Igni @ Geelong -You see this freak, squirting his special sauce on a plate? Yeah well I’m not entirely sure he is sane ?unless he’s a high functioning magic mushroom addict? because HOW DOES HE INVENT THESE TASTE COMBOS? Sprinks, you know me – I am not prone to exaggeration – but I am very very close to asking Aaron Turner to be my manwife faw reals. He just made me the best meal of my life.
Customers don’t get a menu, because Aaron doesn’t know what he is cooking til he shows up to werk and looks in the fridge to see what is there #UNILYF. He offers 8 courses – you can opt for more along the way – but be sure to look around you because the other tables (weirdly erryone was under 45?) are being served different dishes from you. Like WTF is this a restaurant in The Faraway Tree? Anyway, there isn’t enough praise I can dish out about what happened to my pie-hole, I discredit his creative genius with my limited vocab and short attention span, so I’m just going to tell you the ingredients in some of the dishes:
Pine needle yoghurt, freeze dried plums and flowering-gum ice-cream.
2-day fermented pork belly, chargrilled carrot with emu bush salt.
Crumbled blue vein covered with Meredith goat-cheese granita, mint and served in a freaking shell and eaten like ice-cream.
King George whiting-mustard leaf, tamarind and salmon roe in a sea of roasted tomato juice water.
Smoked celeriac with cured yolk swimming in wallaby tail broth which I can still taste when I think about it meow. PS I don’t know what celeriac is.
I also went off-grid and got paired NON-alcoholic wines with my dishes. They were so good that I interrupted the people beside me to request they try them all with me. The dranks were crazy colours (bright orange, purple, baby pink), that would bubble or even pop, and the flavours were insane – half of them should have been a meal in their own right, like a cold soup thing. ‘Do you mean gazpacho?’ Shut up.
In addition to the incred delights that await you at IGNI aka heaven, ole mate Turner’s staff are bae and kewl AF, you kinda feel like you’ve met them all before and would trust them with your spare key. The 50pax dining room has dem posh homely feels, and the chunes dat pump but not overpoweringly, are A flippin plus. Hanging out in a back alley in Geelong has never been so mind blowing.
