Bathers and Flavours
No other condiment complements seafood like the salt of an afternoon sea-breeze. Warm it all with streaming sunshine, hovering gulls, Ipanema beach congos and swaying pines and you'll start to get the impression of what dining at Café Del Pescatore is all about.
Scarborough Beach 's Café del Pescatore bridges café and restaurant in a way that is difficult to describe. Fine food and diligent service are matched with an informal ambiance and satisfying prices, nicely disorientating in a restaurant scene gripped by concrete-floor minimalism and price-optimisation strategies.
The surroundings are modelled on an old fisherman's shack, with Greek island blues and whites that hint at tradition and dedication to food and family. The café provides a warm, comfortable environment despite being light and airy, which is a strange trick indeed.
I lustily went for the mango oysters as a starter. The mangos were a furious orange, heaped atop oysters bedded in crushed ice. Even those unfortunate oyster-phobic souls would enjoy this dish: all the flavour of good oysters without being overpowering. The chilled sweetness of the mangos seized one side of my tongue, while the salt of the oysters lashed at the other; flashes of tabasco and lemon juice appeared elusively between the sweet/salt opera. Triple-bottom-line: these oysters were both dramatic and delicious.
Chef Paul Chapman sources the oysters fresh from Ceduna for the most part, and occasionally from New Zealand to avoid the floury texture oysters develop at the end of the season. Squid is sourced from the north-west and the crayfish are plucked from the deep blue all along the WA coast.
For mains, our waitress Sarah (who came topped with a magical Hiroshima-like blast of viciously spiralling blonde curls) brought me the Linguini con Gamberi Aglio Olio - aka linguini with garlic prawns. It was very different from most pasta dishes: a melody of individual flavours rather than a flat fusion - similar to listening to a song and only focusing on one instrument at a time. Like a good salad, the mouth's attention went from ingredient to ingredient, never sure whether capsicum, a pine nut, or an olive will say "ciao" next. The lack of typical red-sludge sauce pushed the seafood and floral scents of the olive oil to the fore; the exact respect that delicate seafood should be afforded, but rarely is.
Our host Nick Fiore - the epitome of friendly Aussie restaurant professionalism - matched the linguini with a particularly good bottle of Secret Stone Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough in New Zealand , which was soft with pineapples and lychees hiding among the grass. This wine gave me heady flashbacks to the mango oysters and was well selected to complement the pasta. Summer is crayfish season, which means some glorious months of eating are at hand. Café del Pescatore's owner, Nick Fiore, assures me that I haven't tasted anything until I try his crayfish. If what I ate today was "nothing", then "something" must surely be unmissable. So bring your bikini or boardies, then swim, surf, or stroll up the sand to Café del Pescatore, lick your fingers, return to the sand and smile.
