Prize-giving
CONGRATULATIONS, PASTURE…
What does it take to take the Supreme Winner award in Restaurant of the Year? You need really, really good food, and you need flawless service and a room that both delights and comforts. You need a good wine list, and a convincing reason for why you exist. That’ll get you part of the way; seeing to every small thing a little further. The rest? Well, to be honest, more than anything you need heart.
Our Supreme Winner for 2019 is Pasture, and boy does it have a lot of heart. You might be surprised: since it opened in 2016, it’s been well regarded but hasn’t yet won the top gong. But after three years in business, a period in which owner-chef Ed Verner has been through the proverbial wringer (read more about this in editor Henry Oliver’s piece on Verner on page 50), the place has finally come together. It feels like the restaurant it was always meant to be.
It’s always been good, of course — Pasture won Best New Restaurant in our 2017 awards — but now, it’s genre defining, and that’s mainly because of changes made in the past six months. In particular: there are no front-of-house staff, and just six seats per sitting, so the chefs meet and greet, serve your food, chat and, oh, prepare food, all at once. It’s like turning up at a dinner party, only the host can perfectly cook a piece of skin-on snapper over an open fire.
For that reason, as well as taking out the Supreme Winner award, Verner has won Best Chef. His cooking is, quite simply, extraordinary — at once theatrical and real, with a focus on nose-to-tail eating, fermentation and sustainability. Even his bread — a loaf of which you get given on the way out, to eat for breakfast the following morning with some of his 12-month-aged butter — is exceptional.
You sit there, and plate after plate of perfectly wrought food comes over the pass for three hours, but it never feels like time lags. Collectively, the Metro judges spent 18 hours in this restaurant, and every dish is seared into our memory. We ate a steak cooked over a blazing fire accompanied by AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” and we ate albacore tuna that had been aged for a week, brought to blood temperature by the fire, then served, unaccompanied, on a circular piece of ice.
