New York City loves its Australian brunch. Think bright and bubbly restaurant-cafes like Little Ruby’s, Bluestone Lane and Banter, which serve up a range of refreshing dishes from avocado toast with prosciutto to veggie-filled rice bowls topped with a poached egg. The fare is hard to put a label on — veggie-forward, no doubt, and perhaps even a tad Californian — but for chef Daniel Garwood, Australian food means local ingredient sourcing and diverse culinary influences.
Garwood is the executive chef and partner at ACRU, an Australian fine dining restaurant that opened on Oct. 16 on MacDougal Street, a few blocks south of Washington Square Park. The restaurant, pronounced “uh-crew,” offers a $95 tasting menu of five to six courses, along with an a la carte menu of 12 dishes.
“We wanted something a bit more accessible, a bit more reasonable,” Garwood said in an interview with WSN. “But we still wanted to have this essence of fine dining.”
While a $95 dinner isn’t realistic for most college students, ACRU is amongst the city’s more affordable prix fixes — a trend that has gained traction amongst New Yorkers looking for an upscale dining option that’s easier on the wallet, since traditional fine dining tasting menus can easily start at $250 to $300 per person.
“We want people to be able to come in even if they just want one or two dishes,” Garwood said.
Growing up in Tasmania, Garwood grew accustomed to eating and cooking with locally produced ingredients. While Australia’s history is largely dominated by its former status as a British colony — and more recently as a part of the British Commonwealth — the country received many Italian, Greek and Southeast Asian immigrants in the 20th century. Their resulting influence on Australian food is something that Garwood considers fundamental to Australian cuisine.
“It’s more of a concept than a certain style [of cooking],” he said.
At ACRU, Garwood infuses Korean flair into his cooking — an ode to his time as a chef in Seoul and as a sous chef at New York’s two-Michelin-starred Korean restaurant Atomix, which this year was named the sixth-best restaurant in the world. Take ACRU’s potato cake, for example, topped with a generous portion of sweet, briny sea urchin, thinly sliced pickled onions and fennel flower. The dish is an elegant blend of Australian and Japanese influences — sea urchin, or uni, is a traditionally Japanese ingredient, and the cake’s crunchy exterior and creamy inside are reminiscent of a Japanese potato croquette. Breaded and fried potatoes are also a common corner-store snack in Australia, according to Garwood, who infuses references to Australian cooking and culture throughout the menu.
The barbecue beetroot is one of ACRU’s more avant-garde dishes as well as one of Garwood’s signatures, featuring pieces of beetroot that have been roasted and rehydrated in brown butter and oxidized in pear juice. While its chewy texture was slightly off-putting, its sweet, smoky flavor was well-balanced by a large dollop of creamy, salty Siberian caviar.
Another standout starter was the restaurant’s take on damper, a thick Australian bread. The dish is a prime example of Garwood’s commitment to putting Australian foods on the fine dining stage. Priced at $10, the bread had a slightly salty, almost caramelized crust and was served with a foamy pumpkin seed emulsion, adding an earthy, nutty and lightly sweet flavor to the damper.
Perhaps the best dish of the night, the monkfish agnolotti hit all the boxes of an outstanding pasta. The monkfish filling was luscious and creamy, enveloped in a wonderfully chewy, al dente pasta. The agnolotti’s sweet, slightly spicy carrot sauce wasn’t too thick or overpowering, but rather refreshing and almost reminiscent of a tomato bisque. It is topped with pecorino cheese, dehydrated chives and crispy pieces of prosciutto-like chicken skin.
Don’t be deterred by the fatty pieces in ACRU’s lamb dish — the richness is cut by pickled mustard seed, a slightly bitter celery root puree and shaved pieces of roasted celery root in a sweet, sticky sauce. Hidden beneath the first pieces of tender, fatty lamb are sweet, slightly gamey chunks of lamb belly, sitting in an umami-filled sauce of nori and “seamite,” ACRU’s take on a seaweed-based vegemite.
Most traditional fine dining restaurants that offer a cheese course serve the cheeses on their own, perhaps with a form of bread or fruit compotes. ACRU’s goat cheese tart, on the other hand, is warm, comforting and hearty. The tart’s crust is nicely charred and the goat cheese filling is creamy and light, similar to that of a Chinese egg tart. Topped with a layer of sweet caramelized onions and served over a warm cheese sauce, this dish is decadent and satisfyingly savory.
One of the restaurant’s signature desserts, the golden hay time, is Garwood’s concluding nod to Australian food. Named after a popular Australian ice cream bar brand, the popsicle had an almost flaky texture with notes of caramel and honey. ACRU’s pavlova, a meringue-based dessert that hails from Australia and New Zealand, is a master class in balancing texture and flavor. On top of the sweet meringue were candied grapes, a crunchy rice topping with raspberry powder and an ice cream made of salsify, a root vegetable similar to turnips — not what you would expect in a dessert, but equally satisfying as it was inventive.
“When it comes to the dishes, if out of the, let’s say six of them, you find two of them a bit controversial, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Garwood said. “If people come in and see flavors in combinations they haven’t seen or had before, that’s a good place for us to be in.”
Contact Lauren Ng at [email protected].
