Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, Sydney, New South Wales
www.bennelong.com.au

If you’re reviewing sausage rolls in Sydney, there is one place you need to go to sample the ultimate example of the sausage roll elevated to an art form. That place is The Bennelong, Sydney’s most iconic restaurant space, enjoying spectacular harbour views from within the miniature set of pearly white shells at the southern end of the Sydney Opera House. This is not just a place you rock up to on a Saturday at lunch time and grab a roll and a snot block in a brown paper bag. This requires planning, finesse, and a willingness to pay for the experience.

On an evening when Mrs Snot Block & Roll had decreed that we should attend the Australian Ballet, we had an excuse to make a booking at this prestigious restaurant for a before-show meal. When chef Peter Gilmore, famously of the outstanding Quay restaurant (listed as one of Restaurant magazine’s 50 best restaurants in the world since 2009), took over running The Bennelong in 2015, he decided to split the food experience into a formal dining area and a more casual seating area by one of the bars. This casual area is known as “Cured & Cultured”, and has an emphasis on fresh “produce-focused” dishes, served raw or cold, though there are a few hot cooked dishes on the menu. All of the plates are designed for tapas-like sharing. And one of these sharing plates is the “suckling pig sausage roll with black garlic sauce”, which comes in at a hefty $24.

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126 Pacific Highway, Roseville, New South Wales
elkarim.com.au

One of my favourite places for a nice dinner out is El Karim, a long-established, slightly fancy Lebanese restaurant on the highway in Roseville. I’d planned a dinner out with Mrs Snot Block & Roll and booked a table for two, little suspecting the surprise that was to come. The menu had been redone since our last visit, and now listed amongst the various small mezze plates – such as falafels, fried haloumi, lamb kofta, and the delicious honey and zaatar calamari – was “El Karim sausage rolls”. You know what had to be done.

The dish cost $16, and appeared at the end of the meal, as the custom here is to bring dishes out separated in time so everyone can share a few things at a time. The plate contained four rolls, which would do a good job of sharing between four people if you’d ordered a bunch of other things to sample the menu. Each one was maybe half the size of a regular bog-standard sausage roll.

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