Mona, the Disneyland of art

(See part three)

And when everyone was feeling full, ready for something that would not mean sitting by a table for a real dinner, everyone got on board a yacht called Mona Roma, the acronym of Museum of Old and New Art, but who knows why Roma too. Anyway, another stretch of water up the river Derwent and we docked at the pier of a special history museum. This was created and desired by David Walsh, born in 1961, who managed to put together a big fortune by developing a fantastic system to bet on horses without ending up unsaddled. Not at all.

It has an almost unique history, as the museum is located in Berriedale, a dozen kilometres north of Hobart, in what was once (and still is) a winery, namely Moorilla Estate Wines. It was founded in 1958 by an Italian, Claudio Alcorso, born in 1913, who the tempests of life soon beached in Australia. An anti-fascist, he emigrated to Sydney not to bend to the regime. Then the second world war pushed him ever further, to the edges, in Hobart. Walsh sided him financially until he passed away, in 2000. He then took the reins.

One year later, in 2001, he opened the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities, other three years and a brewery arrived in 2004, the Moo Brew, next to the winery. In 2007 the museum was closed and completely renovated. It opened again in 2011 and the success was incredible because it has nothing to do with a classic art museum. Excavated in the rocks, it looks like it is entering the bowels of the earth. They have defined it as an adult version of Disneyland. There’s something true just like there is some envy, because the truth is that it is so enchanting it has become the most visited destination in the whole of Tasmania.

For the dinner on November 14th, Walsh, as a perfect host, not only pulled out the table from his (previous) wedding, but he even made it longer so it could seat over three hundred people, a glass snake in an artificial cavern welcoming the most demanding phase for the three chefs. It is one thing to cook prawn tails on the embers, another to prepare three fine dining dishes in a precarious situation, with people from all around the world to judge.

So we reach the third chapter in Restaurant Australia, the most important one, because Shewry, Gilmore and Perry were called to move down that hardly traced trench, which one can notice or not, placed to separate the kitchen as a physical obligation not to disappear from the art of sublimation of a total pleasure for the heart and soul. Nobody was there to be fed or understand how good the chefs were. Being in an art museum it was a clear way of stating that Australian food and wine can go beyond fine dining, the pleasure of a good meal to recommend to your friends.

Three dishes and six wines, white and red chosen so they could represent the whole national production, highlighting with the various pairings “the elegance and the style, the taste of Australian cuisine”.

If one were to find a small imperfection, a needle lost in a haystack, a close attention to vegetables was missing, after one of Shewry’s starters, the small corncob.

4. To be continued