One of Australia’s finest restaurants, is how Maria Shollenbarger and David Prior describe Attica in Conde Nast Traveler, describing its chef-owner Ben Shewry as “emerging as the standard-bearer for a new national cuisine” by celebrating Australia’s “once-shunned native ingredients.”
You may think you've had this kind of food in Brooklyn or San Sebastián or wherever. “But you haven't,” says Adam Sachs in US food bible Bon Appetit. “What you ate may have been perfectly good, but it wasn't this. While ideas travel, taste is local. The food doesn't taste better at Attica because you've flown halfway around the world to eat it. It tastes better because it is made of things that can be had nowhere else, and handled with care by a sweet-tempered control freak. The Ben Shewry experience requires you to be no more than 35 seconds away from his kitchen.”
"Shewry trades in “fresh and clean and exciting cooking that never leans on the props of hyped-up ingredients to get results,” writes Gemima Cody in Time Out. Don’t expect foie gras or caviar here - “slender slow braised fillet of wallaby buckshot by native pepper berries and served in a rich sauce of its own blood is the only red meat on the menu ... Shewry summons deliciousness from native leaves, small amounts of sustainable seafood – king whiting, blue mussels – and stuff you’ve never heard of like honey made by aphids. Should the apocalypse come and we have to go bush, we want Shewry on our team.”
Attica is a dining experience “on equal footing with some of the best degustation restaurants in the world,” says the Foodie Mookie blog… “akin to discovering your own backyard and realising that amazing flavours are not always borne out of ingredients like garlic, onion or ginger but of saltbush, bush tomato, lemon myrtle, pepperberry and finger lime.”
Attica is the top-rated Australian restaurant on the current World’s Best 50 Restaurants list says Adam Sachs in Bon Appetit, because of “a growing realization that what makes a restaurant worthy isn't its adherence to a standardized set of fine-dining guidelines or white-tablecloth traditions but its willingness to be original, to make food that's interesting, honest, and, at all costs, delicious” …
And for a visual taste of what they’re all talking about, take a look at Attica’s Instagram page..