The last snow egg

The swansong of Australia’s most famous dessert.

Of course the response was crazy. In March, when Quay announced it was retiring its famous snow egg, the Sydney restaurant’s website traffic tripled and the phones rang off the hook. It is, after all, Australia’s most famous restaurant dessert. Chef Peter Gilmore first made it a decade ago, hatching an “egg” (it’s more rounded than egg-shaped, but

“snow sphere” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it) filled with poached meringue and ice-cream topped with maltose tuile and served with granita and fool (that is, fruit folded through cream) in a Riedel tumbler. The flavours and fruits have changed more than 20 times, and the final variation, presented in April before Quay closed for renovations, featured pear, custard apple and mangosteen. But Gilmore says the original combination remains his favourite: guava fool and granita, and strawberry-guava and custard-apple ice-cream.

The frenzy around the announcement of the dish’s retirement recalls the day the snow egg went from being a cult favourite to a pop-culture phenomenon. It was the challenge for the second season finale of MasterChef in the show’s 2010 glory days, one of the most-watched moments in Australian television. “It had nearly 4 million viewers,” says Gilmore. “It went ballistic.” The next day bookings spiked, Quay’s website crashed and people queued outside the venue, hoping for a takeaway version. (The snow egg has always been an eat-in treat, of course, but Gilmore speculates that if he had sold them to go, he’d have made a cool million in sales over the years.) It accounted for 70 per cent of Quay’s dessert orders right up to this year.

While proud of the dessert, and humbled by diners’ reactions to it (customers have been known to shed a tear when it comes to the table), Gilmore says he’s ready to move onto Quay’s next phase. “A painter can’t keep painting the same picture forever.” And don’t expect a revival. “I can promise that it won’t ever come back on the menu at Quay.”

Could it follow the eight-textured chocolate cake, another former Quay signature, to sister-restaurant Bennelong? Here’s hoping. Quay reopens in July 2018, quay.com.au