India Godfrey-Hill

Ortiga is one of Australia’s most contemporary and polished restaurants with a wine list to match. The personal crusade of restaurateur Simon Hill, it fuses the depth of the cellar he established while operating Isis on the same site, with a comprehensive, leading-edge Spanish component.

Whether you’re eating the modern Spanish fare served adjacent to the kitchen downstairs or snacking from small plates in the open bar, there’s a wealth of wine on offer. Wines by the glass carry a Spanish accent and trace around the parameters of the cuisine. Sherry takes a prominent pride of place, and there’s an overall sense of quality and value.

Each part of the list shows a deep understanding of the context, genre and form among top producers. Both the Burgundy and Spanish sections feature useful information. The depth of the Bordeaux on offer shows an appreciation for serving great wines at their peak. Feature pages for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Guigal add lustre to the top end of the European choices. The Australian content reflects the strength of each region represented, making a comprehensive statement of the leading edge of Australian wine.

The presentation and impeccable service led by Simon Hill and sommelier Matt Brooke rounds out the wine experience with world-class attention to detail. Guests can tap into any section of this extensive wine list with confidence, knowing they’re in experienced hands. 

WORDS NICK STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY ORTIGA

Ortiga, 446 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley, Qld, (07) 3852 1155

This article is from the August/September 2010 issue of Gourmet Traveller WINE.

The city’s diners and bars received a glowing report card from Gourmet Traveller’s chief critic Pat Nourse.

“I eat in Brisbane a few times a year and have done so over the last decade or so and this is one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen,” he said.

Fortitude Valley restaurant Ortiga was nominated for New Restaurant of the Year with Mr Nourse commenting that he found it “one of the most exciting restaurants to visit”.

“Whether it was in New York or London, Sydney or Brunswick St, Ortiga is benchmarking excellent food, wine and service,” he said.

Urbane pastry chef Shaun Quade, who moved here from Victoria to take up a position in the revamped fine diner in October, has been put forward as Best New Talent.

“If the guys from MasterChef think tangling with Adriano Zumbo is an eye-opener, wait till they get a load of this guy,” Mr Nourse said.

Two Queensland restaurants, Aria and 1889 Enoteca, received nominations for their wine lists.

“What’s very interesting is that Brisbane restaurants have always punched above their weight for the quality of their wine,” Mr Nourse said. “1889 Enoteca has one of the most interesting lists you’ll find anywhere in Australia.”

He also praised the professionalism of Brisbane’s bar culture, mentioning hot spots such as The Bowery, Mana Bar, Laruche, The Lark and Cloudland.

“Of course you can’t talk about Brisbane without mentioning Logan Rd, with two blocks of concentrated awesomeness like Enoteca and The Crosstown Eating House,” Mr Nourse said, adding that it was an “exciting time in Brisbane”.

SIMON Hill, owner of Ortiga, is a mate of mine. That’s no big deal. I have a bunch of friends in the restaurant business.

While I can predict mutterings of favouritism, the greater danger, however, lies in the fact that I’m nervous about seeming biased and, therefore, am at risk of not doing a place justice.

It seems you can’t turn around in Brisbane these days without bumping into a Spanish menu.

Or, more specifically, a tapas menu, with the bite-sized sharing plates becoming de rigueur in the city’s bars and restaurants.

Some do it more authentically than others though. It’s not every restaurant you’ll find genuine jamon Iberico de bellota, cured from black pigs who’ve feasted exclusively on acorns. At more than $1000 a kilogram ($55 for 50g serving), there’s probably good reason for this. But then restaurateur Simon Hill has always taken his food seriously.

Having run Isis to critical acclaim for 12 years, Hill closed up shop in late 2008, completely gutting the multi-award winning venue during its transformation to Ortiga.

Upstairs, a tapas bar is full of swanky young things enjoying a Saturday night drink and nibbles among rustic wood tables and exposed brick walls.

With mood lighting and upbeat tunes, only the climate-controlled glass cabinet of pigs’ hinds above the bar gives any indication this is not just the latest watering hole to take up residence on Brunswick Street.

A glance through the sexy A6-sized bar menus – revealing nearly 20 sherries by the glass – also hints at authenticity.

Despite an appealing list of foreign beers and cocktails, I decide that when in Rome – or Jerez, in this case – it’s best to adopt the local custom and with the waitress’s help isolate a sherry that strikes my optimum balance between sweet and dry.

With such an enjoyable ambience, it’s with some reluctance we’re taken downstairs to the basement dining room. But we needn’t have worried. Apart from white cloths on the tables, the tone and decor remain similar, with diners seated in an L-shape around a very exposed kitchen. No Gordon Ramsay-style tirades from staff here.

