Cotton Duck

This slick new restaurant, with its wood panelling and concrete floors, is next door to Vini – Surry Hills' favourite enoteca. The menu is constructed in a similar way to the menus at fine diners Berowra and Universal - a list of dishes priced at $55 for two courses and $85 for four (or you can order two and pay an extra $15 for a dessert). This choose-your-own-adventure style of dining can be really rewarding if it's explained properly. For instance, it would have been good to know that peas and beans (a mix up of tiny fresh peas and broad beans with parmesan) is essentially a side dish.

Shaky service on the floor is more than made up for with the wine service. There's a focus on local wines, and it's here that you'll really get to see what the 'Duck is all about. Sommelier Laiana Ryan (she used to work the corks at Berowra Waters Inn) is pouring some really interesting stuff from around the local region including some biodynamic and organic drops.

The food, by the by, is best shared. The whole artichoke covered in bagna cauda (a kind of butter sauce with olive oil, anchovies and heaps of garlic and pepper) is exceptional - pull the leaves off and run your teeth along each one, gnawing off the meat of the plant and the rich, salty sauce. The mushroom vol-au-vent is a bronzed pastry encasing a mix of king brown and shiitake mushrooms, all sticky with slightly bitter chicken and heart jus. Meh. A selection of root vegetables - parsnip, turnip, celeriac, leek, fennel and carrots two ways (raw ribbons of purple heirloom and boiled Dutch) - is exciting on paper but waterlogged on the plate. It'd be cool to see some different textures (pickles, roasties, fried things, more raw things) in the mix.

The duck and onion sandwich, however, is quacktacular. Slices of rare roast duck adorn the plate with little onions and pieces of sweet pear. The menu says there's a Jerusalem artichoke salad, too, but there isn't any on our plate. No matter, because there are two blobs of rustic pâté sandwiched between two little golden rounds of fried bread that more than make up for the missing ingredient.

Desserts bring it all home. The pumpkin pie - almost like a Japanese-style take on an American classic - sees a pumpkin-flavoured set cream on great pastry riding shotgun with a pepita-studded brandy snap. And the treacle pudding is well worth a look too: the little cylinder of steamed pudding is soaked in ginger syrup with a blob of ginger and rye ice cream on the top.

It's difficult to know what to make of Cotton Duck. There are some real clangers on the menu (we haven't even mentioned the tough-as-boots pork), but then, there are some doozies as well. Better consistency on the plate is needed. Myffy Rigby