So this is going to be a slightly different blog post to previous ones, since while it is a "what I did on my holiday" post it's going to be about food and not about games. I spent the week of leave I took last week mostly pretty sick but fortunately, I recovered in time to not miss my holiday reservation for the very expensive Botanic Restaurant. Which is good because it's fucking expensive - about $450AUD for one person, including the profoundly ill-named "temperance" non-alcoholic drinks menu that I would in fact describe as the least temperate drink order I've made in my life - and I paid non-refundably in advance. 

The Restaurant Botanic is the most expensive and (by reputation) the finest restaurant in the state, and it being in my hometown meant I felt I had to eat here before I could go visit places in other cities of comparable prestige in the future. It's a small-plates type fine dining restaurant located, unsurprisingly, in the centre of the botanic gardens. They make great use of that, since their aesthetic thesis is about using native ingredients. Throughout eating there, they never missed a chance to use a botanical speciality grown in the gardens, and in some cases they used this to make it extremely weird. 

Unfortunately, I was eating there alone, since there is a paucity of people in my life at present who think going to half-grand restaurants for the pure gustatory experience on impulse is "worth it" or "a sane use of your money" or "a valid substitute for travelling to Melbourne as a way to spend your holiday budget", and I am at present unclear how one should go about remedying that. I had imagined I'd go for a walk around the gardens before hand, but it turns out that the gardens close half an hour before service opens, so I was limited to birdwatching in the park outside the gardens until it was time for my reservation; I think the guy who they'd left at the gate to let customers in was genuinely shocked that I was a customer of his, since I'd be sitting at a park bench watching birds since before he arrived and he'd tuned my present out. They made the interesting decision of giving you a cup of iced tea (lemon myrtle) at the gate to sip on as you walked from the gate to the restaurant. 

The restaurant itself was a pretty small place, and I think I was the only person there who wasn't there as a heterosexual couple between the ages of 30 and 50, out of a pool of no more than twenty people eating there that evening, and between that and the notes I was taking on my phone, I think I presented as a very odd customer. I had a very good view of the kitchen where I was sitting, and spent most of my time on net watching them work. 

I won't be breaking down every dish they served me, since there was more than twenty (most a single mouthful and so brief they barely made an impression) and it doesn't seem valuable to do so, but I'll cover some highlights. If you want to hear about this in more detail (or to hear about my opinions on their lighting design) feel free to DM me or leave a comment or something. The meals included a lot of seafood - especially amongst the starters, tartlets of various arcane structural materials and seafood fillings were a common theme, and I found this very unimpressive. These dishes were also very overstimulating from an exposition perspective; so many moving parts being summarised into a dish of a single mouthful, and here's me who isn't even much of a fan of seafood. 

The main dishes were better - a dish of corned and smoked emu was the very best thing I ate that night - along with a dish of marron that was served with "bread and butter" in the form of a cubical croissant and nutritional-yeast infused butter and a dish of kangaroo with mushroom (and "kangaroo garum", providing me with a second data-point for an apparent modern fashion for fermented sauces made from various esoteric meats) these mains were the best part of the meal by far. They were each paired with one of the many strange drinks of the "temperance menu", which ranged from the excellent (a cordial of Davidson’s plums, which was extremely tart and aromatic and excellent) to the frankly bizarre (a "dirty margarita" made from the liquid of pickled onions and distilled orange oil that was as weird as that combination sounds). 

The deserts had their own strange pairings; they themselves were mostly unsurprising combinations of fruit, sugar, cream, and such, but the drinks were quite odd - one, served in a shot-class of cut crystal, was a hot drink made from native herbs and the sour juice of a specific tropical ant that somehow recreated the experience of the common or garden hot honey and lemon exactly, and on that note several other dishes in the desert menu were garnished with ants, a decision which I object to not because I have an issue with eating ants, but because when you garnish your deserts with ants this mostly just gives the impression you don't clean your pantry often enough. Throughout the desert course I was also drinking their "house ice tea", made apparently out of whatever they found in the gardens that smelled nice and wasn't poisonous, cold-steeped together and served in quite a large bottle along with a glass that was entirely full with aromatic herbs and flowers from the same garden. The experience was intense and aromatic and not altogether pleasant; they could stand to work on balance of the base flavouring for their tea if nothing else. 

Overall, I think I found the experience more overstimulating than I did exhilarating, and I don't think I'd ever plan to eat there again unless I was doing so with someone who wanted to have this experience themselves (if nothing else, there are still places in this price bracket I've never tried at all, and I get the impression that while their menu varies with the seasons the ideas of it never change). I think they spent too much time and effort working in dozens of native ingredients to every dish, and not enough effort perfecting the balance and intended experience of a given dish. Many times, extremely prestigious ingredients were covered over entirely by a surfeit of mint or cream or other base ingredients. Such is the nature of hyper-seasonal constantly refigured regional menus with more courses than guests or chefs, I suppose. However, I also think this was a really cool experience to have (as a food nerd) and basically recommend the idea of going and seeing what highly prestigious restaurants exist near you for the sake of the experience.