“It was never my intention to be a bucket-list restaurant,” says owner Kim Currie, whose new concept will be more inclusive and affordable.
A corrugated iron building surrounded by crabapple trees and tea bushes on the outskirts of Mudgee isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find a high-end dining experience.
Nor was it what owner and executive chef Kim Currie had in mind when she opened The Zin House some 11 years ago. “It was never my intention to be a bucket-list restaurant. That’s not the sort of cook I am,” she says.
The weight of expectations and influence of successive chefs has taken the Good Food Guide hatted restaurant in a direction that Currie no longer recognises as her own.
“Every time I heard the word ‘degustation’, I cringed,” she says. “I would look out and think, there’s nobody here I know. The locals aren’t coming. We’ve become a special occasion place.”
It led to Currie and her husband, David Lowe, of adjacent Lowe Family Wines, deciding it was time to refocus the restaurant and bring it back to its roots. The couple have decided to close Zin House at the end of the year and in January open as Zin − Food & Wine.
Instead of diners paying $155 for a three-hour, five-course tasting menu, there will be a $95 set menu of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern-inspired dishes designed for sharing and served all at once. That price will include three 60-millilitre tasting pours of Lowe Family Wines – a sparkling cuvee, a rosé and a vermentino (or non-alc alternative).
“I just want to cook simply, from scratch, with the food that we grow. I want the restaurant to be more inclusive, less expensive, and just a little more energetic and playful,” she says.
The opening menu will feature flatbread with olive oil and dukkah, corn fritters with saffron creamed corn, eggplant three ways and za’atar chicken skewers, cooked over a hibachi, and served with toum and fresh tomatoes from the garden.
There will be no time limit on the tables, so diners can drop in for a quick lunch or graze at their leisure. The restaurant will open all afternoon, from 11am through to 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays.
Diners will be able to order additional glasses, carafes and bottles from the bar, which will serve new releases, museum releases and archive bottles not available anywhere else.
“We want people to be able to pop up to the bar and say, ‘Can I have a 60ml tasting pour of that 2014 Zinfandel rosé?’ or ‘Hell, we’ll take the whole bottle and have it out on the lawn’,” she says.
In the spirit of sharing, a QR code on the menu will link to all recipes, where diners can watch the dishes being cooked and the wine being made. “They can save the recipe and make it at home, or listen to David in the vineyards, allowing them to dig deeper if they want.”
It’s the kind of experience Currie always dreamed Zin would be: simple, affordable and approachable, with both food and wine together under one (corrugated iron) roof.
Bookings for the new Zin – Food & Wine are now open
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Erina Starkey – Erina is the Good Food App Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously, Erina held a number of editing roles at delicious.com.au and writing roles at Broadsheet and Concrete Playground.
