Paste Australia — Restaurant in Mittagong

2025: The combination of crisp, light batter and juicy innards makes chef Bee Satongun’s soft shell crab ($31) outstanding. The crab sits camouflaged under flash-fried herbs in a rock pool of turmeric, lime, and lemongrass. It justifies the trip to Mittagong to revisit Paste Australia for a fourth time. Since my last visit, Satongun has added on a lunch set menu ($80/person). This saw a simple half rack of roasted pork baby back ribs ($25), flavoured with garlic, pepper and black beans, round out our entrees.

Mains are selected from a short list of five dishes. Surf’n’turf in the form of sator pad goong ($48) is good option, teaming creamy Queensland prawns, ground pork neck and Thai stink beans (sator) in a sauce flavoured with shrimp paste and lime juice. Larb duck ($38) arrived looking vibrant, with a tangle of minced duck, banana flower and greenery balanced on a roasted larb paste lake. It lost the spicy-sour-salty-savoury balance that characterises Thai cuisine by toning down the chilli to barely perceptable. Eating the lunch set menu sees mains accompanied by green beans in soy bean, garlic and chilli, and white rice.

In the four years since my last visit, a number of small, inexpensive Thai restaurants in Sydney have matched the richness and vibrancy of the sauces here. This will make the price for elevated Thai food in Mittagong harder to justify in the future. However the upmarket setting does include a wine list geared for travellers, allowing us to quaff a half bottle of the 2022 Shaw & Smith M3 Chardonnay ($75) over lunch and get straight back on the road to Sydney afterwards.

2021: Taking a night at Bowral’s Berida Hotel places you a short ride share away from Paste Thai Food Australia. Cementing the service improvement I saw on my second visit, my third meal was made all the better by the warm welcome and familiarity of the floor team. Staff knew what type of water I like to drink, and pointed out dishes new to the menu since my last visit. As a result I ordered them, with the gently poached rabbit in Thai herbal sauce ($30) easily the dish of the night. The tangy orange sauce had a nice savoury rumble and went beautifully against silky rabbit, banana flower and bright snap pea bursts.

Stir fried clams with egg noodles ($40) is another new menu entry. This dish shows off plump Cloudy Bay clams—their flavour amped by a dusting of shrimp powder—against a phad cha stir-fry flavoured with lesser galangal (fingerroot) and mountain pepper. Hokkaido scallops ($28/4) are served chopped up in the shell with sea urchin, ice plant and coconut, and, despite the melange of flavours, scallop is the dominant note.

Saucing remains this restaurant’s strong suit, with crisp skinned Snowy River trout ($41) showing off the sour orange curry paste nicely. I probably should have matched it to plain rice, but the hand-picked crab, pickled shiitake and garlic stem rice ($24) with wombok cabbage stem and surprise tartness from kumquats, proved too hard to resist. (It’s really a dish onto itself though.) Accompanied by wine from the Canberra region—the Collector 2018 Lamp Lit Marsanne ($70)—this was a palate-satisfying meal that justified breaking our journey...

I am reviewing to express my utmost disappointment at Paste restaurant on Friday 8h January. It would possibly be the worst restaurant experiences I have ever encountered.

We have dined here before and had a wonderful time. Excellent food and very good, friendly service. After recommending it to everyone for months, we bought a friend to experience this, drove from Sydney and it could not have been more of a contrast.

We arrived on time and were promptly seated. We were given menus and asked which water we’d prefer, ordering the sparkling which never arrived. We were eventually attended to and realised very quickly it would be a good idea to order the food straight away. After a very long wait our three entrees arrived separately with long periods in between. A second waitress had to ask if we’d received the watermelon salad and then had to chase it up.

After an even longer wait (over an hour after ordering) we were told that our Kingfish choice was unavailable as they’d ran out of the sauce, could we choose something else but not the Murray Cod as that was unavailable as well. Our order had been in for over an hour before this announcement. The table next to us had ordered just after us but had received all their meals at once and way before ours.

When the three mains finally arrived, again all separately, the presentation and flavours were all good but most of the dishes were cold. The rice was the biggest joke. Not only was it gluggy and sticky, it was cold. The second lot was obviously from the bottom of the pot as most of it was crust, quite firm and less than tepid and for this we paid $18…for rice. And you will see from the picture the presentation of this was literally just thrown onto a plate and looked offensive. I must say I have never seen such poor quality and sad looking rice even from a street vendor in Bangkok.

Halfway through service one waitperson disappeared so there was two waitstaff and a runner and at times there was absolutely no one on the floor and a restaurant full of diners looking around either wondering where their food was or waitstaff. If the staff were stressed for whatever reason, it showed, I don’t think we saw a smile once. Everything was rushed. The man that seems to be in charge in front of house spent most of the time walking back and forth mumbling expletives under his breath which were all audible to us or he was preoccupied on the iPad which unless this was communication with the kitchen is unacceptable.

If there were staff or supply issues or anything like that this should have been communicated to us from the beginning and the service should have compensated for this but the lack of enthusiasm made a bad situation much worse. At no time did we receive any apology for food being late, arriving separately or being unavailable. You are a Michelin restaurant. Does any of this seem acceptable to you? We paid $100 per head for this experience and just feel...

Michelin starred Chef Bee Satongong from the acclaimed Paste Bangkok, has another of her amazing Thai restaurants in Mittagong in the NSW Southern Highlands.

We randomly visited the restaurant when on a golf trip. Craving Thai, we looked up google and the review and pictures looked good and we walked in a secured a table. Little did we know about this amazing Thai restaurant or chef that has received so many accolades.

A large restaurant space which was quite full when we visited, the bar grabbing your attention as you enter. The table set up is quite simple and we are seated with the menus to peruse.

There is an a la carte menu but we had the set menu for $96 for 6 courses. They do dishes that use premium ingredients that people are familiar with but at a very sophisticated level.

First was the Tasmanian Scallops with lychee, young coconut and sea urchin. Fresh and delicious combination of flavours and the scallops were perfectly cooked.

In this tasting menu, there was also a watermelon salad which had a nice salty floss; ground salmon with fried shallots, roasted galangal powder & Huon river trout caviar. The texture served on top is a nice contrast to the sweet juicy watermelon and certainly a unique dish.

The duck red curry, a popular choice of ours, this one l roasted with a crisp skin was a nice mellow curry yet still delivering bold and punchy flavours. There was also a mixed Mushroom dish that was fragrant and spicy.

One of our favourites was the Slipper lobsters with pomelo, shredded betel leaves and a chilli sauce. Packed with flavour and perfectly cooked. The slipper lobster was absolutely delicious and left us wanting more.

The dessert was a Luscious tamarind cheesecake with a nice crumb and served with a dollop or creme, this dessert was polished off quickly and the perfect end to a great meal.

There’s a premium drink list and good cocktails including the smokin’ heat cocktail; clove smoked Bulleit Rye with apple juice, elderflower liqueur and chilli. It didn’t just taste good, but delivered on theatrics too.

If you do visit this restaurant, you’ll be in for a treat. It is the best Thai restaurant we’ve eaten in including Thailand. It is well worth making a destination visit and spending a little bit extra for...