The meat has that deep, soulful tenderness from low, slow cooking, although much of it is slathered with a full-on barbecue sauce that, for me, makes everything it touches taste similarly sweet. It has the lot - sticky smoked pork ribs, pale swathes of juicy/fatty maple and black-pepper pork belly, a pile of chopped pork, and some hauntingly aromatic Rangers Valley smoked brisket, as well as half a dozen soft, seedy, pull-apart bread rolls and a big bowl of perky house-made pickles.

You need three to four protein-dependent people with high carb thresholds to do justice to the Papi Chulo BBQ platter ($86). Photo: Edwina PicklesД«ut do not come alone, or even in pairs. Go-to dish: Papi Chulo BBQ Platter for 2 to 4 people, $86. Here, owner Justin Hemmes has raided his own kitchens for a hot boy team of Ms.G's head chef, Patrick Friesen, and El Loco's Christopher Hogarth, working with wonderboy Dan Hong as executive chef. In Latin America, papi chulo is what the girls who watch the boys who watch the girls go by, call the hottest boys. Good smells hook you by the nostrils within metres of the two American-style smokers, the broad wood-fired grill and the Brazilian charcoal rotisserie in the big open kitchen. It's a barrel of fun a veritable circus of smoky, deep-south barbecue, South American spice and tie-on bibs in a party-time setting that mashes up Brazilian cantina, New Orleans bar and Texan smokehouse. in the 1940s - seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care. One of the hottest new restaurants of 20, having opened on New Year's Eve, it certainly lives up to the slogan devised for Manly by the Port Jackson & Manly Steamship Co. Tipped out on to Manly Pier 30 minutes later, at least a dozen passengers head straight for the door of the Merivale Group's new blockbuster. Less than two weeks since Papi Chulo opened on 31 December 2013 to a rousing New YearвЂ™s Eve party, I planned a surprise lunch for Mysaucepan to celebrate our wedding anniversary and weВ are about to find out if this restaurant is living up to its hype.It's only a matter of time before they rebrand the 6.30pm Manly Ferry out of Circular Quay, the Papi Chulo service. But one constant in this equation might be HemmeвЂ™s trump card вЂ“ a tantalizing position right at the edge of the water at Manly Wharf. South American dishes like ceviche and empanadas, charred seafood, fresh summer salads and a killer cocktail list complete the variables for the food and drink equation. Papi ChuloВ smokes marinated meats over wood for at least six hours to create an intense barbeque pit flavour that comes straight from the American Deep South. This spanking new smokehouse and grill is turning HemmesвЂ™ Merivale restaurant stable into a rather unique and colourful piece of headwear.

His latest venture is not just another feather onto his hat. WongВ was awarded two hats and Best New RestaurantВ in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide 2014 in its first year of operation вЂ“ quite a feat in itself, let alone in a cuisine completely foreign to his heritage. HemmesвЂ™ has drawn first blood though вЂ“ his modern Chinese restaurant Mr. His foray into Cantonese cuisine, taking on Chinatown heavyweight restaurants, is like Chuck Norris taking on Bruce Lee. From fine dining to casual fish and chips, from French, Italian and Japanese to modern Cantonese, Hemmes is reinventing the flavours of these cuisines with his own brand of flair and panache, offering points of difference that must surely be relegating competitors back to the drawing board. He now has a collection of restaurants in just about every foreseeable cuisine in Sydney. ~~~~~~~~O~~~~~~~~ ItвЂ™s a well-known fact that restaurant linchpin Justin Hemmes donвЂ™t do things in halves. вЂњItвЂ™s so tasty, IвЂ™m digging the crap out of this crabвЂќ

Papi chulo restaurant