Trevor Pepys reviews Grenny’s, Noosaville
Back in the early days of settlement, when old Walter Hay had just blazed the first trails into town, one of the first to ride his covered wagon in and set up camp was one Grenville Duckworth, who opened Grenny’s Seawater Cafe on Hastings Street in 1982.
Grenny became justly famous for a variety of seafood specials but none more so than his seafood Marseilles, which foodie doyen Leonie Palmer described as “a peasant dish of prawns, bug tails, mussels and crab simmered in garlic, white wine and fish stock – delicious”. In the ‘90s when Hastings Street landlord greed began to force all the interesting people off the strip, Grenny went upriver on Gympie Terrace and splashed his famous signature dish on the front wall of his humble shopfront in signwriting that was bigger than Seawater Cafe.
The signwriting has gone but Grenny’s remains, and with seafood Trev’s holiday theme this week, it seemed appropriate to roll up on one of the New Year period’s lovelier evenings and grab a front row table where Trev and the missus could watch the stars dance on the river while the white cockatoos in the trees and the funky band playing beneath them vied for our attention. On such a blissed out summer evening that could have been at any time over the almost 40 years that Grenny has been a seafood constant in Noosa – except perhaps for the creaking of knees and hips as we lower ourselves into chairs – Trev ordered a bottle of the keenly-priced Marlborough pinot gris by Little Angel ($29) and a plate of bread and dips to be going on with while he surveyed the menu.
And there it was, tucked unprepossessingly between the duckling and the eye fillet: seafood Marseilles, “a hearty meal of Moreton Bay bugs, prawns, reef fish, mussels, scallops and calamari saut¨¦ed with garlic, chilli, and julienne of vegetables steeped with wine, fish fumet and coulis” ($40). For Trevor, there was no choice. Straight out of the pages of history and into his salivating gob. Meanwhile, the missus decided on the Laguna Bay crepe ($28) an “old-fashioned style combination of seafood folded with creamed spinach, mozzarella cheese in a herb crepe, mornay glaced and topped with prawn and smoked salmon”.
There was a wait, but we didn’t mind. The wine was refreshing and the music from the park entertaining. But from the moment our mains hit the deck a wave of deja vu rose up from the river and engulfed Trev like a sudden tsunami, but not in a good way. It occurred to him that this was exactly what they might have ordered and eaten in the 1990s, but had it stood the test of time?
Answer: no, not exactly. The seafood Marseilles was a perfectly adequate super-serve of all of the afore-mentioned fish and crustaceans on the shell, over which a thick, creamy, gluggy sauce had been thoughtfully poured to drowning point. Without access to a bucket, there was no way Trev could remove enough of the overly rich liquid to get to the animals below it, although when he was able to rip a bug apart, there was nothing wrong with the flavour. The dish looked for all the world like Grenny had written the recipe and the rules of presentation on the kitchen wall in a previous century and they were not to be varied.
Distracting the missus by pointing out a fat person trying to cross the road, Trev sought respite in a chunk of the crepe, the texture of which was cheesy and appealingly old-fashioned as the menu had suggested. But what lay within was, sad to say, bland and only faintly fishy.
A trip down memory lane on a beautiful evening, it certainly was that, and Trev was home with a glass of good pinot noir in his fist in time to watch the Brisbane Heat finally score a couple of points.
The verdict: The past is a foreign country and we shouldn’t have gone there. What other diners were having looked good. We’ll give Grenny’s another go, looking forward, not back.
