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It’s raining tapas in Surry Hills. Cru54 gets a shower of praise from Nick Dent.
Putting potato salad on your plate is like putting a revolver to your head and spinning the cylinder. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear a click and the potato will be cooked through (and there may be some boiled egg in there too).
If not – blam! – the potato is practically raw, and you’re stuck holding an uneaten mountain of it while Auntie Sal glares at you from across the patio.
I mention this because the Russian salad ($13) at Cru54 looks pretty much like potato salad, with green beans, carrot and mayo. It does not impress us much, until we take the plunge and put it in our mouths.
Hidden capers add zing; pieces of prawn are briny surprises; the little potato cubes are solid, but soft. This is no game of Russian roulette – it’s the potato salad of dreams. Auntie Sal, please take note.
Cru54 is the latest fancy tapas bar to open in Surry Hills recently (Bentley, Bodega and Emmilou being the others). It’s the brainchild of Catherine Andreo Tuma, a Frenchwoman of Spanish descent, who designed the menu with French chef Vincent Girardin.
While Catherine’s fitout is funky, service here is family-style, with everyone from the hunky Gallic dude to the motherly lady a model of attentiveness.
Most of the tables are outside, while a lengthy bar takes up the bulk of the interior space. They clearly want people to drink here. Get a bottle of Cosme Palacio y Hermanos Cosecha 2004 – a fruity red from the Rioja ($60) – and get ready to graze on some very special things.
First up there are four cold, tasty splodges of bacalao (salt cod) mousse, each wrapped in a red capsicum scarf and balanced on paper-thin crostini ($12). The compote ($13) is another triumph: a splash of hard toffee on top of four goat’s cheese golfballs, with caramelised onion underneath. It’s a lesson in just how sweet savoury can be.
Six potato croquettes ($11) contain jamon-infused mash so fluffy it’s a wonder they don’t float off the plate. These miniature zeppelins come with a romesco – a nutty salsa of capsicum, tomato, garlic and almonds.
Braised chorizo ($13) is tender and mild as the Virgin, and fired up with a little whipped cream horseradish. Mind you, we’d eaten half of it before we noticed the red wine and cider sauce hiding at the bottom of the bowl. They should perhaps serve it in something shallower.
Same goes for the veal and lamb albondigas (meatballs) ($16), which were, well, meaty, but really needed that sauce that lay squandered at the bottom like a star quarterback left sulking on the bench.
We almost didn’t order dessert. Shame on us. ‘Pain perdu’ is what the French call French toast and it means, literally, lost bread. A rectangle of moist, cinnamony banana pain perdu is lined up against an ellipse of chocolate ganache on roasted macadamia chunks ($10). The super-sweet ganache is daringly seasoned with sea salt. Zowie! I’ll be coming back just for more of that dessert.
As if to underline the fact that the service at Cru54 really is special, we’re brought a chupito – a complimentary end-of-meal treat. It’s a shotglass of fine Spanish sherry. You have to love that.
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