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It’s a fun thought experiment to imagine what you think an $80 pie tastes like. Do this before taking a bite out of the quail, duck and foie gras stuffed pastry pocket that arrives at your table accompanied by silky mash and a sweet-and-sour cherry glaze. That way you can determine if you in fact can taste all the quiet luxury between that bronzed suet crust. This is a dish full of subtle grandstanding in both technique and ingredients, and is one of the more obvious nods to the extensive fine dining credentials of the group’s culinary director Joel Bickford, last seen behind the pans at Aria a few years back. Is it rich, velvety and gamey? Absolutely. Comparable to an everyday pie? Not at all. This finicky dish shares only a distant DNA with its footy-loving cousin. Is $80 still a lot to pay for a pie? Yes.
But to be fair, you haven’t come to The Grill because you’re after an affordable treat
Now, it would be remiss of us to come to any venue with “grill” in the title and not sample from the steak menu, and while you can absolutely bust the bank with a $310, 1.2kg MS5+ Fiorentina, the delights are just as primal at the shallower end of the dream pool with an equally marbled Wagyu rump cap for $68. It’s like a solitaire diamond, requiring very little adornment, dressed in nothing but an unctuous Bordelaise sauce sticky with red wine and bone marrow. It’s the sort of meat that sends you into a reverie with each bite, but at 280g, it is over too soon, especially if you’re sharing.
While the big-ticket cuts are headed straight for the hot coals, they’re having some fun with secondary cuts on the starters menu, like a Wagyu tongue skewer on a grilled flatbread with a sharp onion salad as a foil to the rich, tender meat, kissed with just the right amount of char. Marron’s delicate freshwater flavour pairs with the richness of sweetbreads to create a fine-dining ode to Western Australian farm life, humble with turnip and gooseberry.
Or if you prefer to eat your status symbols instead of wearing them, order a delicate dish of Paspaley pearl meat, which you won’t find on many menus. Gossamer-thin slices of Pinctada Maxima oyster meat are interspersed with the fresh crunch of white radish, sea lettuce for salinity, a subtle citrus savouriness from the yuzu and enoki mushrooms, and a surprisingly insistent garlic aroma from fresh garlic flowers.
Sydney is a big fan of a bistro, and the CBD boasts a stacked deck of quality places to get oysters, red wine and a rising hierarchy of steak cuts. However, all the close quarters and soft furnishings that make a bistro so snug and inviting in winter are at odds with a city that thrives in summer. This is where The Point group (also behind Shell House, The Dolphin) has put some careful thought into the appeal of The Grill. You press level 9 in the lift, but you start at level 5 of the building formerly known as the MLC Centre (now it’s 25 Martin Place) so you end up around waist height with the surrounding business towers. But happily they make the most of their elevated position by leaving one wall completely open so that you get a sense of balmy outdoor dining that is immune from weather fluctuations.
They’ve also updated a lot of the traditional bistro fixings to create a mid-century-does-futurism vibe, with shiny metal curves and warm tones loudly punctuated by splashes of red, especially in the all-red tiled bathrooms that feel like they belong in a Berlin nightclub.
We like the way they’re taking the traditional bistro playbook, adding fine-dining flair and a few cheeky flourishes to make something entirely its own and very Sydney
Why not have a venue that serves a $32 glass of the famously grippy Georgian skin-contact Pheasant's Tears alongside a frozen Marg and a lager on tap? There’s no one way to have a good time, but if you do it with a blow-the-budget meal, The Grill at the International is Sydney’s shiniest new destination to do just that.
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