I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Ante’s Tagliatelle With Fermented Shiitake Mushrooms

Vinyl bars? We’ve got a few of ’em. I’ll save the long explanation of the genre and just say it’s a Japanese thing Australia has been remixing in the last few years. But while some places feel like cosplay, others – like Bahama Gold in Melbourne and Astral Weeks in Perth – feel like Jimi Hendrix covering Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. They honour the original, but feel irrevocably like their own thing.

But after my recent (umpteenth) visit to Ante in Newtown, here’s what I know to be true: no one in Australia has the vinyl bar genre dialled quite like Matt Young and Jemma Whiteman.

On one hand, Young is the co-founder of Black Market Sake – Australia’s most prolific and intrepid sake importer – who frequents Japan’s far-flung sake breweries and record stores, hence Ante’s peerless caches of sake and vinyl. On the other hand, Whiteman has long been one of our chefs to watch, at Pinbone, Cafe Paci and many other crucial Sydney restaurants.

But to think of Ante strictly as a sake bar with great food is kinda wrong. So too is thinking of it as a restaurant with a serious sake list. Whatever you do – don’t call it an izakaya. Young and Whiteman’s alchemy is way too specific.

All of this brings me to a dish I’ve had on rotation for years: Ante’s tagliatelle with fermented shiitake mushrooms.

“This was the dish I had in my head while we were dreaming of the bar,” Whiteman tells Broadsheet. “We opened Ante with the hope that people could experience sake paired with anything and everything.”

In the moody lighting, the tangle of blonde noodles and mushrooms bathed in a slick, terracotta-coloured sauce looks deceptively like a bougie boscaiola. But from a flavour perspective, it may as well have crash-landed from outer space.

“I think what makes the dish work so well is that it combines layers of umami-rich ingredients: a butter made from dried mushrooms, fermented shiitakes, kombu and parmesan cheese,” Whiteman says. “We emulsify it together with a little pasta water to create a rich and savoury sauce, balanced by the acidity of the lactic fermentation and a little squeeze of lemon juice.”

That emulsion is the reason Danielle Alvarez could smash two bowls. Me? I want to suck it off my chopsticks all night long. Order extra bread and mop, mop, mop till there’s nothing left. It cloaks your tastebuds in a sensual umami funk that hits like nothing else – especially when Isaac Hayes’s Shaft theme starts oozing from Ante’s primo hi-fi. Can you dig it? Right on.

@ante_syd