Restaurant: Mocean Restaurant and Bar
It’s the stuff of kitchen legend, but everywhere you turn the lads from Banc seem to be climbing that ladder. Perhaps it was Liam Tomlin’s tongue that separated the men from the boys. In a baptism of fire, Marcus Chant arrived here from the UK and was inducted into the Banc hall of fame. Trained by his father at the Glenneagles in Chewton Glenn, he had worked in London’s Greenhouse Restaurant and at the Gidleigh Park Hotel under Gary Rhodes. Now the head chef at Bondi’s Mocean, he is taking the restaurant in a new direction. The menu comfortably straddles the gastro pub and casual modern Australian dining, and all with those beach views that (luckily for us) keep attracting British chefs to our shores.
Chant’s earliest food memory is of hand cut fresh asparagus. His favourite restaurant is Petrus in London, and he looks to chefs Marco Pierre White and Heston Blumenthal for inspiration. On his days off he likes to make use of living on the coast by cooking up some quick and easy seafood, and his kitchen tip for all of us home cooks? Always bake your potatoes for mash. Food for thought indeed.
Sarah Theeboom, July 2007
