Back to Bilpin

thursday is pool comp night at Sam Hardinge and Casey Palczewski’s New Apple Bar restaurant in the Blue Mountains’ village of Bilpin. It’s rare that anyone actually picks up a cue, let alone plays pool, and the menu is limited to a routier-style, no-option chicken and chips. Mind you, it’s the best chicken and chips you will ever taste. The free-range organic chicken and hand-cut potatoes are roasted in the wood-fired oven that’s at the core of the apple-growing country restaurant and both are sourced from the neighbouring Bilpin Springs Farm. Bilpin Springs is better known as the larder for Sydney’s Bondi Beach dining institution, Sean’s Panaroma, owned by Sean Moran and his husband, Michael (Manoo) Robertson, who are Sam and Casey’s partners at New Apple Bar.

For the rest of the weekend, the roadside restaurant serves a full blackboard menu of “whatever is pilfered from next door”, which might include more chook, Wiltshire lamb, Saddleback pork, fruit, vegies, herbs and salad leaves, supplemented by seafood sourced from the Sydney Fish Market. “I barely cook,” Sam confesses. “The produce and the oven do all the work.” Although the pool comp may have been inaugurated as locals’ night, all comers are welcome, particularly since this summer’s bushfires ravaged this tiny community and the businesses that operate along Bells Line of Road, the alternative route through the Blue Mountains linking North Richmond with Lithgow.

While no one has been left unscathed byrecently took a road trip to see how they are faring.