A Feast for the Eyes

STUDIO 49 PRESENTS

THE SEA ROOM

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A feast for the eyes

 

 

BBQ'd Mackerel

 

 

 

Surrounded by over 100 years of tradition The Sea Room at Studio 49 presents a gourmet selection of Trompe l’oeil dishes of sumptuous  seafood set on the custom designed “ X  Streme”  table and seated with hand painted Fritz Hansen style “Cheeky Chairs”.

 

Main course

Oysters Naturelle - eight succulent freshly shucked  oysters served

with a garnish of red caviar, fresh seaweed greens and lemon wedges.               

 Served with a Tableland garden salad and bread of your choice                                             $195

 

Bouillabaisse   - a classic French dish of locally caught seafood, mussels

 and fish poached in a rich tomato broth,  served with a crisp slice of  lightly

chargrilled house made sourdough.                                                                                                       $195

 

 

 

Classic Fish and Chips – line caught local Barramundi  deep fried

 to perfection in a light beer batter and served with  golden organic Kennebec

 potato chips and a house made garlic aioli on the side.                                                                $195

 

 

Chilli Mudcrab – A Port Douglas speciality.  Fresh local

Queensland mudcrab wok fried with a piquant chilli sauce.                                                      $195

 

Chargrilled Mackerel – a full flavoured fish grilled on an

open charcoal bar-b-que and served with a spicy tomato salsa laced

with locally grown fresh green peppercorns complemented with a pickled

cucumber relish.                                                                                                                                             $195

 

Bar-b-qued Prawns -  locally caught Queensland Tiger prawns

tossed on the bar-b-que with a lively savory marinade and served with 

wedges of Tahitian lime                                                                                                                              $195

 

 

 

All dishes hand painted on porcelain and individually presented in a hand made timber box.

 

Wines

The Sea Room Wine List offers the great nectar of the gods to accompany each dish with creations from the Edwards Estate Art Label.

 

Reds -           a full bodied dark shiraz .  A big wine exhibiting melon features

with dark berry highlights and a fresh finish.                                                    $125

 

an award winning big pinot with strong character.

This wine has grunt.                                                                                                      $125

 

 

Whites -      a cheeky little blonde chardonnay.  Dry and beautifully

balanced with a slightly nutty character.                                                             $125

 

Each hand painted trompe l’oeil wine bottle is served in a wooden presentation box.

 

 

ENJOY!

 

 

 

 

 

Surrealism - out there food art

Play those word association games and when someone says “surrealism” everyone shouts out “Dali”, maybe Magritte and for the aficianados Andre Breton but Dali is the standout man, the numero uno  choice.  

 

Avida Dollars as he was known for his self declared love of money , “I want gold, I want cheques, I want cash” Dali was quoted as saying (and he got it in spades), is seldom associated with food painting.  But think again, think ‘Fried Eggs on a Plate without the plate’ 1932 depicting an immaculately painted soft fried egg dangling from a long string or the grotesque ‘Soft construction with boiled beans’.

 

Needless to say Dali had a whole raft to things going on behind the food but it is the fabulous image that is the point here.  Have to say he wasn’t quite so hot with the boiled beans or the lamb chops in ‘Gala with Two Lamb Chops in Equilibrium on Her Shoulders’ but check out the bread basket in ‘The Bread Basket’ 1926 – a bit before he got weird like his ‘Ordinary French Loaf with Two Fried Eggs Riding without a plate, Trying to Sodomise a Heel of a Portuguese Loaf’ 1932.  Now there’s a dish you don’t see too often on your average restaurant menu!

 

Gotta say that Dali’s imagination was pretty wild and maybe we could do with a bit more of that in restaurants.  There used to be a restaurant up here in Port Douglas called ‘Going Bananas’ run by a French guy who was pretty wild.  He would put a snake (lolly variety not the real thing) in your mouth and then cut off the protruding bit with a pair of scissors – ouch! I wonder if he ever went too far?

I recently finished a Dali-esque painting called “Apple of my Eye”.  It seems there is a different hidden meaning for different people.  A Tas Facebook friend commented : “Very appropriate”.  Had to think about that one – maybe the apple just out of reach floating in an empty landscape?  I hadn’t thought of that but like all surrealist art it’s in the eye of the beholder.

