Pearl jam

Chef Peter Gilmore relaunches Sydney’s Quay and reboots the oyster along the way.

“When I was really young, I think my mum tried to feed me oysters and

I threw up,” says Peter Gilmore. The chef’s oyster aversion has lasted so long he’s kept them off the menu at Quay for 17 years. It’s not the flavour, which he says he loves, but the texture that puts him off. With the harbourside Sydney restaurant reopening after its first big renovation, Gilmore thinks it’s time to change his ways: the new menu opens with a dish called Oyster Intervention, which showcases everything he loves in oysters, minus the bits that unsettle him.

Gilmore takes a ceramic shell by Studio Jam’s Jacqueline Clayton and Paul Davis, fills it with an oyster cream, then tops it with crackling made from a crushed deep-fried sheet of dehydrated oysters, chicken skin and tapioca. He finishes it with oscietra caviar “for that burst of umami and sea flavours”. It’s his dream version of oysters, served with a handcrafted mother-of-pearl spoon.

Like most of the relaunched

Quay menu, it’s a completely new dish. “The Snow Egg is gone, the congee is gone,” Gilmore says. One keeper: the pork belly and scallop dish that he’s been remixing since he first served it at De Beers at Whale Beach nearly 20 years ago. Quay’s rebooted line-up will be served in a more intimate space (thanks to a reduced 80-person capacity), and the restaurant finally maximises its view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Upper Level, Overseas Passenger Terminal, The Rocks, NSW, (02) 9251 5600, quay.com.au