A 40-page wine list is daunting at first, stopping everywhere from the Granite Belt to Burgundy, with an understandable emphasis on the Spanish varietals. Prices are just as varied, ranging from $35 to $16,500, while the ability to order by the half-glass, glass, half bottle or 500mL means the wine is pleasingly accessible.

Asked to recommend a tempranillo within a certain budget, our personable waiter was eager to accommodate and convert us to one of his favourite drops. Mission accomplished.

The menu is part old-school Spanish, part new vogue cuisine and the beauty of entree-sized servings to share is that you can flit between genres and eras.

And so it was we started with an ultra traditional ‘pulpo a la Gallega’ – tender pieces of Galician octopus served on discs of firm potato and topped with paprika. It was deliciously unpretentious, like gourmet peasant food.

Contrast this with deconstructed ‘pig’s head’: an innovative trio of slow-cooked pork cheeks, julienned deep-fried ear, and snout crumbed in pistachios (all delicious, though the texture of the snout was, shall we say, challenging).

Having settled on our choices, the chefs preferred to stagger their arrival as they saw fit, and so we criss-crossed our way through a rustic and hearty chickpea and baby octopus stew and an exceptional salad of crisp radish, orange, hazelnuts and black olives.

Of our five dishes, only the last went unfinished: cylinders of pancetta-wrapped rabbit, served with king brown mushrooms and fresh snails in a cappucino foam, was just too rich, although by this time our stomachs were starting to beg for mercy.

The beauty of Spanish cuisine is that it’s every bit as delicious as that of its northern neighbours, but without the pretentiousness and formality so often attached to French cuisine.In that regard, Hill and chef Pablo Tordesillas couldn’t have been more loyal to the Spanish spirit.

Whereas most of Brisbane’s top-notch restaurants retain an unfortunately stilted feel, Ortiga oozes personality, but is no less delicious for it.

Perfect for people who take their food – but not themselves – seriously.

Reviewer rating:

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Grazia Review

AFTER a couple of $10 finos at the zinc-topped, street-level bar of Fortitude Valley’s scalding Ortiga, we descend to the engine room, a white, linen-clad subterranean warehouse-style dining salon and naked kitchen for, among other things, a $50 flounder, no chips.

Don’t misunderstand me. Ortiga is not particularly expensive (although it’s not cheap). But it represents the ultimate Australian expression yet of how the aspirational middle classes have co-opted the essentially rustic beast that is traditional Spanish home cooking. Just when did our exchange rate with the euro slip so far?

The answer, perhaps, is when Brisbane restaurateur Simon Hill decided his old Isis site and chef Pablo Tordesillas (not to mention his amazing wine collection) could be put to better use. The result, while in no way formal, is undoubtedly Australia’s most serious Spanish restaurant, a place with double-draped tables, besuited maître d’ and a multi-vintage collection of Romanée-Conti (alongside a prodigious selection of Aussies and Spaniards) that makes an obvious, stark comparison with either Melbourne MoVidas, or Sydney’s Bodega. Where the southerners exude tongue in cheek, an easy blurring of the boundaries between drinking and eating and a slightly beguiling informality, Ortiga takes itself more seriously. If you’re down here, you’re down to dine. And dine well.

Tordesillas’ menu adopts the vogue mode of offering several dishes for two: one is that flounder, grilled, boned and served in a golden puddle of butter and olive oil, with chardonnay vinegar, parsley and massive garlic chips. It’s a textbook, bold and lively version of a fish that, admittedly, polarises. It comes with a mixed leaf salad. And like everything we eat, the produce, while of great quality, is lacking any real sense of provenance. The rest of Australia is boasting about its Queensland beef and in Ortiga, the meat’s from WA! It’s a Brisbane thing.

The flounder, and indeed a bowl of lovely, fried, eat-’em-whole school prawns with citrus salt and the creamiest alioli, veer towards the rustic. But there are unquestionably ambitious dishes, too. A special of mud crab – flesh plus brown innards turned to a sauce – is tossed with herbs (dill, parsley, celery leaf) and served within a nest of green beans and peppers with broad beans, a dill salsa verde and a red pepper sauce all around. The pretty/arty splodges will impress some more than others.

A salad of seared tuna belly, cucumber ribbon, heirloom tomatoes, grilled baby onion and olive oil sorbet is creative and contemporary without being too fussy, while the combination of oysters beneath flat-beaten pork trotter meat, sautéed nettle, hazelnuts, a gelatinous pork jus and pinwheels of crackling (pictured) is destined for signature status, instantly. Unique and wonderful.

