Crème brûlée at highly commended Casual Dining Restaurant the Bach Eatery

PROVING THAT GREAT EATING DOESN’T HAVE TO BREAK THE BANK

CHIPPENDALE

Why did we choose LP’s? If you’ve been, then you’ll already know. With the backing of Porteño’s Elvis Abrahanowicz and Joe Valore, head chef Luke Powell is cooking some of the most flavoursome, honest and totally delicious food in Sydney right now. LP’s is a big venue, full of canteen-like timber tables with a wideopen kitchen where the Southern Pride smoker, imported from Alamo, Tennessee, sits in pride of place. And boy does it produce some tasty meat. Much of what you’ll eat here has had the Southern Pride treatment. The one thing you have to order, above all else, is the beef short rib. It’s smoked for 15 hours until a thin, black, crackly crust develops on the outside, and the meat and fat within meld into something so tender, so unctuous, you’ll never want to eat an eye fillet again. It’s served on the bone and tastes powerfully of the bonfire, especially when you get to those crusted bits on the outside. Order it. You’ll be dreaming about the mashed potato and gravy for many moons to come. It’s more like a Paris mash than the Aussie kind, it’s so silky and butter-dense. It’s topped with chicken gravy that tastes of the roasting pan: burnt sugar and complex, umami saltiness. It looks self-consciously like the KFC potato and gravy, but with an incomparable explosion of flavour. For dessert, share the mammoth portion of ‘poor man’s pudding’, aka ‘pouding chômeur’– a Canadian concoction of sponge soaked in hot caramelised maple syrup and topped with vanilla ice cream. It comes in a pie-sized tinfoil pan, and will feed three or more. Not bad for $16. No wonder Powell left the dainty pans of Tetsuya’s to take up the dynamic, charred tones of the smoker: it’s food you’d eat every day if you could. 12-16 Chippen St, Chippendale 2008. 02 8399 0929. www.lpsqualitymeats.com. Tue-Sat 5-11pm.

LP’S QUALITY MEATS