PROFILED BY DE GROOTS MEDIAUt Si Cafe is an old church, refurbished and furnished in a simple and attractive country style with plenty of magazines and contemporary art to occupy you while you take your pew or sit at one of the tables outside. Colette Barnes’ French mother for many years ran a dining inn just up the road, her son, Julien Davies, started his cooking apprenticeship at the highly acclaimed Stillwater Restaurant in Launceston and finished it at the equally acclaimed Fee and Me (where he still does the occasional shift). So you might say food, and a love of good food, run in the family.
And it shows in their use of fresh, organic and free-range ingredients, in the small menu that changes depending on what’s daily to hand, and in the quality and flavours of the cooking itself. You need to be early if you want to buy some of Colette’s hand-made breads to take home. On Julien’s menu the savoury dishes, cakes and desserts are the sort of flavoursome, chock-full-of-goodness, countrified food you hanker for outside the cities, and too seldom find. There might be a spicy pumpkin and almond soup, a creamy chicken and mushroom pie served in a cup with a crisp little puff pastry lid or a whole, locally farmed, baby salmon with fresh horseradish, accompanied by an assortment of freshly picked, and properly dressed, salad leaves. Without foam, sphere, smear or gel in sight, this is what they mean by good food.
Graeme Phillips