Owner-chef Eilish Maloney says she sees the same customers every day “because they don’t want to spend their money anywhere else”.
If you’re lucky, Eilish Maloney, chef and owner of The Studio, will deliver each dish from her sustainable food-focused restaurant and wine bar’s “Trust the Chef” menu to the table. This is partly because Maloney is a chef who likes to leave the kitchen and talk to customers, but also because her explanation about each dish’s ingredients and process is thrillingly detailed.
She brings butter bean broth – listed as Whole Lotta Love on the weekly four-part “blind” menu – a blend of fermented leeks, dried mushrooms, parsley, confit lemon and butter beans topped with half a boiled egg sprinkled with cheddar from Bruny Island Cheeese Co. Smoky paprika and pangrattato croutons are made from a gluten-free caraway seed focaccia baked onsite.
She explains how leek roots and mushroom stalks were used to make the broth. “We’re notorious as human beings for trimming and chucking in the bin,” she says. “These bits have got the power.”
The broth, spectacularly flavourful with soft, crunchy and melting textures (the soaked pangrattato is like cubes of tofu) underlines how Maloney makes every ingredient tantalising, particularly anything often billed as “humble”.
“Meet Me in the Middle” turns out to be a potato and greens galette with labneh, brown butter, almonds and egg. The “Small But Mighty” is sourdough topped with roast carrot and persimmon chutney, labneh, Rockaway Farm salami and macadamia nut butter.
The latter’s arrangement – rich pink slabs of meat lolling beside a rose-like wodge of sunny chutney (using persimmons from Maloney’s neighbour’s tree) on creamy, pepper-flecked labneh – is as beautiful as it tastes. It’s the same trip-to-the-moon tongue sensation with the galette, its pressed layers of potato, seaweed-green silverbeet and pink-tinged cabbage perfect with the salted chilli labneh.
Dessert, or “Never Sweet Enough”, is a softly sweet raspberry and vanilla mascarpone brioche using fruit Maloney preserved from last summer; the sourdough brioche incorporates milk waste from The Studio’s coffee machine.
There’s also a heady bakery menu of cakes, pies, slices and sausage rolls, while a substantial snack menu runs until 7pm Thursday to Sunday when the space switches into cosy wine bar mode. You can easily make a full meal out of oysters with finger lime oil, fried cabbage with chilli labneh, grilled chicken and a popular cheeseburger. Cocktails and regularly changing wines are top-notch, too.
Maloney’s zero-waste approach to ethically and sustainably produced food –championed by her business, The What If Society, which sources produce from farmers and producers in the Southern Highlands, where she grew up and lives – is aligned with a simple love for core food ingredients.
“Most of my creativity comes from physically seeing something, a vegetable, a fruit, whatever it is, and going, ‘OK, I have to do something with this. How do I use this?’,” she says. “I can’t look at a list on an email and go, ‘Ah, yeah I’ll get that’. I need to see it.”
Maloney’s teenage passion for food technology at Chevalier College in Burradoo led to a CV encapsulating Michelin-starred London dining room The Ledbury and a year at Josh Niland’s original Oxford Street Saint Peter. But her heart is in the Highlands.
The What If Society, which started with a Saturday street stall 150 metres down the road, turned four in July. In five weeks or so, The Studio’s sibling venue, The Exchange – a grocery store selling bread, preserves, pickles, jam, cultured butter and local produce – moves from a nearby street to two doors along.
Meanwhile, Maloney’s indefatigable vision for ethical, sustainable and considered food draws in ever more converts.
“I see the same customers every single day because they don’t want to spend their money anywhere else,” she says. “They’ve bought into our business and this lifestyle, and they feel so good for it. That feels so rewarding. It feels like I’ve played the part that I was meant to in the world.”
Three more to try in the Southern Highlands
Moonacres Kitchen
Chef Stephen Santucci uses the organic fruit and vegetables from Phil Lavers’ world-renowned Moonacres Farm up the road for masterful salted cod and potato hash browns, a fruit-loaded bruschetta with ruby red rhubarb and much more.
81 Illawarra Highway, Robertson, moonacres.com.au
Eschalot
Set in a converted 1840s inn on the main street of Berrima, Eschalot’s Mediterranean-ish focus on seasonal and local produce hits a high with the restaurant’s popular Chef’s “Feed Me” barbecue of wintry meat and vegetable dishes and ambitious desserts.
24 Old Hume Highway, Berrima, eschalot.com.au
Paste Australia
It’s easy to drive past Mittagong in the weekend flow to Bowral’s tulips, wineries and main street shopping, but leave the path for chef Bee Satongun’s lauded Thai food, a hatted inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
5 Main Street, Mittagong, pasteaustralia.com
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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