Nomad

Overview

Nomad dishes up Mediterranean cuisine with a fine dining twist in handsome surrounds - the heart of the Point Chev shops.

The dinner menu is divided into 'Hunted' (meat and seafood), 'Gathered' (salads, pastas and molluscs) and wood fired pizza. It’s small but intriguing, filled with beautiful contradictions such as watermelon and olives, orange and anchovy; and food I’ve never heard of – music bread, charcuterie. As the latter seemed to involve a lot of meat, we ordered two, with an iceberg lettuce salad (my favourite kind – how nice that’s it’s back on menus everywhere) and walnut gnocchi.

The service was a bit patchy upon arrival due to some confusion about seating and a rather long wait for our menus and water to arrive, but the waitress was sweet and the candlelit, brick-walled interior of the bar quite lovely, so we let it pass. However, an overlong wait for mains is never a good thing, and by the time the dishes finally arrived on the table we were all a bit grumpy.

The charcuterie was a pile of prettily presented meat and condiments on a slab of wood; Serrano ham, Calabrese salami, air-dried wagyu beef, Gunaciale, pickled cucumber, and truffle cream. This was quite enough to contend with until a waiter (who definitely introduced himself as Coconut) approached with an unmarked white tube, the kind that usually contains lotion for nasty rashes.

“It’s chorizo mascarpone”, he said, squeezing out a long pink worm on the wood. It looked like the insides of an uncooked sausage, but tasted salty and cheesy and delicious, just like the rest of the platter (bar the pickled cucumber which was only slightly soft and sour, so it just tasted like a cucumber past its use by date).

The salad was a pile of lettuce cups drizzled with roasted pepper aioli, which was tasty, if a little unsubstantial for the $12 price tag. The gnocchi was far more successful, with delightfully sweet mini roast peppers and fresh coriander and mint.

Overall, Nomad is a decent go-to for Pt. Chev locals, but could be improved by upping its service and portion size game. Still, the pizzas did look good enough to warrant a second visit.