If you’re a regular to Sydney’s Surry Hills, then you may have noticed a small cluster of restaurants sprouting from the underside of the award-winning apartment development 38 – 52 Waterloo St.
The building, designed by Cadalepas Associates, has created a perfect understated dining and retail precinct on ground level, featuring 3 very different food offerings: (in reverse order of opening) Kenji Maenaka’s ‘Japanese tapas’, El Capo Latin American fare and Orto Trading Co.’s amazing fusion of cuisines made to share.
Louise Hunt and Anne Cooper – the pair behind the hugely successful Baffi & Mo – have taken a quite-modern space and given it an English garden feel, with herbs (also used in the kitchen), and flowers about the place in pots and jars, garden tools and a wall of recycled bricks. While the menu by Chef Chris Low is a melange of food cultures from English to French, South American to Italian.
“We wanted to make a local place where people could come a couple of times a week if they wanted to,” Anne says. “We take a traditional dish and then we apply a lot of French cooking techniques; so, it might be a roast, but not how you remember it.
“That’s what we aim to do, take those dishes and present them in a way that looks like it’s been really simply cooked, but there is quite a lot of technique behind it.”
Dishes are very much made to share, which comes a lot from Anne Cooper’s Italian heritage. “If you sit down for a meal in my family home it’s always in the middle of the table for sharing and there’s always 50 people around it,” she laughs.
Whether it’s sitting outside on the long yellow trestle tables – made from the old SCG scoreboards – or sitting at the bar inside having a few cocktails, this latest Surry Hills offering, along with it’s new neighbours, is bound to find some loyal regulars.
Orto Trading Co.
ortotradingco.com.au
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