Elizabeth Street Food + Wine opened on 7 June 2013, the sister site to Castray Esplanade Food + Wine.
ESF+W are not just a restaurant, they also sell locally sourced fine produce, laid out in a way that takes you back to the green grocer days of old.
This Girl and her Gore Grind Devotee specifically went to ESF+W for their black pudding. The Gore Grind Devotee is a black pudding connoisseur and one of his mates recommended ESF+W as the best black pudding in Hobart.
Gore Grind Devotee is a fried eggs, bacon, black pudding and two pieces of toast-kind-a-guy (got to have two pieces of toast). To his shock, the black pudding was served with a fried egg in a salad of pea shoots, smoked tomatoes, red onion and salsa verde, $15. ESF+W don’t do any menu variations but the desire black pudding meant he had to swap his usual toast for salad.
And what a salad it was! The ‘best salad’ he’s ever eaten in his own words!He said that if I served him up salads like that, he’d eat them every day, and he especially loved the smoked tomatoes!
We found this pic of their black pudding on ESF+W facebook page!
We chatted to the co-owners, Michael and Karen as we were paying and they told us they are also huge black pudding fans and make their own for the restaurant in the French way, without the oat filling of the Eastern Europe black puddings. This has now become Gore Grind Devotee’s favourite type of black pudding, it is very strong in flavour, which he totally loves.
This Girl had their Braised mushrooms, with olives, labneh on a grilled flatbread for $15 and was a serious taste sensation.
And we went not once, but twice!
On our return visit, the Gore Grind Devotee didn’t deviate from his black pudding obsession, This Girl tried the Baked pumpkin and ricotta gnocchi with pesto cream sauce for $16 however. Not what I would class as a gnocchi, more a vegetable bake, however delicious none the less.
ESF+W have got it going on in their restaurant, generally I am not into places that won’t do any menu variations, however these guys know their flavours and so far, all our meals have been great and they are also reasonably priced.
What This Girl loves about ESF+W is their commitment to use local suppliers and sustainably produced products. They have a huge chalkboard with a Tassie map drawn on it which details where they source their produce.
They sell a huge array of fresh meat and vegetables, they even have take home ‘ready meals’ but these are ESF+W meals that you won’t find in any cardboard packaging in a supermarket freezer, these are fresh meals ready to heat up and serve at home!
The whole set-up of ESF+W makes you feel like you could spend a beautiful few leisurely hours there, eating fine meals on their large communal tables, the roadside windows open. It’s a great way to do some traffic and people watching from your seat on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Then you can browse their produce to buy and take home.
There is so much to choose from and This Girl loves that you know exactly where your produce is coming from.
Oh and of course they sell wine, but not just wine, they sell some of the best local beer and ciders available.
