Ah-ummm? Ah-ooom? Ah-woooom? Aooooooooooom? When jazz composer Charles Mingus released Ah Um in 1959 , listeners weren’t quite sure how to pronounce the ground-breaking album’s name. Many still aren’t. The avant-garde Mingus, of course, wasn’t in the business of telling people how to respond to his art – let alone how to pronounce something – preferring to let end-users come to their own conclusions.
Which kind of makes Ah Um a perfect name for the Astral Weeks’ team’s new, difficult-to-pigeonhole restaurant that opened on Friday . Because while chef Branden Scott’s bowerbird menus might feature farmhouse-style dishes such as gem lettuce teamed with the Basque sheep’s milk cheese Ossau-Iraty, or anchovies dressed with olive oil – you know, plates you might have expected to eat during Scott’s Wines of While era – Ah Um isn’t a European restaurant or a wine bar. (Having said that, the wine list that South Australian winemaker Jean-Baptiste Courdesses has written for the bar wouldn’t look out of place at either of those establishments.
) Scallop crudo with the Peruvian dressing leche de tigre (“tiger’s milk”) and good oysters sharpened with a puckering rhubarb mignonette speak to a love of seafood, but steak tartare with prawn crackers suggests the menu is as much turf as it is surf. And although there’s a bunch of interesting, small-scale sake imported by Blackmarket Sake – and the team behind Sydney’s brilliant Ante – Ah Um is in zero.