Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [27]
In the cellar door, we meet a couple of enthusiastic employees, Kate Wall and Mike Mudge, who take turns pouring us samples of various wines, including superb examples of a sparkler (named Croser after founder and winemaker Brian Croser), a Riesling, and a Shiraz. After lunch, when the tasting room slows down substantially, the two give us a tour of the building, showing us the huge nineteenth-century waterwheel and the up-to-date processing facilities for the champagne-style sparklers.
As amiable and eager to please as Kate and Mike are, the man who makes our day is Chef Le Tu Thai. A Vietnam boat refugee, born of Chinese parents, he came to Australia in traumatic circumstances at the age of sixteen, beginning his career in the culinary field by taking a job as a dishwasher in a French restaurant. With pluck, luck, and lots of talent, he rose from tender of the suds to the top of his profession, gradually honing one of the most respected repertoires in the country for contemporary Australian cooking, often called “Mod Oz” cuisine.
Le’s constantly changing menu offers superlative ingredients from the area in classic preparations frequently brightened with Asian accents. Appetizer choices might include quail sausage wrapped in prosciutto with white bean tortellini, soybeans, and black cabbage, or maybe seared yellowfin tuna with tempura oysters, soba noodles, and baby leeks. Today, Cheryl begins with a beautifully balanced dish featuring a gorgonzola and caramelized onion tart with apple, celery, and pickled-walnut dressing. Bill orders one of the regular starter specialties, dazzling grilled Kangaroo Island marrons (giant crayfish) with crustacean mousseline, shellfish essence, truffle cream, and a salted duck egg, which he follows with a hearty, rare steak dressed with meaty oxtail samosas and robust Moroccan chile jam. For her main course, Cheryl opts for roasted Kangaroo Island chicken with scampi and Armagnac sauce, perfectly prepared and wonderfully flavored.
It’s a magnificent introduction to the sophisticated tastes of Mod Oz food, even to Bill with his deepening cold, but at the time we fail to grasp anything much about the essence and significance of the style. Until we gain more experience with the cooking in Sydney, the lunch is merely an outstanding meal, easily the most elegantly delightful yet on the trip. Within a few days, it becomes part of a revelation.
The drive to McLaren Vale yields surprises more immediately. Bill maneuvers deftly through Adelaide’s morning rush-hour traffic, gaining confidence in his left-of-the-road skills, and gets onto an expressway heading south. After a few miles, Cheryl notices something peculiar about the highway we’re barreling down: an abundance of traffic signs face the opposite direction than Bill is headed. “Could we be going the wrong way?” she asks.
“If so, we’ve got lots of company. There could be a helluva pileup ahead.”
Later, after our arrival in McLaren Vale, locals tell us the highway department ran out of money to purchase land, so it only built half of the projected road. Traffic flows south in the morning, then access shuts down for two hours, and after that, it runs north for the rest of the day. At least the strange arrangement solves Bill’s problem about driving on the appropriate side of the street.
A smaller area than Barossa, composed of one village and the surrounding hills, McLaren Vale enjoys a similar kind of bucolic allure. At the head of Main Road, the only street in the valley with any red lights or commercial activity, Bill pulls into a wine information center to get a map. It’s not open yet, but Mary Hamilton, chair of the McLaren Vale Wine Marketing Committee, shows up to drop off some paperwork.