Want Kangaroo Sausages? Here's Your Guide, Digger

Anyone compiling a list of the hottest recent restaurant trends in the city would have a few obvious starting points. Steakhouses, certainly. Also burger and barbecue joints, and maybe gastropubs. But there's one trend that's been sneaking its way onto the culinary landscape: Australian food.

The city now boasts at least eight eateries offering Australian fare, most of them having opened in the past year or two. Whether this can be attributed to shifting tastes or public relations campaigns like the Australia Week promotion in January, it represents a culinary reassessment of a country whose food has long been derided as just a more exotic-sounding version of British food (which has undergone its own renaissance in recent years) or as the butt of "prison food" jokes (unavoidable for a country founded as a penal colony).

Now that Australian cuisine is coming into fashion, that raises the question: Just what is Australian cuisine, anyway?

"I've been trying to come up with the answer for that for years," the chef-owner of the Australian-themed NoLita restaurant Eight Mile Creek, Will Ford, said. "We're a country of immigrants, just like America. If someone were to ask you, ‘What is American food?,' you'd have a hard time answering that one, too."

Jason Crew, co-owner of the Australian pub Sheep Station — who like Mr. Ford, is an Australian native — was similarly hard-pressed to provide a definitive description. "There's nothing I can pinpoint as Australian cuisine," he said. "It's mostly about fresh, locally farmed or fished ingredients. And it has a slightly different take on a lot of things you would find in the States, Europe, or England."

If nobody can quite articulate what Australian food is, most Aussies can agree upon what it isn't: It's not Foster's beer (most Australians claim to disdain it); it's not "shrimp on the barbie," at least not by that name (Australians refer to shrimp as prawns); and it's definitely not a bloomin' onion.

A good starting point for Australian food is the meat pie, a shell of pastry filled with beef or lamb. About 5 inches across by 2 inches thick, meat pies are found in roadside shops all over Australia, and make an extremely satisfying nosh when properly executed. Most Australian eateries in New York have meat pies on the menu, and several are specialists.

The best of the latter group is Tuck Shop, a small East Village storefront with good range of meat pie offerings. The traditional ground beef rendition ($5) features a reasonably flaky crust that gives way to a moist, rich beef filling with just a hint of spiciness. Recently sampled on a cold, windy day, it was the perfect antidote to the brisk weather.

But the best meat pie in the city right now is the one at Mr. Crew's Sheep Station in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the pie is listed among the appetizers ($6). The spectacularly flaky puff-pastry crust would stand on its own as a delectable treat, and the meaty filling is juicy without descending to sloppy Joe levels of soupiness.

Australians also have their own style of hamburger, which features sliced beets, grilled pineapple, and a fried egg. It sounds like a mess of discordant flavors — and sometimes it is — but the version served at Ruby's Café in SoHo ($12) combines unusually flavorful beef, a brioche-style bun that strikes just the right soft-yet-sturdy balance, and the unorthodox toppings into a surprisingly harmonious whole that deserves to be mentioned among the city's best burgers.

If you want to get more exotic, a good place to start is the Sunburnt Cow, an East Village spot whose menu features lots of small dishes between $7 and $12, allowing for a wide range of sampling. Some of the choices are just Down Under spins on familiar dishes, like calamari served with a fine kiwi/chile salsa ($7), and shrimp kebabs rubbed with South Pacific spices ($10). Others are a bit more out there, like the kangaroo sausages ($9), which suffer from the common Australian bugaboo of being too heavily spiced with cloves and mace, and are a bit mealy besides.

If you're up for more of a splurge, the place to go is Eight Mile Creek, the oldest and most ambitious of the city's Australian restaurants. Mr. Ford's kangaroo fillet ($26) has just a hint of robust gaminess — an Australian corollary to venison. Starters include spicy prawn dumplings with an excellent citrus-soy dipping sauce ($10) and, in another nod to exotica, emu carpaccio. And if you're not keen on the kangaroo entree, go for the baked barramundi fillet, a crisp-baked piece of fish with medium-firm flesh and a subtle sweetness, served on a bed of grilled asparagus. It pairs well with a cold bottle of Boag's, a Tasmanian lager.

Like most of the city's other Australian restaurateurs, Mr. Ford gets most of his ingredients from Australia and tries to be as authentic as possible. But as he pointed out, "It depends on what you mean by authentic. We've got kangaroo on the menu, but most Australians don't actually eat kangaroo. They eat lamb and beef."

The limits of authenticity are evident at Wombat, a new spot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with varying levels of Australian influence up and down the menu. For example, Tuesday is lobster night, but the lobsters don't come from Australia (where lobsters don't have claws) — they're from Canada. But they're available "Australian-style," which means roasted and spiced.

Asked what was the most authentically Australian dish on the menu, a Wombat waitress replied, "Well, most of it isn't really authentic; it's more Australian-inspired." Then she leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, "You wouldn't want it to be authentic — Australian food isn't very good."

Hmm, sounds like that p.r. campaign still has a ways to go. Then again, this waitress was American, not Australian. And the fact that such a comment can be made within a bustling Australian restaurant says a lot about how far this food has come.

Restaurant Listings

Australian food can be sampled at the following restaurants:

• Bondi Road (153 Rivington St., 212-253-5311): Fish and chips, plus a few other seafood offerings and burgers.

• DUB Pies (193 Columbia St., Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, 646-202-9412): Meat pies are the specialty at this small storefront, where DUB stands for Down Under Bakery.

• Eight Mile Creek (240 Mulberry St., 212-431-4635): Open since 1999, with a sophisticated menu and an extensive wine list, this is the city's definitive Australian restaurant and the only one that truly offers fine dining instead of pub food.

• Ruby's Cafe (219 Mulberry St., 212-925-575): Most of the sandwiches and salads at this SoHo spot are standard café fare. But the Aussie-style burger, complete with beets, pineapple, and fried egg, is first-rate.

• Sheep Station (149 Fourth Ave., Park Slope, Brooklyn, 718-857-4337): Spectacular meat pies, excellent lamb chops, and fine fish and chips make this newcomer a welcome addition to the city's Down Under pantheon.

• The Sunburnt Cow (137 Avenue C, 212-529-0005): Good selection of small, modestly priced dishes, providing a good starting point for a sampling of Australian offerings.

•Tuck Shop (68 E. 1st St., 212-979-5200, with an additional outlet inside the Cyber Café, 250 W. 49th St., 212-757-8481): Fine meat pies that hit the spot on a cold day.

• Wombat (613 Grand St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-218-7077): The eclectic menu features lots of Asian influences, although there's one true Aussie classic: the chicken Wellington floater, which despite its unfortunate name is an engaging combination of chicken, puff pastry, and mashed peas.