Sepia, Sydney CBD

We first visited Sepia many years ago, back in our dating days when "month-versaries" were something worth celebrating. Fast forward many years, and Sepia is now heralded as one of best restaurants in Australia and we were itching to go back to see how it has developed over the years.  

We will let the photos do most of the talking.  Suffice to say, every dish we tried was clever, showcased the flavours of the ingredients and was presented immaculately.  

The service was very attentive, as you would expect at a fine dining restaurant but it was at time a little hard to hear the descriptions of the dish. As it was a blind tasting degustation, it made it a little hard at times to know what we were eating. 

We started with an optional starter course of oysters following by our amuse bouche: smoked scarlet prawn with pickled daikon and shiso.  This was K's favourite dish - the prawn was crunchy and the pickled daikon giving it a refreshing vinegary flavour.  Gets you salivating for the rest of the meal. 

Next course: sashimi yellow fin tuna, goat milk cevre, avocado, belle radish and pork crackling. Subtle flavours but slightly too creamy for K's liking.

Next, we had the bonito on a nest of fried potato.  Hidden beneath the bonito is a poached quail egg and topped with caviar and roasted chicken powder.  The poached quail egg was rich, gooey and together with the potato nest, added an interesting textual element to the dish.

Then came the charcoal grilled black lip abalone, dashi sabayon (like a chawanmushi but better) and roasted chicken skin. The sabayon helped to accentuate the fresh seawater flavours of the abalone - this was yum and an interesting way of serving abalone that I had not seen before.

Unlike other fine dining restaurants, Sepia served its bread part way through its savour courses. This bread was very warm, soft and moist. It was so tempting to go back for more, but we held back knowing there were several courses still to come.

Onto our last seafood course - soy cured black cod with yuzu and sheet yoghurt, horseradish, ice plant and nasturtium.  We love black cod - our favourite being the signature miso black cod at Nobu and this one was very good too. We've never had ice plant before but it gave this awesome crunch and lightness to the dish which was a real surprise. Probably another one of K's favourites for the day (though it made C crave Nobu's version more).

Next came two red meat dishes.  The first, a roasted duck breast with candied fuyu persimmon, oba and wild strawberry vinegar.  If you thought this would be your run of the meal duck breast, you are mistaken. Eaten with the candied persimmon (with a lovely jelly texture), there is an explosion of salty and sweet flavours all at the same time. Pity there were only 4 pieces on the dish!

The final savoury dish looked pretty as a picture: seared venison, sansho pepper, roasted pumpkin, miso and artichoke. The autumn leaf like sheets of pumpkin which sat on the top were delicious and had such a concentrated pumpkin flavour.

Hidden beneath is a perfectly cooked pink venison:

After the venison, we had a palate cleanser of candied native apples, miso apple caramel, creme fraiche and snow apple sorbet dai dai and sake. C thought the sweetness and sourness in this dish overpowered a lot of the more subtle flavours. If we were given a menu in advance, it may have helped us to pick/appreciate the different flavours more.

You know how sometimes your brain tricks you into only remembering the good parts of something?  Well that certainly wasn't the case with this next dish. This dessert was the most memorable dish when we first visited Sepia several years ago and it definitely lived up to this memory and more this time round.  And again, isn't it so pretty?

This is Sepia's signature dessert: winter chocolate forest - which is like a deconstructed black forest - soft chocolate, hazelnut and almond, lavender and honey cream, blackberry sorbet, elderflower and meyer lemon jellies, green tea, licorice, chocolate twigs and bronze fennel. I would come back to Sepia just for this dessert.

The second dessert option was the "Milks" - consisting of milk done 6 different ways - milk chocolate, coconut yoghurt, rice milk pudding, goat milk dulce de leche (like a candied milk), sheep milk sorbet, milk cake, milk crisp and yuba (a bean curd skin made from soymilk). I can't imagine how much technique goes into making this dish - whilst the description sounds like it might be a bit heavy, this dish was perfectly balanced and just so so clever.

We cannot recommend Sepia highly enough for a special occasion. There aren't many fine dining restaurants that you'd be willing to re-visit given its price tag but this one is a special one.