Broadsheet and Melissa Leong Are Hosting a One-Off Dinner With O Tama Carey at Palazzo Salato

Sri Lankan cuisine meets pasta at this ambitious cook-off between two leading chefs. In partnership with Cat Amongst the Pigeons, here’s what’s going down.

For food industry heavyweight Melissa Leong, there’s nothing more exciting than a novel combination. The food critic, TV host and consultant has made a splash over the years bringing together chefs with big reputations, but very different backgrounds, for one-off dining events.

“That kind of stuff really lights up my brain,” she says. “When you throw the right combination together, you can achieve alchemy that just can’t be sustained in a regular restaurant concept.”

So when Broadsheet and South Australian winemaker Cat Amongst the Pigeons asked her to play matchmaker for a one-night-only event earlier this year, she was all-in.

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“Cat Amongst the Pigeons and Broadsheet came to me with a blank slate to create the kind of dining event I want,” she says. “They let me curate who I wanted to work with, and I let the real talent do their best after that. My skill is in curation – theirs is everything else.”

That event – which saw Melbourne chefs Victor Liong (Lee Ho Fook) and Matt McConnell (Bar Lourinha) blend Spanish and Portuguese with Malay and Cantonese cuisine – was a sell-out. “Tickets were snapped up, and it translated into an evening of truly collaborative and thought-provoking food, wine and conversation,” Leong says. “I was absolutely blown away.”

Now, preparations are underway for two follow-ups. In Melbourne, head chef Ronith Arlikatti welcomes the legendary Christine Manfield to Hopper Joint on November 20. And Sydney gets its turn on November 14, when celebrated Sri Lankan chef and food writer O Tama Carey joins Love Tilly Group’s Scott McComas-Williams in the kitchen at Palazzo Salato.

“O Tama Carey and Scott McComas-Williams are two of my favourite chefs in Sydney,” Leong says. “They’ve marched to the beat of their own drum, delivering edgy, captivating and delicious food.”

Carey’s Darlinghurst restaurant, Lankan Filling Station, is known for its innovative Sri Lankan fare made, increasingly, with native Australian ingredients. Here, Carey combines recipes from her mother and grandmother’s arsenal, as well as her research trips to Sri Lanka, with Chinese and European techniques (she’s worked at both Billy Kwong and Bistro Moncur). McComas-Williams, on the other hand, is a pasta craftsman. Palazzo Salato, where he heads the kitchen, is an ambitious Italian restaurant that pays homage to Roman trattorias and grand diners like New York’s Gramercy Tavern.

It’s certainly an unpredictable pairing.

Leong anticipates something “dynamic, exciting and special”. Rather than “forcing things together that might not work, I think of this more as truly integrative collaboration,” she says. “Scott and O Tama are mates outside of school, and I want to see how they blend their styles and flavours.”

The two chefs have actually cooked together before. “I worked at Lankan with O Tama a few years back,” McComas-Williams says. “Despite it being a pretty short stint, it was and still is one of the most fun and interesting kitchens I’ve worked in.

“It’s humbling to have the opportunity to collab with her, especially with such an interesting crossover of flavours. Sri Lankan cuisine and pasta is a pretty wild concept on paper, but putting our heads together we’ve found some ripping combos that make a lot of sense – I’m looking forward to sharing it.”

The group has a fitting partner for this event in Cat Amongst the Pigeons. “Their DNA is all about surprise and juxtaposition, and I am all for that,” says Leong. Each dish Carey and McComas-Williams create will be matched to drops from the winery’s Fat Cat range, adding another interesting dynamic to the night.

“As the name suggests, Cat’s wines deliver on big, rich flavour and outstanding quality,” says Leong. “It’s the perfect complement to … the bold pairing between O Tama’s Sri Lankan cooking and Scott’s Italian-inspired venue.” The label’s brand-new sparkling chardonnay-pinot noir blend – a personal favourite for Leong – will also make an appearance.

These events, with all their moving parts, recall Leong’s work with the boundary-pushing TOYS, or Taste of Young Sydney, which she co-founded with Morgan McGlone (Bar Copains, Belles Hot Chicken) back in 2010. TOYS brought together a group of ambitious chefs and sommeliers for a series of degustation dinners around Sydney. These singular events solidified Leong’s conviction that curated, one-off encounters show local dining culture at its best.

“I miss that mad-scientist approach to dining events,” she says. “It’s not practical, or even sustainable, but it is a ton of fun and 50 levels of tasty."

“Collaborations are an opportunity to share ideas with people outside of your own world of work for a night or two. I think it gives culinary creatives an opportunity to do something outside of the confines of a regular restaurant structure, which can expand and shift their own perspectives. For diners, it’s an opportunity to meet someone new, or just have a fun night out experiencing a menu you’ll never get again.”

Tickets will go on sale shortly - follow @broadsheet_syd for more details.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Cat Amongst the Pigeons. Remember to DrinkWise.