The Bodega line-up is back rocking a tiny bar space. Welcome to Wyno.
The original Bodega line-up is back, live, unplugged, and rocking a tiny bar space in Surry Hills, writes PAT NOURSE.
Never let it be said that the Porteño boys are afraid of flavour. Every plate at Wyno, their new bar, drips with the stuff – cheddar and butter, anchovies and olives, cured fish and fat. Tweezer food it ain’t.
Are you going to eat a richer new dish in Sydney this spring than the plate of fried eggs smothered in a gravy laden with foie gras and the twang of oloroso sherry? Served with buttery triangles of blonde toast, it’ll stop you in your tracks, a yolk-dripping riposte to every snotty slow-cooked egg in town.
Until recently this space was 121BC, the best Italian wine bar the city had ever seen. Apart from the change to the sign out the front and the addition of some plants to the shelf of glasses above the bar, and the fact the map of Italy and the big, light-bulby chandelier are gone, squint and it’s the same room: a narrow corridor partitioned down its length by safety-glass wine for sale in bottles on one side, a low, skinny bar down the other. Dark and convivial and wondrous.
Joe Valore, Ben Milgate and Elvis Abrahanowicz were the original partners in Bodega, everyone’s favourite rock ’n’ roll tapas bar that opened nearby just over a decade ago. In the time since, they launched Porteño, moved it, then opened another Bodega, all while Valore and Abrahanowicz worked on side projects around town (Continental deli among them). Now having them back in one small room, Abrahanowicz and/or Milgate in the tiny kitchen, Valore on the pour in dapper duds behind the bar, it feels a bit like putting the band back together.
The immediacy of the cooking at Wyno is reminiscent of the early days at Bodega when the plates were designed so two guys, working with not much more than a flat-top and some cheap knives, could bang out great food fast and hot to a full room. Sardines from Continental, for instance, come out in the can in molten butter, topped with a nest of fried potatoes, while a purée of spinach, a mixture of wood-ear, shimeji and shiitake mushrooms and a boatload of cheddar make a bowl of porridge anything but dour.
Keeping it in the family, there’s seafood sausages from LP’s Quality Meats, filled with a mixture of
gently smoked crab and flathead bound in egg, set on bisque sauce. The fine texture of the mousse in the sausage is complemented by buttery egg noodles and salmon roe. Saucy stuff.
In terms of flavour, the shareplate menu leans more ContinentalEuro than Bodega-Latin, but Milgate and Abrahanowicz haven’t lost their taste for fat. Start with hunks of focaccia cut from a loaf on the bar – a gorgeous, olive-oily thing, shot through with black grapes, which comes alive when swiped through rosemary-powered whipped lard.
The Wyno cellar is a patchwork thing, composed in part of quite a lot of wild and woolly Italian wine that presumably came with the premises, an odd smattering of hipster locals, some of the sherry and malbec Valore specialised in at Porteño and Bodega, plus a helping of the Austrian and Alsatian whites he enjoys drinking right now. Call it a work in progress.
Some downsides. There’s not a lot of light and shade on the menu. Every vegetable comes with cheese, anchovies or cold-cuts. A lot of the plates will start to congeal if left untouched for too long. “Wyno” ends team Porteño’s hitherto unbroken run of excellent names, but at least it’s easy to remember. Desserts are basic: see the sticky cheeks of poached quince with a spoonful of labne redolent with cardamom, and exactly no soil, squiggles, crumbles or cress.
The room is small, the seats are few, the space tight. The hillbilly, honkytonk and guitar-driven tunes have been swapped for a soundtrack that leans more Bobby Womack, but it’s by no means hushed.
But then just about everything you liked about 121BC is still a big draw. That you can buy everything you’re drinking to go from the retail shelves. (That shouldn’t be so radical, but this is Sydney, after all.) The one-to-one immediacy of the service, the hustle in the kitchen, the raw atmosphere of the place, and its perfect blurring of the eatery-drinkery divide. It’s what living in the big city is supposed to be all about, and just about all of it tastes great. Who’s afraid of flavour? Not us.