The name embroidered on the white jacket certainly rang a bell, but the man striding among the tables at Euro last Saturday night was a stranger to me. He looked like Simon Gault's younger, slimmer brother.
It was Gault himself, of course, walking the floor mostly and keeping an eye on what was coming out of a kitchen in which I think I counted nine chefs.
"I'm wearing one of those special chef's slimming jackets," he said with a smile when I remarked on the new lean look.
He made a great advertisement for what he and Euro are selling these days under the label "A Modern Way To Eat". Not long back from a two-month research trip to the UK and US, Gault has rejigged the menu to replace refined sugar with fruit sugars; to drastically reduce salt; to replace cow's-milk butter with the buffalo variety; and to emphasise healthy oils such as coconut. The kitchen is cold-pressing fruit, vegetables and herbs and using nuts to make dressings. Grains and seeds feature prominently. The menu mentions wolfberry, maca root and chlorella.
Euro turned 15 in August and Gault has eight restaurants (it may be nine by the time you reach the end of this column). There are cookbooks and retail products. I gather he's on television too. But the idea of discovering something new plainly fires him up - and it shows in the food.
For starters, we couldn't go past half a dozen oysters, which arrived in suitably theatrical fashion, billowing smoke from a small bowl of dry ice. They were Clevedon but as fat as Bluffies, and tasting creamy yet mild - a pinch of the Hunter Valley salt that came with them proved just the ticket.
A sashimi of sweet pink-hued tuna used a dressing of yuzu and wasabi, with radish and sprinkles of crunchy buckwheat to add texture and interest. Meanwhile, a glass of cucumber gazpacho was delicate and rich, and its accompaniments introduced me to another menu element - activated nuts: these have been soaked in water and slowly dehydrated, beginning a germination process that purports to make them more readily digestible.
Our mains were slightly more problematic: pan-fried flounder, unexpectedly filleted, was hidden beneath a mountain of kale that had been flash-fried. This made it as crisp and fattily delicious as kettle fries, but there was just too much of it. The arrival of a kale-based Caesar-style side salad made me feel like Peter Rabbit; kale seems to be the year's fashion ingredient, but a better waitress would have warned us that we were overdoing it.
Further duplication came with dehydrated chickpeas, which appeared in that salad and in a dish of lamb belly, but the meat itself was decadently, silkily rich and, paired with an apple chutney and big chunks of cabbage steamed and then char-grilled, a perfect dish for a nasty weekend.
Words cannot do justice to desserts (for which pastry-chef Rob Hope-Ede should take a bow). Whipped yoghurt was compressed into a gelatinised block, and served with a grape sorbet - a seed-heavy granola added texture. I was not permitted to test the Professor's assertion that the chocolate fondant was the best thing she had ever eaten, but I can report that she asserted it with some vigour.
If our meal did not give me the full measure of the "modern" menu, that may have been down to a couple of bad choices. But anyone partial to dining out should look in on Euro regularly. The new menu is a good reason to make it soon.
Starters: $22-$26; Mains $34-$39.50; Salads $18-$26 (small) $36-$39 (large); Pizzas $24; Desserts $17
Verdict: New menu, but quality hasn't changed