Shopping Centre food - Becasse, Westfield, Sydney

In Britain a small number of elite chefs have bitten the bullet and moved their restaurants into hotels. The chefs benefit from sympathetic rents and overheads, the hotels benefit from having a destination restaurant within the building, and sometimes a few much sought after tables available exclusively for their guests. This kind of symbiotic approach is also to be found in Sydney – Tony Bilson’s restaurant is within the Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel – but the relationship between Justin North and the Westfield shopping centre is something new.  Mind you, when you step out of the lift at the Fifth Floor of Westfield nothing quite prepares you for the super glossy scale of every element.

There’s a monster food court serving very decent food – good dim sum; Italian; middle eastern; sausages; gelato; pies; Vietnamese and Charlie & Co (Justin North’s take on a decent hamburger). Then there is the rest of the North Empire which is collectively known as “Quarter Twenty One” – food shops; a brasserie; wine shop; cooking school; a bakery … and if all that were not enough to keep him busy – Bécasse, a serious restaurant.

I cannot recall another high end restaurant that finds itself lodged on the same floor of a shopping centre as the food hall. Bécasse is a modern looking 22 seat restaurant that has buckets of ambition and high aspirations. You enter the dining room through a tunnel-like corridor bedecked in strange flower displays, as you sit down to the black-leather topped tables the windows are framed by original brickwork. It is a great compliment to the designer that you could be almost anywhere and when you pick up Justin’s menu there is not hint, not an echo, not a whiff of shopping centre to be had.

The food is very good indeed. Breads are fresh from the bakery at Quarter Twenty One – brioche, ham and cheese, and seven seed roll – served with whipped butter (something that seems  to be in vogue in Australia).  Dishes are impressive, intense flavours, artful presentation.  A “Bespoke winter veg garden” translates a plate with a mound of “soil” made from black olives and crumbs, plus heritage carrots; target beetroot; a sweet mousse made from green peas. Very fresh and very good. On to “marinated local yellow fin tuna, confit octopus, mandarin and white radish” which comes with abalone ham. Then “Forgotten vegetables, smoked pork jowl, yabby tails with aromas of cedar”, served on a plank of wood – the forgotten vegetables being kohl rabi, celeriac, swede and purple potatoes a tad familiar to most of us which rather stretches the term forgotten. A standout dish was the “Glenloth squab, confit wing ravioli, roast chestnuts and truffle jus”. The squab tender and delicate, the Australian black truffles highly perfumed and on the side “en papilotte” new potatoes and more truffle. Stylish dish. For dessert the “Winter Still Life” teamed Calvados ice cream, confit chestnuts, and little mushrooms that were made from ice cream and meringue. It was laid out on a large plate and looked rather like the snowy scene you get in those “snowstorm” globes!  Add interesting wines from a lengthy list – I have never before been offered a Japanese wine but the “Gris de Grace, Koshu” was sound enough – and you have a pukka, proper fine dining experience. 

Bécasse is not a cheap place to eat, but anywhere with this level of ambition and the skills to back it up is unlikely to be so. The “Nine course Degustation” with a wine flight costs $270 Australian (just over £175). Or there is a three course A la Carte at $120 Australian (about £80).

Very good food, well-cooked, well-seasoned and rather surprisingly hidden away on the Fifth Floor of a shopping centre.

www.becasse.com.au

www.bilsons.com.au

www.westfield.com.au/sydney