In keeping their promise to reveal details for one level per week ahead of the big December opening, Solotel and Matt Moran have announced Bea as the latest layer of Barangaroo House. The highly anticipated project will house this 180+ seat restaurant on the middle level, below the already announced rooftop bar Smoke..
From 16th December, Bea will be open to the public, highlighting a menu of contemporary Australian food led by chef Cory Campbell, with a focus on native and local ingredients expressed using a variety of international techniques and flavour profiles. This means Campbell will be using some of the best hand-picked produce he can find from Australia’s seasonal bounty, spanning seafood and meat to vegetables and native spices, worked into dishes like a reimagined steak tartare, a kingfish rolled in burnt leek ash before being seared, sliced and finished with oyster emulsion, and an eye fillet rolled in a powder of dried native fruits and served with black radish.
The menu is said to work just as well for shared feasts as a three-course meal, complemented by a special “feed me” chef’s menu which will be constantly changing and allow Campbell and his chefs to play around with new ingredients and ideas.
Campbell, a highly experienced chef with four years at Copenhagen’s iconic Noma and six years as Head Chef of Melbourne’s beloved Vue de monde, says that Bea will be about “fun dining rather than fine dining” with the focus on the flavours rather than the technique. “Their journey starts when reading the menu”, he says. “I could write down that the meat is cooked over coal or slow roasted for 24 hours, but where’s the intrigue in that?”
Some of that “fun” he mentions definitely seems like it’s spilled over onto the dessert menu. The signature end-of-meal treat being offered at Bea will be simply titled “chocolate, caramel”, constructed as a delectable homage to the building’s architecture with three different sized chocolate disks sandwiches together with chocolate mousse.
Wine will be an obvious go-to for anyone dining at Bea, with sommelier John Paul Wilkinson pulling together a list that features quality drops from classic global wine regions alongside iconic Australia producers and wines from smaller regions, highlighting the “next wave” of local producers as well as biodynamic and natural wines.
Bea will open on 16 December and is now taking bookings.
Bea at Barangaroo House
Address: 35 Barangaroo Avenue, Barangaroo
Website: www.barangaroohouse.com.au
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