The museum restaurant is just as flummoxing, entertaining and self-aggrandising as the rest of MONA in Hobart.
Contemporary$$$
There is a woman at the table next to us who is not actually at the table, but under it. She’s dressed mostly in black, wearing sunglasses and reaching around the tabletop for a glass of water that she has been tormenting in various ways for the past 10 minutes or so. Before that, she was leaping across the white booths to the side of the dining room; at one point she presented a cylinder from a small music box under a tiny cloche to a woman dining alone. She is accompanied by a roving violinist and an accordion player. She is making art.
Art is the theme at Faro, the restaurant attached to MONA: Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. When Faro opened in 2018, its main artistic endeavour was its setting: the room juts out over the Derwent River, a long glassed-in rectangle punctuated by a central triangle which itself holds a giant sphere, which is an art piece called Unseen Seen by James Turrell. To get from the museum to the restaurant, you walk through a hallway along an illuminated walkway that appears to be suspended in coloured mist; a museum employee instructs you not to fall off and not to take photos (my guess is that flash would ruin the illusion).
Initially, Faro was a tapas restaurant, serving modernist drinks and upscale Spanish nibbles. These days, chef Vince Trim – who also leads the kitchen at The Source, the other formal restaurant at MONA – is leaning into the idea of restaurant-as-art piece, with a menu that’s fantastical, confounding, pretentious, gleeful and exceedingly fun. It is utterly befitting of a museum that might sell T-shirts bearing all of those words, a proudly bewildering and contradictory place. Would you really just want a nice lunch after revelling in the perverse funhouse that is MONA? I think not.
For the first time in my career, I am put in the position of coming up against my masthead’s profanity policy for reasons other than my own vulgarity. F— art, let’s eat is a collection of snacks that includes a yellow liquid made from tomato, lemongrass and saffron that you lick from a porcelain rendering of MONA founder David Walsh’s finger. The irony is, of course, that the dish’s name suggests a removal from the art around you, and then forces you to participate in the art in the most prurient and ridiculous way possible.
Is it art or is it just stupid? Does it taste good? Does it matter? (The answers are: both; yes; yes, but only kind of.)
A dish called Fancy Feast is specifically designed to evoke cat food, the words on the menu even printed in the font of the brand. The wordplay works on multiple levels. Yes, the combination of cured tuna, spanner crab and prawns topped with caviar is fancy. Yes, it is a feast. Yes, it is a fancy version of what we feed our pets.
The first bite is a sweet seafood rush; by the third, the dish is downright disconcerting. Its slight sliminess, heightened by the addition of prawn and chorizo “pearls” made of tapioca, is a purposeful toying with your senses. Are you supposed to be warring with your own disgust? It’s a very odd proposition when paying (a lot) for food, but fairly apropos given the setting.
The menu is direct in calling out its inspiration. Massimo Bottura, Italy’s most famous living chef, gets a shout-out. The name of Mexican chef Enrique Olvera (Pujol) appears ahead of the description for el jardin de invierno, a dish of buckwheat tamale pucks nestled among mole made from koji and hazelnut, various mushrooms and a wattleseed XO sauce. It’s a mind-bender, both visually and tastewise, the different components bringing to mind Japanese, Mexican and Chinese flavours that somehow become harmonious.
Trim is a talented chef, not just a trickster, and that fact becomes more obvious the further you get into the menu. Blood and velvet showcases venison at its best and most tender, alongside a disc of 72-hour cooked wallaby. The accompaniments – baby beets, black garlic, prune, barley, blackberry and molasses, buckwheat – all work to sweeten and temper the meat, to give it depth and bloody character.
The Faro menu is fantastical, confounding, pretentious, gleeful and exceedingly fun.
It’s somewhat ironic, given all of the above, that dessert is more straightforwardly, well, dessert. Don’t get me wrong, this is no rustic tart situation. But lots of fancy restaurants might have something resembling the Coco Chanel dessert at Faro, though elsewhere it would likely be called elements of chocolate or some such nonsense. Different kinds of chocolate – creamy, crumbly, brittle – are arranged in a sculptural manner. It’s fun, but hardly thought-provoking.
Many people – most people, I’d wager – don’t want their dessert (or any other part of their meal) to be thought-provoking. The whole notion of food as part of an art experience is fraught with the potential for pretension. But I see a disconnect between the wild art and the safe food offerings at most museums – one that doesn’t exist here. Faro is just as flummoxing, just as entertaining, just as self-aggrandising as the rest of MONA. It’s an edible show, as vital as all the other exhibits, and it’s one I wouldn’t miss.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Like eating inside a glassed-in sculpture
Go-to dishes: F— art, let’s eat ($34); El jardin de invierno ($36); Blood and velvet ($54)
Drinks: Short list of cocktails and wines, mostly from Moorilla, the on-site vineyard and winery. A broader list would be nice.
Cost: About $220 for two, excluding drinks
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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