Here is a menu with some fresh ideas that don’t seem to have done the usual molecular rounds, a fresh feel in an espuma-free environ.

A little goat’s milk pudding with fresh figs, truffled honey and candied walnuts is a delight; the use of commercially made tortitas de aceite, the Sevillian pastry wafers, with a chocolate and caramel ice cream can be forgiven when the ice cream is this good and the broken wafers so fine. Less forgivable is the seemingly random policy on bread for tables (we saw none, others were luckier). At $50 per flounder, it’s a little middle-class expectation that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Let’s call it an Australian perspective on Spain.

Ortiga,  446 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley, phone 07 3852 1155
Hours: Tue-Sat, 6pm-late
Typical Prices: E$17, M$25, D$12
Summary: Detail that’s hard to fault and some serious cooking mark this as a standout newcomer
Like this? Try: Bar Lourinha, Melbourne; El Toro Loco, Sydney
Stars: 3.5

The Courier Mail

Lizzie Loel

January 18, 2010

RENOVATIONS can be painful experiences and for Simon Hill and his team at Ortiga – the restaurant formerly known as Isis – the highly anticipated opening has been a bittersweet process.

First came the sweet bit – the field trip where Hill and his key people, chef Pablo Tordesillas and manager/sommelier Matt Brook, spent three weeks distilling their vision and eating their way around the Spanish culinary landscape.

Sourcing and creating fantastic artisan produce like jamons and the Ortiga-branded sausages made to Tordesillas’ recipes in Sydney and giving the already substantial cellar a Spanish injection must also have been fun.

Then there was the bitter – the building process and its associated drama, all of which eventually fell into place with one monster exception.

The very open kitchen now located downstairs needed a complicated extraction fan, which came in parts from Germany. Unfortunately, they didn’t fit and this set the opening back by months.

Looking like a modern art installation, this umbrella of steel is mighty powerful and necessary because the kitchen is quite literally in the dining area.

Tordesillas is parked nightly at the dolomite stone pass which is designed to look like a kitchen table. Grills fire and the enticing aromas reach the nearby tables minus the smoke and bluster from the plancha grill.

The brick wall behind the kitchen has been glassed in and backlit, creating one of the most attractive open-plan kitchens I’ve seen.

The menu takes some explaining.

Upstairs it’s simple wines by the glass and delicate tapas like piquillo peppers stuffed with salt cod, Spanish pizza topped with spreadable pork sausage, boards of Iberico and other jamons. A delicious baby gem-heart lettuce is draped with cantabrian anchovies with a creamy valdeon dressing or you can nibble on some spiced nuts, olives and shucked-to-order oysters. Downstairs, traditional recipes have been given a shake up in both preparatory methods and plating techniques.

Oysters with pigs’ trotters is an example. Where you would expect some charcuterie in the form of a hoof, perhaps stuffed with oysters, you get no such thing. Put through several intricate cooking processes until the meat literally falls apart, it is then set and cut into strips. This wraps around the oysters, encasing them entirely, and the dish is served warm with a piquant blend of fried ortigas (stinging nettles), crushed fried bread, garlic and nuts. Hard to picture? I’m sure it is but, trust me, the flavour burst of the hidden oysters is a gastronomic show-stopper.

Carrillera de cerdo estofada, or pork cheeks – the actual cheeks about the size of an eye, not the fleshy jowls – are vacuum-packed and slow braised in a circulator with fino sherry and almonds. The result is stunning. It’s as rich as Croesus but you want to drink the sauce straight up.

Ajo blanco is normally a soup garnished with grapes and melon but this version is a creamy cappuccino draped elegantly over smoked eel and garnished with grapes.

Escabeche of quail is an artistic arrangement of tiny, fragrant quail joints perfumed with coriander and fennel, seared until lightly caramelised and served with a bitter leaf salad to balance the sweet richness of the meat.

Goat’s milk is just set using a rennet derivative and forms a soft, wobbly custard so delicate it’s almost gossamer-like. Sliced fig is the perfect accompaniment but the truffled honey is a double edged sword. The honey is ideal but the truffle packs a bit too much punch for my palate.

The wine list is easily one of the state’s best, with eloquent descriptions that help decode the multiple global listings and you are also in good hands with manager/sommelier Matt Brook, whose knowledge of the menu and its evolutionary background is invaluable.

It might have nearly done him in but Simon Hill has pulled this one off and then some. This is bold, robust food put through molecular techniques and plated in an artistic and contemporary manner. It is hard to get the x-factor that the place is already exuding down on paper – guess you’ll have to see for yourself.

THE SCORE

Food: 18.5

Wine: 19

Service: 18.5

Ambience: 18