Clare Smyth is very happy. As you would be. She’s just found the perfect potato. When, as a London-based, three Michelin-starred chef with your own restaurant brand, you’ve recently launched a brand-new fine diner on the other side of the world, there’s an awful lot to do. But the chance to spend one precious day of her short, two-week Sydney visit on an Australian potato farm was just too tempting for this culinary star. And better still, it paid off.

“A potato is the base of our signature dish,” Smyth says. “And people just love it. But I didn’t know I would find such a good quality potato here in Australia. It was a big relief.”

Formerly chef-patron at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Smyth is the elegant, thoughtful and self-described “passionate” chef behind Core, an acclaimed Notting Hill restaurant in a pretty terrace house. Last November, after months of delays, she opened her first overseas endeavour, Oncore (pun fully intended) – a delicately beautiful fine diner on the 26th floor of the gleaming Crown Sydney tower. The only problem… she wasn’t here.

“Our development chef [Antonio Acquaviva] had come out here and I was due to follow. But then Sydney went into lockdown. Luckily Antonio was able to be here so I knew everything would be alright,” she relates, as we sit gazing down across Sydney Harbour from Oncore’s elegantly appointed private dining room. “At least he was able to get the first menu down… And if you have a good team, they’ll do well and they have done very well. And now I just want to put that behind me and move on!”

For Smyth, cooking is all about nature. Nature, terroir and of course, produce. And so, to that potato dish – a whole potato made ever so pretty with tiny herbs, flowers, miniature crisps and pearls of trout roe.

What’s needed, Smyth says, is a potato that can stand up to eight and a half hours’ poaching in kombu butter. Enter the Queen May variety from The Gourmet Potato in the NSW Southern Highlands. Grown by the Hill family (now fifth-generation farmers) in rich, organic soil, their excellent spuds feature on many top restaurant menus – and at Carriageworks Farmers’ Markets.

“What was really fabulous was going to the farm and seeing it,” the Northern Irish farm-raised chef smiles. “The terroir there is so different – cooler climate, really rich red soils… You can see why it’s such great potato-growing country.”

Served in a tangy-rich seaweed beurre blanc, the Queen May and all its trimmings make for a textural, sensory and very delicious experience. It’s second on the Chef’s Tasting Menu of visually delightful, technically complex and cleverly executed dishes that make a meal at Oncore so special.

A nod to nature and all its beauty is reflected in everything from tree-branch lighting fanning across the ceiling to the painted branch motifs on delicate, bone china plates. And in the ‘lamb carrot’ – where carrots from a lamb braise become the centrepiece of the dish, and a lick of rich, meat braise (with tiny lamb fat crunches) is secondary to the golden vegetable discs. A fabulous idea, like many others on the seven-course menu (plus canapés).

Coming from a very formal, Michelin-style fine-dining background, opening her own restaurant marked a huge shift for Smyth, professionally. But she speaks to the way a new breed of landmark eateries walk the talk when it comes to sustainability, seasonality and ultimately, great tastes.

“We’ve learned to work with what’s around us now, which has opened up a whole world of creativity towards food,” Smyth explains. “People thought I was mad doing a potato but I didn’t care. I’d done the other stuff. I wanted to move on, challenge myself, do things that are important to me and my identity. Being brave. Just changing it up a bit. Trusting your instinct about what good food is…”

That includes working with the best producers. “That’s a big, big part of what we do. Finding people who are farming in a really great way. Really just supporting them and making sure we stick with them. The message is also about the way we eat – in a more sustainable healthy way. More vegetables and grains… flipping things around. In people’s minds, how they eat, where their food’s coming from is really important.”

Her support for producers extends to enlisting Carr’s, a classic Sheffield silversmiths for her cutlery, and Royal Crown Derby for fine bone china plates, some engraved with Chef Smyth’s own thumb-print – keeping traditional British craft industries alive in the process.

A huge fan of Australia – Smyth worked here during the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and has returned many times since – she is impressed by our quality produce and “unique culinary identity”, as she describes it. Clearly excited for her future here, she’s already experimenting with a new chicken breed (the Bresse chicken from Tathra Place Free Range at Wombeyan Caves in New South Wales – also supplying her duck and quail) and she can’t wait for Australian truffle season. “I just love truffles,” she confesses. “I put them on a gold thumb-print plate!”

She’s also curious to start working with native ingredients, integrating previously unfamiliar flavours into her very personal cuisine style, alongside the best in local produce. “That’s where Oncore will really create its own identity,” she says. And we can’t wait to see where it goes. Meanwhile, we’re very happy to welcome this inspirational chef to our shores.

Related review: Oncore by Clare Smyth delivers an unmissable performance