'Apple of my eye' oil on canvas by Michael Edwards

 

 

 

 

 

Painting red hot food art

Capsicums and chillis are so incredibly sensual, they curve and bulge inside their shiny hot red skin.  I just love to paint these vegetables on steroids – build up the red hot colour with layers of vermillion tinted medium until the canvas just glows with vitality.

This is the technique of the great masters, especially Caravaggio who didn’t even draw his subjects first but painted straight onto the canvas.  He started with a grisaille – a monotone painting in burnt umber  and shades of grey – molding the shape to perfection before adding any other colour. 

This method produces a spectacular complexity in the final painting.  The under layers show through giving a depth of colour that is almost impossible to achieve any other way.   The semi-transparent layers reportedly reflect the light back and forth giving that translucency that many natural surfaces have.  In particular skin tones.  The top layer of the skin is a yellowy transparent layer masking the red underneath to give the characteristic pinky orangey colour of Caucasian skin. 

Combining this with a touch of chiaroscuro gives a drama that makes the painting ‘pop’.  Those masters knew a thing or two.

Old Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio was a bit of a man about town with a red hot temperament – even had his sword confiscated in Rome for getting into a bit too much biffo.  Ended up having to do a runner after killing a guy.  Apparently he never had a kitchen in his house – ate out every night.  But he met a sticky end, according to one report, on a beach between Rome and Milan after the grand master of the Order of St.John apparently ordered a hit and two knights were duly dispatched to do the job

Anyway back to the art.

The deep red colour is achieved by tinting medium with vermillion and washing it over a dry underpainting and then re-establishing the highlights being careful not to dull the molding.  I like to let the brush wander and make it’s own depressions and ridges and then enhance them.

 

And once the painting’s finished there is always the cooking.  Steve Manfredi has a brilliant Capsicum and Eggplant Rotolo with black and white hand made pasta.  He has these fabulous pasta dishes that are assembled from cooked ingredients, including the pasta and then chilled and served cold.  Basically this dish consists of alternate layers of black egg pasta (made with cuttlefish or squid ink) and white egg pasta with tomato sauce, fresh basil and roasted capsicum between the layers.  The whole thing is then rolled tightly and chilled, cut into slices and served with a little extra tomato sauce.  Wow I can taste it now!

 

Cheeky Chairs - the Artisan's seat

When it comes to a juicy scandal you can’t go past the Poms – they’ve got it all sewn up.  Ever heard of a guy called Profumo, pretty unusual name, and a girl called Christine Keeler?  They were around in the 1960’s so maybe before your time but hey it’s a great yarn and the inspiration for my ‘Cheeky Chair’ series.

When you see the pic below that Aussie snapper Lewis Morley took back in 1963 in London you’ll know it.  Here’s Christine Keeler, the reported call girl or at least good time party girl, astride one of those designer Fritz Hansen chairs (bit the worse for wear – the chair that is not CK) in the nuddy. The thing was she was having a bit of a fling with old Profumo who just happened to be the Minister for the Cold War and she was sort of mixed up with the Ruskies somehow so there you have it, bingo, spies, nuclear missiles, parties at Country mansions – the lot.  What ever happened to all those great ‘foreign affairs’ ?

Photo by Lewis Morley 1963

 

Anyhow I got hold of some of the same, or similar, Fritz Hansen chairs and artified them with the bits of young CK Morley didn’t show.  Cool huh?  Well a lot of fun anyway and a great icebreaker at that dinner party when the in-laws call round to make sure their little girl’s looking after herself.  Bound to set their minds at rest don’t you think?

 

 

Food Art and Trompe L’Oeil  Mudcrab

It’s all in the presentation – well with Trompe L’Oeil that is the essence.  We used to run a cooking school in The School House at Port Douglas back in the nineties and mudcrab made a great ice breaker for the opening dinner.  People would come from all over the country to spend a week cooking and eating.  People seldom knew each other before they came.  We knew that it would be a messy affair with crab claw crackers and finger bowls so it is hard to be too self-conscious when you have your hands covered in sauce and crab! 

