Chillis Cottage in Davistown is an excellent spot to enjoy oysters, cinnamon scrolls, breakfast omelettes and gelato sundaes.
14.5/20
Contemporary$$
If you find yourself hunting for a new lunch spot this weekend, somewhere by the water where you can get stuck into chardonnay and grilled fish, I can highly recommend plotting a course to Davistown and hunkering down at Chillis Cottage. With its jetty views, white picket fence and house-baked sourdough, the weatherboard-clad restaurant is about as close to the Platonic form of “nice place to eat oysters within two hours’ drive of Sydney” I can think of.
Husband-and-wife team Cameron Cansdell and Hayley Hardcastle opened the Central Coast site for breakfast and lunch in late February, and yes, I agree with what you’re thinking: “Odd name for a cottage. Isn’t ‘Chilli’s’ an American casual-dining restaurant chain founded by Larry Lavine in Texas in 1975?”
“Chilli”, Hardcastle tells me, is the nickname she’s had for Cansdell since they started dating. Fair enough. The couple also runs Chillis Deli (the absence of the possessive apostrophe is intentional) a few suburbs over at Ettalong’s Galleria, a 1980s-built labyrinth of cafes, hotel rooms, empty shops and a cinema. The deli trades in gelato, pasta, salumi, and sirloin cooked over coals; its brunch-time Bloody Mary is the most ferociously spiced I’ve ever encountered.
The smart-casual cottage, meanwhile, is a place of potted wildflowers, stained timber and a heavily cushioned banquette. Cansdell has been cooking in the area for several years, and has forged solid relationships with the Central Coast’s best suppliers. The produce at Chillis is pretty cracking as a result. The other week there was a choice between skilfully shucked oysters from Shoalhaven or Wagonga, while soy-seasoned yellowfin tuna was tiled over avocado and brightened with the tang of sliced sunrise lime.
Alan Foods, a small-scale market garden in the Dooralong Valley, supplies much of the spray-free vegetables, herbs, figs and persimmons, and I may have missed a trick by not ordering the roast beetroot salad with tahini and “organic shoots”. But who among us can turn away a $29 “pie of the day”?
On my visit, it was a bronzed oval of sturdy, butter-forward pastry, housing a beef bourguignon-style braise of wagyu neck on a bed of vibrant-green mushy peas. There’s no “Let me explain the menu” here. Just small plates, bigger plates, sides and desserts, and descriptions are informative without being flowery. “Grilled Moreton Bay bugs with macadamia, cucumber, lemongrass and lime” comes out exactly how you’d expect: split crustaceans in a zippy, crunchy salad.
Three butterflied garfish are sympathetically charred and topped with a rough tomato and caper salsa; rump cap from Westholme Wagyu in remote Queensland is a great bit of steak, beefed up with a tumble of mushrooms and confident jus. A sweets selection is headlined by vanilla gelato sundae with caramel sauce, banana, praline and tall shards of chocolate. All children within a five-metre radius will lose their minds at the sight of it.
It’s early days, so there’s room for a few, easy improvements. (Martinis could do with an olive-pit bowl; the bug meat was tough around the edges; a decadent-looking raspberry and mascarpone sponge cake was drier than it should have been.) But the floor team is accommodating, and Cansdell generally cooks with sound ideas and restraint. Chillis is on track to becoming a nice place to eat oysters – and cinnamon scrolls, breakfast omelettes and gelato sundaes – for quite a few years to come.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Cosy, waterside, all-purpose restaurant and cafe
Go-to dishes: Fish of the day with tomato and caper salsa ($45); daily sashimi with sunrise lime and avocado ($31); banana and caramel sundae ($19)
Drinks: One-page list of easy-drinking wines, mostly Australian, plus breezy cocktails to suit the view
Cost: About $160 for two (lunch), 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.
This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine
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