Rockpool Bar & Grill

Celebrity Australian chef Neil Perry began opening award winning restaurants back in 1989 when he and business partner Trish Richards established the fine dining restaurant Rockpool in Sydney. This restaurant has gone on to win numerous awards and has built Neil Perry into an iconic Australian brand.

His Rockpool Bar and Grill restaurants, opened in Melbourne in 2006, and in Sydney in 2009 have very little to do with technical cooking and are instead urban shrines to well hung beef.

We visited the original Bar and Grill in Melbourne's Southbank complex with a pair of great foodie friends. On entering the restaurant we passed Neil Perry's specially built low humidity, ionized dry aging room and drooled over some very tasty looking chunks of cow.The wine list is prodigious and we kicked off with a Ruinart Rosé at the bar before sitting down to the serious red blooded business of the day.

The beef menu is divided into various cuts of grass fed yearling aged for 35 days, grass fed 36 month old, aged for 57 days and a grain fed 300 day old aged for 60+ days. The cattle are all from quality Australian producers and the cuts range from Rib Eye to T-bone to Fillet.

A simple selection of side dishes are offered as accompaniments and you can select a sauce should you so desire. We begged a bowl of freshly grated horseradish to accompany our beef and bemoaned the lack of the apparently superb goose fat roast potatoes that had disappeared from the menu to be replaced with a rather mundane Potato Puree. Our other sides of Pumpkin and Sweet Potato with Burnt Butter and Garlic Yoghurt and Sauteed Zucchini were very good.

The meat arrived simply cooked with a single wedge of lemon on top and nothing else on the plate. It is a testament to the quality of the produce that this resulted in four very happy diners. Accompanied with a Torbreck Shiraz life just couldn't get much better. My fillet was cooked to perfection, red rare but not bloody due to the aging process, meltingly tender and ever so slightly charred on the outside.

The decor at the Melbourne Bar & Grill is muted to the point of being mundane. If it's decor you are after then head to the Sydney Bar & Grill which is in a superb art deco refurbished building in the CBD. But if it's fabulous cow you are after then either Rockpool Bar & Grill will send you home with a smile.

(A note to less carnivorous eaters - there is a fine selection of seafood dishes offered as well).