Pitch perfect
Omnia takes the art of fine dining to a bistro setting, writes MICHAEL HARDEN.
Omnia comes loaded with preconceptions. It’s the first of three restaurants to open in the Capitol Grand development, the high-rise, high-end apartment complex on the corner on Chapel Street and Toorak Road. That’s the one owned by Larry Kestelman, the property developer who decided, never having dabbled in hospitality before, that he should oversee the CG restaurants himself. The potential for an expensive, hubris-powered car crash is thrilling.
Instead, Omnia is a levelheaded, precision-pitched local that pays attention to the details and serves simple yet nuanced bistro food in a room kitted out for comfort as much as dazzle. Locals have taken to it with gusto, flocking to the sizeable room each night.
Chef Stephen Nairn’s food helps. He has a fine-dining background (Eleven Madison
Park, Vue de Monde) and channels those skills and techniques through a bistro filter to great effect.
There are snacks like a crisp brik-pastry cigar filled with ocean trout, house-smoked over cherry wood and mixed with a lemon crème fraîche, or zucchini flowers, tempura-battered and served with a green-olive tapenade, salty with anchovies. And a marinated white anchovy lays across toasted baguette that’s spread with a preserved-lemon and olive-oil emulsion.
Nairn’s flavours lean to the clean-lined but he’s not afraid of a little salt and fat. The marinated capsicum and Gruyère custard tart, for example, starts with a classic short pastry that contains custard blended with roasted capsicum. That’s topped with capsicum that has been blasted in the Josper oven, peeled, marinated in sherry vinegar and chilli flakes for a week and then dehydrated. It’s a lot of work, gone in a flash and highly satisfying.
There’s also a very good steak tartare made creamy with a smokedegg emulsion and served with salty
pommes gaufrettes and raw yellowtail kingfish, sliced to order and lifted by an apple and makrutlime jelly and sea succulents.
The attention to detail doesn’t end with the smaller courses. There’s a section of things to share, which includes a superb smoked organic Milawa chicken, served as a half or a whole bird, slathered with a green chimichurri-style sauce.
Nairn’s skills come to the fore with a barramundi and greentomato dish. The barramundi is filleted and cooked in the
Josper oven in a broth made from mushrooms, apple juice and the fish’s bones. The broth takes on a smoky flavour that, with the mushrooms, makes it almost meaty and great friends with the salty, vinegary tomatoes laid on top. It displays great balance and that’s repeated with the dry-aged, roasted pork belly that comes capped with crackling and served with black pudding and roasted peach.
There’s balance with the service, too. Like Nairn, front-of-house guy Kevin McSteen has a CV full of fine dining (Attica, Eleven Madison Park) and adapts those levels of attention to detail to the looser setting. Descriptions of dishes are mercifully short, wit levels well judged with a relaxed approach laid over a foundation of efficiency.
The wine list could do with a trim. There’s a lot of worthy stuff, including several vintages of Grange and impressive lists of chardonnay and pinot noir, but its length and breadth feels like it got lost trying to find a fine-dining restaurant.
Desserts might include a very satisfying plum, raspberry and hazelnut pie or, a soft-centred cheesecake, a version of the rich Basque style, that’s served with a tart blackberry sorbet.
With its double-height bar, marble, mirror, leather and timber finishes and hanging faux greenery, Omnia certainly looks the part of a swanky South Yarra local. The best news is that it also plays the part and does so convincingly and confidently. It’s a great addition to the neighbourhood.