ON THE PASS
Tell us about your new pop-up, Esmay. I’m going to be taking over the space at Wasabi for three months. I love Noosa – I did my apprenticeship there. After time off [during lockdown], I have a renewed purpose and I think it’s going to be a good learning curve for me to see the restaurant as a whole, not just from the kitchen.
How’s the menu going to be structured? More than ever people don’t have deep pockets, but we still want good food and wine. I’ve used that as my base, then structured it backwards from there. We’re going to break it down into just two or three courses – we want to give people that restaurant experience, where they taste a lot of different things, but at a cost that’s still approachable. There will also be an ever-changing selection of hyper-seasonal snacks.
Given it’s right on the water, I’d be crazy not to do seafood. Something like a big John Dory on some mushrooms and Geraldton wax. There are a few iso meals that I will be bringing into the restaurant, with some fine-tuning, like roasted spatchcock with black garlic stuffed under the skin,
