Would you like potatoes with that? Of course you would. Every chef in town knows that it’s the chips that really sell their fish and chips, and the fries that really sell their steak frites (speaking of which, here are Sydney’s and Melbourne’s best).
We like restaurants that do potatoes because we instinctively know that means they’re serious about pleasing us.
There’s that pub we’ll go out of our way for because they do such a good, foil-clad baked potato, swimming with sour cream.
The local Indian restaurant that sells more masala dosa – those crisp, furled pancakes stuffed with spiced, crushed potatoes and onion – than butter chicken.
The Italian trattoria where gnocchi is as popular as pasta because gnocchi is just mashed potato in another, more heavenly form.
Potato cakes (potato scallops in NSW) are also having a moment, elevated to fine-dining status with seaweed at the Bathers’ Pavilion in Balmoral and with saltbush at Stokehouse in St Kilda. Both evoke childhood, summer-holiday nostalgia with their salt-and-vinegar tang.
And good old potato wedges are the unlikely stars of the new 20 Chapel in Sydney’s Marrickville, home of former Rockpool Bar and Grill executive chef Corey Costelloe.
First brined, then cooked with vinegar, then deep-fried in pure wagyu beef fat, they don’t taste like beef fat but like spuds from another, better planet.
Let’s not forget the late French chef Joel Robuchon’s pommes puree, brought to Australia by Guillaume Brahimi for his first restaurant, Pond, in Kings Cross in 1994, and dubbed “Paris mash”.
The recipe calls for peeling just-boiled potatoes while still stupendously hot, passing them through a sieve, then beating them repeatedly in a hot pan until quite dry, before beating in milk and butter. A lot of butter. Like, 250 grams of butter to 600 grams of potato. Now you know why it’s one of the great dishes of the world. It’s basically potato-flavoured butter.
In Brisbane, the lively SK Steak & Oyster restaurant in Fortitude Valley has a potato menu that lists 10 ways with spuds. Choices run from a classic mash to hash browns, potato gems and an amped-up lobster mash. I’m not saying people go there just for the potatoes – actually, yes, I am.
The world belongs to potatoes – and we’re just living in it.
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Terry Durack is the chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and Good Food.
