Ester: Australian Cooking

make a fire. fake a fire. roast your oysters. dance for pipis. slow it down. raise a toast. take lunch. grill a salad. bake a crab. step outside. burn your pav. pass the salt. eat with your hands. chew on the bone.

Ester is an invitation to play with your food and enjoy the adventure. It’s born of an eponymous restaurant in inner Sydney, but it’s proudly not a restaurant book. Think of it more as the foundations for some new ideas in your kitchen and at your table; written to be used, shared, read aloud, perhaps burnt.

Mat Lindsay’s cooking resists easy labels. Certainly it’s a distinct kind of full-flavoured Australian food: generous, mindfully chosen seafood; darkly caramelised wood-fired bread; vegetables cooked to just the right level of doneness; meat that’s been treated with respect and, often, time; and the odd burnt pavlova, a true signature. Ester the restaurant is all about its wood-fired oven and the magic it imparts, but the fundamentals don’t change at home, and everything in this book can be made delicious wherever you live.

The ethos of Mat’s acclaimed and widely beloved Chippendale restaurant has always been to offer guests a no-rules good time and the intention within these pages is just the same. Whether it prompts you to rethink the possibilities of toast, roast your fruit, try the classic cauliflower, or embrace Sunday lunch, the Ester playbook presents many ideas to cook and live by.

Mat Lindsay is one of Australia’s best cooks and food thinkers. No overstatement. He grew up on the central coast of New South Wales and had never been to a fancy restaurant until he walked in the door of Neil Perry’s Rockpool, the fanciest restaurant in Sydney in its day, looking for a job to pay the bills while he was studying graphic design. Working for Neil Perry and for Kylie Kwong, two of Australia’s most celebrated chefs, at Wokpool, Rockpool and at Billy Kwong, he learnt about produce and technique, about how to taste and how to build and balance flavour. Under Kylie particularly, he also acquired a capacity to always question western assumptions around food. Mat opened his restaurant Ester in Sydney’s Chippendale in 2013. He followed up with the bar (aka place to eat food with your wine) Poly in 2018 and he runs AP Bread on the side (toast is a passion). Cooking with fire has become a thing since he opened Ester, and he is self-taught - on the job - the fire was only operational a couple of days before the restaurant opened. He hasn’t looked back. People associate his food with simplicity, thought and big flavours.