Love Tilly Devine
A new chef with a flair for elegant invention steps things up at the laneway favourite
MICHAEL WEST GIVES good toast. Briny clams on crisp fingers of garlic bread, say. Or shiny fillets of sardine garnished with curry leaves. Or mussels, plump and slathered with spicy rouille. And then there’s the parmesan toasts with Japanese Vegemite – little rounds of bread freighting a blizzard of Reggiano cheese on top of a dark, umami-rich goo that West concocts from tamari and shio kombu. All this needs, you think to yourself, is a bloody good glass of wine. And this being Love Tilly Devine, one of the country’s original and best purveyors of wines from off the beaten track, that is not going to be a problem. You might say half the battle is won just having Iggy’s bread (the best bread in Australia). Each of his magical toast products passes the canI-eat-this-with-a-glass-in-my-other-hand? test with flying colours. And if there’s any bread left over after that, he finds more inventive uses for it still. One of the tastiest upcycles is his fiori or fusilli (West loves a corkscrew shape, it seems, an aesthetic fit with a room full of bottles and corks), the pasta tossed with buttery leeks, a decent hit of chilli, and the crumbs of bread turned into crunchy pangrattato. The space that passes for a kitchen at LTD is not large, but from it West produces wonders. He’s an alumnus of Automata, and it’s tempting to connect his love of Japanese accents with his time spent cooking with Clayton Wells. He throws seaweed in with the burrata, spikes the hollandaise for the asparagus with the seven-spice called shichimi togarashi, and uses yuzu-kosho, the chilli-hot citrus paste, to bring sparks to slow-roasted cabbage bejewelled with beads of salmon roe. Rare is the bar-snack menu where dessert seems like a better idea than another tilt at the wine list. Not so at Love Tilly Devine today. West takes a mousse of dark chocolate, sets it on toasty pumpkin seeds and then splashes it with Fernet Branca for the perfect bittersweet finish. à91 Crown Ln, Darlinghurst 2010. 02 9326 9297. lovetillydevine.com. Mon-Sat 5pm-midnight.
He throws seaweed in with the burrata, spikes the hollandaise with shichimi togarashi