Mordeo Bistro & Bar — Restaurant in Sydney

Matching food and drink is a thing that you usually associate food and wine. How about matching food and beer? No I'm not talking kebabs and pies, rather a more refined experience. The good people of Mordeo Bistro and Bar with Stone and Wood teamed up to bring such an experience. Mordeo located on the corner of Phillip and Hunter St in the vicinity of Chifley towers. Making Mordeo the perfect location for this event to take place. Mordeo has a stocked bar with beer on tap and is a great spot for after work drinks. There is also space for dining including a separate space for a group or an intimate corporate dining experience.

We are familiar with the quality award winning boutique beer produced by Stone and Wood. We are now thankfully familiar with the amazing southern European Bistro style cuisine that Mordeo has on offer. On this occasion, Mordeo chefs masterfully created a 5 course menu that encompassed flavours associated with beer and its ingredients, presenting details of each dish to all in attendance. This followed by Oscar from Stone and Wood also interacting with the diners, providing an education on the brewing process, ingredients used and tasting notes of each beer.

The meal starting off with seafood dishes. The amuse-bouche was a snapper cevice seved with fresh seaweed, salmon roe and lime. This dish paired beautifully with the green coast lager with full malt flavour with a subtle hops finish. The next dish the sweet seafood flavour of seared scallops with toasted almonds served atop of a the rich silky galaxy hop smoked cauliflower puree, so good it should be bottled. This almost being the case with this dish being served with one of our favouite ales the pacific ale brewed using Australian Barley, wheat and the same galaxy hops used in the cauli puree.

For the next part of this dream pairing moving to protein sourced from the land. With a duck ragu tagliatelle slow cooked with the garden ale, juniper, wild mushrooms and bay leaf. A full flavoured dish made with handmade pasta Mordeo is known for. Paired with malt of garden ale with a flora- citrus aroma which was also used in the dish it was served with. Then came the Berkshire pork belly sourced from Byron Bay where Stone and Wood is located. The pork was melt in your mouth slow cooked with the cloud catcher ale and served with braised fennel hearts and a rosmary hop jus.

The meal came to a perfect finish with a decadent dark chocolate tart with burnt honey, laveder and dark malt Gelato. This paired with the dark rich malty Jasper ale.

Thanks to Mordeo for hosting the event, the amazing food, great service and hospitality. We hope Stone and Wood continue with these events and we recommend keeping an eye out for such events by signing up to the Stone and...

There is a nice picture of a home made pappardelle with beef ragu on the website so I was looking forward to eating that. At arrival it turned out that it is not available as the menu changes frequently. Big disappointment as it was the main reason I picked this place, the other pasta dishes on the menu (seafood linguine, risotto and mushroom ravioli) did not have beef or red meet.

If the menu was changed on the same page of the website that had a photo from the old menu, how difficult it is in the 21st century digital age to change or remove a digital photo? Since that (otherwise perfect looking) pappardelle is not available, one can question if that photo is really of the restaurant’s own creation. I mean one could post photos of Gordon Ramsay dishes on thei restaurant menu page to lure customers in but then just claim that those were on the old menu. I’m pretty sure it is considered false advertising, will contact the ACCC to clarify.

Had the mushroom ravioli instead, the pasta was clearly home made and done perfectly al dente. However it was swimming in mushroom soup, literally so liquid and watery that it could not be considered a sauce or even soup as it was lacking any thickness.

On top of it the dish was overly burning hot, at the kind of temperature that can only be achieved by microwaving. It was a busy night but that is not an excuse for short cuts that render an otherwise maybe OK home made meal down to a food court “choose any 3 pasta” made the night...

Terrible experience - booked set menu lunch for 12 people but one person fell ill and two could not make it due to unforeseen work requirements. Mordeo charges us for 12 even though there was only 9 of us - excuse was they set aside food for 12 and we didn’t give them any notice. The only item that could possibly have required “setting aside” was main course since other items were a charcuterie plate, dips, green salad and polenta chips (given number of people at the restaurant it did not look like they catered those items just for us or that they had to put special orders in for those items). Main course was choice between fish, steak and schnitzel. Again, hardly something that requires special ordering and unlikely to be something that will go to waste if they sell 3 less of those on one day. They operate in the city and should understand there is occasional possibility of people not being able to turn up for unforeseen work commitments. We were also charged a staff gratuity of $36. The manager ended up (reluctantly) taking $55 off but bottom line is what should have costed $552 costed $713, an unconscionable profit of $161 for them. Will never go there again and will be sure to let our corporate team know it is an inappropriate venue for...