Soaring columns, 17 steaks, art deco panache: Does Rockpool still have what it takes?

Suited maitre d’. Soft but audible jazz. Fat hissing on hot coals and art deco panache. On a wet Tuesday night, everything is luxury-steakhouse business as usual at Rockpool Bar & Grill, a temple to expense accounts and the cow since 2009. Except … hang on a minute. What’s this? The menu is smaller! It seems half the size it was six months ago. “Look how they massacred my boy!” (To quote The Godfather and a nine-year-old meme.)

Neil Perry, its original showrunner, cashed out of the restaurant years ago and, these days, it’s operated by Hunter St Hospitality, a group backed by asset management firm Metrics Credit Partners. With more top-end competition from the likes of Grill Americano next door, not to mention consumer confidence in a death spiral, I had feared Hunter Street’s finance officers would eventually come for Rockpool’s sprawling menu.

The carte has always featured one of Australia’s best line-ups of rock-star fishers and farmers, with pristine crudo from the “cold bar” up top, a side of speck-fortified mac and cheese at the bottom and a ferocious amount of meat, salad and seafood in between. Pasta has long been a strong point, too, especially the semolina noodles sparkling with Moreton Bay bug and the twin-engine umami horsepower of smoked tomatoes and prawn oil.

Now the menu is … actually, no, don’t worry. Stand down. On closer inspection, it’s pretty much the same length. The pasta is still there, plus 60 other items across two pages in a leather-bound folder, rather than printed daily on a giant piece of cardboard. The perceived reduction in size is a trick of the menu’s new graphic design, introduced three months ago.

Although, now that I’m thinking about it, the menu is so bloody big it probably could be halved and Rockpool would still be heaving with guests (like it is on this cold evening). Certainly, chefs Santiago Aristizabal and Joyal Mathew grill fish with stunning precision, and if you want to order half a Far North Queensland coral trout, surrounded by clams and finished with lime leaf, this is the place. A wood-fired pork chop, sticky with caramelised whey, tastes engineered for the mighty collection of red Burgundy. But we’re all here for the steaks, right?

There are 17 (!) steak choices on this visit, from a David Blackmore full-blood wagyu topside for $65, to a $380 Cape Grim chateaubriand. A 400-gram CopperTree Farms rib-eye, butchered in-house from a Hereford that spent a good life foraging grass, comes out rosy-pink, neatly sliced and full of strong, beefy flavour. The crisp, charred exterior loves a dab of bearnaise, which comes from a kitchen that really knows how to make bearnaise.

Rockpool’s longevity also stems from its front-of-house team, currently led by general managers Dane Reid and Kayla Mueggenburg. The first time I ate here was the year it opened, and it was obvious that my girlfriend and I (we’d saved for two months for the occasion) wouldn’t be spending big. But rather than ignore us for the puffy old boys huffing Beaune Premier Cru, our waiter sent out complimentary sliders (remember, this was 2009) and a surprise bowl of onion rings: “I could tell you really wanted to order them – these are on me.”

I’m recognised on this occasion but, while watching other guests, I clock that every bottle is ceremonially presented, every empty glass quickly cleared or refilled. If it’s your birthday, there’s a little cake and candle. Egalitarian hospitality. Crunchy potatoes. Soaring columns that feel like a set from Batman Returns. Everything is still in its right place at Rockpool Bar & Grill on a wet Tuesday night. The Platonic “rich man’s folly, poor man’s dream” (to quote a Bill Callahan song about recreational boating).

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine