Sunday, November 02, 2008
Bella Restaurant at The Sebel Heritage Yarra Valley
It was 4th October, my last night in Melbourne. I was staying at The Sebel Heritage Yarra Valley. After working all day, we arrived that afternoon, checked-in, showering then going out for more product knowledge then it was time for dinner!

Bella Restaurant offers monthly seasonal changes to the menu and gourmet ingredients from local Yarra Valley produces. As I reading the menu, we had no idea where we should start. As it is a rare occasion, my colleagues determined to have most by ordering different main meals.

Our entree is Bella's Pruners Plate:

Consist of Yarra Valley rabbit terrine with strawberry jam on top, farm house cheese, duck pate (top right), tarragon mustard (below right), mango chutney salsa (below left),and garlic aioli (top left) with biscotti bread.

The bread was not too dried which I like. I love the rabbit terrine, mango chutney and duck pate. In fact, my colleagues scraped these until the other plates were clean while leaving the mustard and cheese.

Next is J's choice of main meal:

Grilled barramundi, garlic prawn brochette, baby peas, spring onions and confit lemon.

She said that the barramundi is absolute delicious and she liked it cook well done (her request).

Nest is L's order:

Boned & roasted baby chicken, truffle foie, pearls onions, creamed celeriac in natural juice.

The baby chicken was tender and soft. It seem just ordinary roast chicken. My friend said that it was not a special dish.

Mine is:

Noisettes of veal, braised savoy vegetable, salt & pepper mascarpone, mushroom & jus.

The veal was tender and everything was the right flavour. The only thing i didn't like is the fried bacon accompanying this dish. It seem not a match, I could easily separated the bacon from the rest of the dish. The mascarpone was melted a bit while we were taking picture each other's dish. I would suggest that the mascarpone should not be salted as it only highlight the salted veal. Love the mushroom, seem it was soaked with jus prior cooking and it was juicy.

All of us loved the dessert:

Hot chocolate souffle with ice cream vanilla.

It's classic, but we loved the warm gooey dark chocolate in the centre while it was cold outside in the Yarra Valley. The ice cream was loaded with vanilla bean and it was delicious after you spoon the gooey warm chocolate souffle down. The butterscotch sauce was sweet as paired with these dark chocolate. As all of us are almost full, we could not finish the souffle. It was bigger than the usual and we loved the intense flavours. Next time I will definitely save more place in my tummy for the souffle.

It was full of fog at 8am on Sunday morning when we were hunting kangaroo picture with the golf cart. What a start for the amazing morning experience. I saw a shadow and shouted, "Kangaroo...!" My friend drove closer to the shadow and we saw a golfer. My friend said that I was hopeless over my over-excited spirit for seeing free kangaroo in the nature...&@^%^#^%&. We found a couple of kangaroo and more and more group of kangaroos around the golf course. We saw ducks, and some black bird with red beak around some golfers that morning. It is a great golf course, designed to blend with the nature very well.

We did have breakfast at Bella Restaurant. I love the breakfast as we were provided with fresh fruit like banana with passion fruit instead banana chips at most hotels do. Also, I noticed that the honey was in a standing glass container with some pieces of honeycombs. We also saw that the fog were flying around to disappear from Yarra Valley around 10am. Nevertheless, as we were running out of time for the massage session that morning, we could not take any picture.
 
posted by Lilia at 5:38 pm | Permalink | 5 comments