Emily Taylor: Where the flavours create a bar brawl in your mouth

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Gluttony is harder than it looks. It’s listed as a sin, as something you give in to, when really it’s a skill, requiring not just hunger but resilience.

So sayeth the great man of letters Tom Junod.

It’s hard to escape Junod’s pithy bon mot when dining at Emily Taylor in Fremantle.

Their pride and joy are their Hyundai-sized dumplings and we couldn’t agree more. Be proud. Be loud. Be gluttonous. The massive, plump dumplings are full of all sorts of quasi-Chinese fillings like oxtail, marron chilli and chive and lobster and truffle and they’re cheap.

Twenty dollars for three lobster truffle dumplings is a bargain. Especially so when you consider the flavour, the alabaster white dumpling wrapper cooked soft and pliable and a dipping sauce of sweet aromatic soy. They were a marvel of generous engineering.

Pity they were served cold. Not luke warm. Cold.

If you put Shaoxing butter and ponzu on a tennis shoe you’d eat it and the tennis shoe. They team it with marron, chilli and chive dumplings. The filling was chunky and only just cooked, no hint of rubbery protein in these monsters. And like everything this kitchen plates up – with the exception of Thai green curry – the flavours are like a bar brawl in your mouth, writhing with sinuous flavour.

Duck and pork wontons were good if a little light on flavour after the first two. They were, however, sitting in a clear, aromatic duck broth, scented with ginger and chilli. Magnificent.

Shark Bay scallop dumplings were also robed in a soft chewy wrapper and the flavours were back on brand. The meat was chunky, adding texture and chew. It was served with a prawn and cucumber chilli XO sauce and yuzu. My god. What mad alchemy. Lovely. Funky. Fresh.

Emily Taylor is a large scale restaurant carved out of the combined backyards of 150-year-old worker’s cottages adjacent to the Freo Markets.

The jumble of ancient limestone buildings has been repurposed into a small, smart boutique hotel called The Warders. There must be 200 seats in the sprawling restaurant both inside and out.

The night of this review was an average weekday night and the place was heaving with old and young, hip and daggy, mums and dads and lads on a bender. It’s enormous fun and well run.

Our waiter Hermela was an Ethiopian woman with a sense of humour, a loud laugh and great serving skills, making recommendations about what goes with what and how not to over order. Gluttony was our travel companion that night. Hermela invited us around to her place to cook Ethiopian food. We’re going.

A green curry of chicken was, well, bland. It had none of the punchy flavours one expects in Thai green curry. More fish sauce? More green chillies? More lemongrass? It needed something to lift flavour. The chicken was well cooked and tender and they used those tiny Thai eggplants about the size of a marble and crunchy to boot. Good composition, but a bit meh in the flavour department.

The kitchen was back on track with a twice cooked sticky pork dish and it wasn’t dry. How many pork belly dishes have you ordered with the promise of soft, juicy meat and squishy rendered fat, only to be disappointed by dry and stringy meat.

The cubes of pork belly at Emily Taylor were nothing of the kind, a masterclass in how to slow roast pig tummy and get it right. The chunks were tossed through a salad of sour greens, bean shoots and cashew nuts. It was made all perky and in your face with a tamarind and chilli caramel sauce. Nice job.

Tapioca dusted ocean barramundi with green apple and green nam jim was okay. We’re not huge fans of barra. Great to catch, but not so good in a restaurant setting where its flesh deteriorates to mush after just a couple of days, especially if it’s a frozen product. It was full of flavour as you would expect, but just okay.

We’re not pudding eaters, but a black sticky rice with coconut sorbet and astringently dark caramelised pineapple wedges was an utter delight.

Emily Taylor is a celebratory restaurant. If you are looking for a long table for your work Christmas function it delivers. They have good beers on tap and in bottle. The wine list is fit for purpose, inexpensive but unremarkable. The servers are a bustling machine of customer forward preciseness and, we were in awe of a kitchen which seemingly effortlessly sends out hundreds of plates a night.

Get in touch with your inner glutton and take a trip to Emily Taylor.