12 hours Ago By Callan Boys
Good Food hat 15 / 20 How we score French $$ $$ Like many buildings in Newcastle East, Bistro Penny’s Edwardian-era site has a varied history. Ghost signs on the frontage spruik insurance sales. At one point, it was a bank.
A cafe openly ripped off Bill Granger’s ricotta hotcakes at the address when I was enrolled at high school nearby and, in the early 2000s, it was hatted fine-diner Restaurant II. Today, it’s home to one of the best tomato salads in the state. Owner-chef Joel Humphreys has enlisted local grower Dylan Abdoo from Newcastle Greens to help out on salad duties; he supplies Ferrari-red oxhearts that are doused in enough chilli oil to hold your attention without it ever overpowering the fruits’ heightened tomato-ness.
Pickled onion and lovage add further punch. (Yes, lovage – the mysterious umbellifer named Australia’s Most Underappreciated Herb for the past six years. It tastes a bit like celery, a lot like vegetable stock, and should be mandatory in every Bloody Mary.
) After working in Sydney restaurants, such as Rockpool and Bistro Moncur, Humphreys moved to Newcastle with his family five years ago. He partnered with long-time chef mate Nic Wong to open Bistro Penny, which came about after the blokes realised they were both looking at the same Bolton Street site for a solo venture. After significant renovations, the dining room reopened in November and it’s a bona fide looker, all brooding leather, original terrazzo sandstone and cedar.
Exposed steel beams hold up a high ceiling. Wong is mainly on the floor, leading a young (read: a little green, but very friendly) team with restaurant manager Amy Evans-Bird. Humphreys is on the tools in an open kitchen, shuffling coals and turning cranks on a mighty grill that can cook anything from a scallop to a whole pig.
The French-forward menu doesn’t list a whole pig at the moment, though, suckling or otherwise. Perhaps it will come when the private dining room opens upstairs later in the year. Scallops, however, yes, chef: they come appropriately chubby and pooled in the shell with a chicken-fat bearnaise that I’d love to swish fries through.
But it’s too early in the evening for that kind of behaviour. Merimbula oysters are up first, textbook-shucked and served with grilled peach mignonette. They’re in remarkable nick for the height of summer.
That tomato salad is great friends with Humphreys’ boudin noir – a warmly spiced slab of blood and pig’s head pudding with a coal-black exterior that may remind you (and I mean this in a positive sense) of the blackened crust on a backyard barbie rissole. Served with soft fromage blanc, salsa verde and confidence, it’s reminiscent of the borderline-austere plating at St John (if you’ve ever eaten in London’s Shoreditch). It turns out that Humphreys worked there, too.
Meanwhile, steak is a beefy, shaggy onglet covered in a righteous helping of Cafe de Paris butter ( now we can get stuck into the frites), and duck à l’orange translates to a cinnamon-suffused bird, steam-roasted and sympathetically grilled. Barbecued king prawns are the highlight of the mains, swimming in a long-flavoured saffron and fish stock sauce that asks for another hunk of thick-crusted baguette. The only flubbed dish: a rum baba with smoked peanuts, banana sorbet and crème diplomat.
On one visit, it was boozy, sharp and creamy – everything a baba should be – but overwhelmingly sweet on another. I would, and will, roll the dice on that again, though. Bistro Penny is a certified charmer with real talent in the kitchen.
How good to have a proper restaurant back in the heritage space. The low-down Atmosphere: Unassuming charmer equally suited to date nights and long, family lunches Go-to dishes: Oxheart tomato salad ($24); boudin noir with green sauce ($24); king prawns with sauce au safran ($45) Drinks: Far out. You can still buy wine for $60 a bottle in a restaurant ? Concise, approachable list of Australian and French drops, bookended by a small selection of cocktails and spirits.
Cost: About $180 for two, excluding drinks.