 

This was the inspiration for my Chilli Mudcrab trompe plate.  We used to get our mudcrabs from one of the great colourful identities of Cairns “Johnny Mudcrab”.  We would order them from old Johnny who spoke with the deep gravelly voice of a well-seasoned fisherman – I never met him but I imagined him to be a well-worn man in his fifties or sixties with a craggy suntanned face and stocky build, probably wearing an old faded T-shirt with Johnny Mudcrab across it, those hard wearing denim shorts and boots.  We never had time to drive from Port Douglas down to Cairns so he would send them up on the Red Line bus live in a box.

http://www.studio49gallery.com/#!the-trompe-loeil-plate-collection/c1alp

 

The bus driver would complain that the crabs were scratching to get out all the way.

Darren Lewtas, a local chef at the time, ran our first cooking school before we hosted the big names like David Thompson and Steve Manfredi, and cooked the most magnificent Thai Style Mud Crab dish.  I have called my trompe dish “Chilli Mudcrab” because that’s how I remember it – all dripping with a rich dark sauce that smelt of ginger and chilli, garlic and wine.  A deep robust dish that was as spectacular as it was delicious.  I wanted to always keep the memory of that dish alive, relive the moment.

Choose your favourite Trompe L'Oeil plate from the artisan works tab.

http://www.studio49gallery.com/#!food-art/c1wkl

 

 

Darren Lewtas’ Thai Style Mudcrab

1st preparation

One mudcrab – 900g to 1kg per person

250g mirepoix of root vegetables including:

Onion, celery, carrot, leek, ginger, garlic  and lemon grass

¼ litre dry white wine

 

Method

Place all ingredients in a heavy pot with a tightly fitting lid and steam for 10 minutes
Remove crab, clean and portion

 

2^nd preparation

Ingredients

2 teaspoons prepared red curry paste

1 large onion finely chopped

2 spring onions finely chopped

1 shredded beetroot

1 tablespoon fish sauce

¼ cup rice wine

½ cup loosely packed fresh coriander

 

 

Method

Combine all ingredients, except coriander and wine , in wok and cook over heat to just coloured
Add cleaned crab and wine
Cover the wok and cook until crab is very hot
Sprinkle with coriander and serve.

 

Food Art and Trompe L'Oeil

 

Food is art and art is food – a feast for the eyes.  They say you eat with your eyes first but to create a visual delight both the chef and the artist need inspiration a starting point that gets the juices flowing that provides the spark to light the fire of passion that becomes the artwork.

 

I remember the inspiration for my Trompe L’Oeil  dish ‘BBQ’d Mackerel’, it was an afternoon walk along the back lane behind my studio in Port Douglas.  It was one of those balmy tropical afternoons.  The lane leads up to the lookout and then down a long flight of steps to Four Mile beach.  The view from the top is magnificent – out across the Coral Sea to Low Isles and the Great Barrier Reef beyond and down below, over the balustrade and down the craggy rock face to the sea lapping over the ancient granite boulders far below.  Fishermen stand and cast their lines far out into the clear water but this afternoon it was different.


 

It wasn’t the endless turquoise water, calm inside the reef, or the stretch of white sand along the beach fringed with coconut palms that seems to run off into infinity, nor the yachts bobbing on the swell or the deep blue Queensland sky it was the waft of bbq’d fish drifting up from below that provided the inspiration.  One of the fishermen had lit a fire and was turning his catch over the hot coals.  The aroma was delicious, I wanted to leap over the handrail and join him.  Fond memories of beach bbqs, of sipping glasses of wine around a bonfire on summer nights, of waking from a night slept beneath the stars on the sand, the smell of the coals still smoldering.   All these flashes of inspiration. 

BBQ'd Mackerel

I love Trompe L’Oeil, the illusion, the trick to appear what it is not.  I needed to capture that moment the fish was lifted from the fire still steaming with the burn marks of the griddle striped across it.  That peculiar flavor that bbq’d fish has, a slightly burnt delicious taste that fills the senses and screams ‘Freedom’.  I wanted, as far as is possible, to make the painted plate of bbq’d Mackerel indistinguishable from the real thing.  I wanted, every time I looked at it, to be transported back to that moment I smelt the fisherman’s catch cooking on that fire on the rocks.