By Simon Thomsen and reviewer
The summary This breezy, family friendly bistro and cafe serves easy-to-please fare to suit the seaside setting and casual feel.
Value Reasonable.
Chef Emma Woods.
Owners Sandra Bruns and Timothy Petersen.
Service Needs to be chirpier.
Food Contemporary.
Wine Modest, yet smart, classy and well-priced international list; 17 by the glass.
Vegetarians More for lunch, limited for dinner.
Child friendly High chairs, toys, child's portions.
Noise Mostly street noise, especially buses.
Wheelchair access Yes.
I LOVE dressing up for dinner. For Swell, I slipped into shorts and a clean T-shirt but had to wash off the salt and sand at Bronte's outdoor showers after a swim.
Dining out isn't about the slickest setting, service and food. A footpath table holds the promise of languid pleasures, not to mention something yummy with a glass of wine after a swim.
Fish and chips ($26, $15 child's portion) by the kitchen's incumbent, Emma Woods, swims pretty close to perfection. She uses flathead, dipped in a light and crunchy beer batter. The grown-up version has rosemary-salted kipfler chips; the nipper's one, french fries.
The children were a little annoyed when I kept stealing fish from their plates but I'm teaching them how to share. I reinforced that lesson over salt-and-pepper cuttlefish ($19) beside a small midden of limey, coriander-laced bean sprouts and tamari dipping sauce. The lattice-scored curls of crunchy, rice flour-dusted cuttlefish are chunky yet soft and make a fine beer snack for the malty Three Sheets pale ale ($8).
Swell is popular, especially on weekends. It kicks off early with a breakfast menu that runs until 3pm and morphs from cafe mode into a pretty bistro at day's end.
It's not a big space, but the restaurant's adjacent Japanese sibling, Bonsai (they share the same owners), not only takes some of the overflow, it lets them eat from the Swell menu.
The fresh-faced interior is smartened with tablecloths for dinner. Bench seating under the open picture window lets diners gaze out to the ocean. Outside it's bare timber tables and paper napkins. The downside is the bus stop is right beside you, which feels like having dinner at Wynyard.
Smiles can be sparse on the floor and at times the service is perfunctory. One gorgeously sunny waitress provided redemption. Maybe Emma Woods could offer some advice. She was a waiter in the early '90s before jumping onto the other side of the pass while at Rockpool. A decade ago, Woods was singled out for the prestigious Josephine Pignolet Award for best young chef and established The Light Brigade's culinary reputation.
Swell is her welcome return. The focus is more on simple, clean flavours than finesse. She mingles Asian dishes with Mediterranean fare, although the food doesn't always rise to previous levels.
Roast tomato tarte tartin ($18), its ruby-red contents interspersed with roast eschalots, is crowned by a large dollop of goat's curd and sprinkled with baby herbs. The combination of sweet, acidic and creamy is as fresh as a late-afternoon southerly, although it's let down by a gluey base to the puff pastry case.
Masterstock-poached chicken salad ($19) captures the mood of a balmy evening. Cool slices of chicken breast are splayed over a mound of sesame oil-scented house-made egg noodles with cucumber for relief, spring onion for sharpness and the pleasant bitterness of nigella seeds.
Main options include a plump, Greek-influenced braised lamb pie ($28), the rich, chunky filling laced with salty fetta, caper berries and olives. Anyone nostalgic for Woods, circa The Light Brigade, will be lured seaward by steamed barramundi with a tamarind curry ($29). The fish goes troppo on baby corn and snowpeas with the sweet-and-sour tamarind and ginger sauce, while a smudge of mint masala adds another layer of complexity.
Lunch finds Swell full of yummy mummies with Miu Miu handbags and lone business types having mental-health moments. The fare mingles casual cafe - sandwiches and salads - with some dinner dishes, as well as sushi and sashimi, plus miso soup from Bonsai.
Roast vegetable salad with Iranian couscous ($19) is the sort of great vegetarian dish that's missing from the evening options. Tomato, onion and pumpkin plus fresh rocket is mixed through couscous made interesting by the earthy spicing of harissa.
One of Sydney-via-Italy's great loves, blue swimmer crab with pasta and chilli ($32), suffers from an overly generous hand. The bowl is full of angel hair pasta and there's an excess of sauteed cherry tomato halves that swamp the crab.
Desserts keep it as simple as a reasonable chocolate cake with whipped mascarpone ($14) but nothing quite captures the feel of long, warm days as the blueberry tart ($13), which piles fresh blueberries on to vanilla-scented ricotta in shortcrust thinner than a bikini model. Time for another swim.