, with only one of the courses out of the 10 containing meat. A lot of the dishes incorporated quite strong seafood flavours such as mullet roe, xo sauce and caviar so you really need to be a big seafood fan to enjoy it.
The food is best described as experimental. And as is the case with experiments, some work and some don’t. The first course was plantain with garlic and chicharrones (fried pork rinds) which was served in a mortar and pestle with instructions that we needed to crush the ingredients ourselves. A bit too gimmicky for me for a fine dining restaurant and even my friend who is a huge fan of garlic found the garlic overwhelming.
In some cases the flavour of the sauces completely overwhelmed the main ingredient. This was particularly the case with the scallop with coconut and allspice. If the waitress hadn’t told us there was scallop in the dish we would never have guessed as it was finely chopped and completely overwhelmed by the coconut. Both my friend and I felt the dish would have actually been better if it was a plain grilled scallop without the sauce.
The star of the night was the one beef dish so it was a shame there weren’t more meat based dishes. The marron and coconut bakes was a close second, although I wasn’t a huge fan of the chef bringing the live marron to our table to ïntroduce” us to what we’d be eating later. I’m happy to accept the seafood is fresh, you don’t need to prove it to me.
Because there wasn’t a menu when each dish was served we received a very detailed explanation of all the ingredients in the dish. Ten points for the enthusiasm with which the explanations were given, but the process felt a little too contrived, especially as almost every dish was served by a different person.
They seemed so focused on describing the food they forgot the basics of service which meant we were regularly left with empty wine or water glasses.
The menu concludes with 3 decadent dessert courses so make sure you save some room. Credit goes to the chef making pumpkin seem at home in a dessert.
Overall it’s the kind of restaurant that you visit once for the experience, but there other restaurants in Sydney such as Nel restaurant ( https://nelrestaurant.com.au/ ) which do a better degustation menu.
The Star
80 Pyrmont Street Sydney