Coolgardie Safe on Edward Street, East Perth

This place is only about 15mins walk from our apartment (5mins from Claisebrook train station, and 10mins walk to Perth and Northbridge), and has been there (to my knowledge) for at least a couple of years. Got my hands on a buy 1 get 1 free main course voucher in the Perth's Entertainment Book. The special feature of Coolgardie Safe is that they use local Australian produce and "bush" ingredients in their recipes. Always keen to try new things, I suggested to hubby we try this place out (the voucher being an extra incentive) and showed him the menu available on their website. He was keen to try this place, particularly to sample crocodile meat. Bookings at this restaurant are necessary.

Like the rest of the businesses on Edward Street, the building of the restaurant itself is actually an old house which has been converted and renovated to suit a restaurant setting. As we walk in the entrance door, there is a nice covered outdoor area with those outdoor gas heaters. There are about 3 rooms inside the restaurant, all set up for diners. We were greeted and invited by one of the hostesses (somehow the word waitress didn't quite suit the ladies serving us) to choose our seat. At the table were the restaurant's usual menu and the special menu. Our hostess explained the menu to us, told us what the soup of the day was, and also advised that the restaurant is BYO only (there is a corkage of $4.00 per person), which didn't bother us at all as both of us are non-alcoholic drinkers.

For drinks, I went with the "tassie devil" mocktail, which is tomato juice with pepperberry and tabasco - it was kinda spicy but more of an aftertaste - Rob didn't taste any spiciness and thought it tasted like any tomato juice. Rob ordered the "muntharri blur" mocktail which is made with muntharri berries and apple juice - this was a nice sweet drink. (Apologies for the bad quality photos - we forgot our camera and had to rely on hubby's phone camera.)



The entree set-up allows you to pick and choose what you want in your entree, with pricing for the items both individually and as a set of 6. Our hostess highly recommended that we try the "Tastes of Australia" platter as a starter, which included crocodile meat, kangaroo, baby marron, emu sausage, karri smoked chicken, caperberries, trio of australian olives, wild lime compote, bush tomato chutney, quandong relish, beetroot tapinade and damper. This was $12p/p, and was a great way to try a little of everything. Obviously we went with this recommendation, and were pleased we did so. The crocodile meat looked and tasted a little bit like chicken - for some reason I actually expected it to be red meat (I don't like red meat much). The kangaroo looked and tasted like any red meat. We were kinda disappointed that the emu meat came in the form of a sausage because the meat has been processed and you can't really taste much of the actual meat - it tasted very much like a normal sausage does. The smoked chicken were nice. The caperberries tasted nothing like capers and more like olives. The damper was toasted and was yum - we had it with the compote, chutney, relish and the tapinade. We were happy with this platter.



Man-eating-crocodile ;P



For our mains, we went with the seafood platter ($29.80p/p) which had pepperberry tasmanian salmon, lemon myrtle and chilli prawns, shark bay scallops, coffin bay natural oysters, hand cut australian chips, bush tomato chutney and lemon aspen jus. Rob really liked the lemon myrtle juice that came with the prawns, and dipped his chips in the remaining juice left behind after the prawns were eaten. The juice had a nice sweet flowery fragrant taste. The raw oysters were yum (I love natural oysters!), the scallops were cooked to perfection (i.e. not overcooked). I felt that the salmon was a little bit overcooked, but that's a biased opinion from a person who loves sashimi and fresh raw salmon meat.



This will be a good place to bring overseas visitors to let them try "Australian bush" ingredients. Now obviously, this is probably not exactly how the Australian indigenous people nor the bush Aussies traditionally ate (somehow I don't think they would have the facilities to make a 'muntharri blur' mocktail), but you gotta admit that the menu is quite innovative and interesting. Give this place a try for an interesting experience. Grab the voucher too!