Restaurateurs Brent Savage and Nick Hildebrandt will open a new sustainable seafood focused restaurant and bar, Cirrus, on 21 September.
Located at Barangaroo, Cirrus will open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, and will seat 100 including 40 outside.
Cirrus – named after the type of cloud – is housed in the cloud shaped Anadara building on the harbour front at Barangaroo, designed by FJMT’s Richard Francis-Jones.
The restaurant is the fourth venue from Savage and Hildebrandt, who also own and operate Bentley Restaurant + Bar, Monopole and Yellow, which converted to a vegetarian-only menu earlier this year.
Savage’s menu is designed to be shared and puts the spotlight squarely on seafood, however there’s also a selection of meat dishes, and unsurprisingly, significant attention has been paid to vegetables.
The opening menu includes dishes such as Moreton Bay bugs with house-made XO; Northern Territory mud crab with green garlic and tarragon; a ‘Cirrus Platter’, Savage’s take on a seafood platter of oysters, Skull Island prawns, cobia and honey bugs; whole flathead and chips; and a take on the humble Caesar salad – grilled cos lettuce, whipped mullet roe, cured egg yolk and Ortiz anchovies.
Savage said “We’ve been working for almost a year on the menu for Cirrus and it has changed and morphed along the way. The menu is quite large and is great for sharing and I really want people to treat it this way, so they try all types of seafood in the one meal.”
Former Gourmet Traveller Sommelier of the Year, Hildebrandt has put together a wine list that features selections of Sparkling, Chablis, Semillon, Chenin and Jura to complement the seafood focused food offering. The wine list will feature more whites than red, as well as plenty of drops from small producers, and by the glass and carafe options.
Designed by Pascale Gomes-McNabb, the former Noma Australia space has been transformed into a dining room boasting polished concrete floors, a steel bar that seats 20, low lighting at night, and a combination of timber, marble and gold travertine tables, surrounded by a banquette lining the floor to ceiling windows.
An extensive wine wall reflects the venue’s strong emphasis on wine, and in what has become a Bentley Group and Gomes-McNabb signature, the ceiling's design is a focus, comprising hundreds of hanging, sculpted rods and a suspended vintage speed boat, ‘Alvin’.
“We want Cirrus to be a fun place, loud, energetic and busy with an emphasis, of course, on good quality food and drinks that you would come back for again and again,” Hildebrandt said.
