Good Food Events’ presents Snack Series at Melbourne’s top restaurants

The ultimate snack tour is coming to Melbourne, where hatted and fine dining restaurants are transforming seldom-seen cockerel meat into limited edition small plates, served exclusively for under $25 during the month of June.

Restaurants Prince Dining Room, Serai, Maha, Dunda, Lee Ho Fook and Reine & La Rue have each partnered with Aurum Poultry Co. for Good Food Events’ inaugural Snack Series, transforming the world’s most popular meat into sausages, grilled shish, skewers and consommé.

But it’s not your typical chicken they’re using. Rather, chefs like Mitch Orr, Brendan Katich and Victor Liong are taking on cockerel: young male roosters, preferred by some chefs for their lean meat, crispy skin and nutritional density.

Prince head chef Ben Parkinson says he became familiar with cockerel while working in France, where it is traditionally used to make coq au vin.

“It’s nice to be able to use it and highlight it in Australia because I feel like it’s definitely undervalued and underrated,” Parkinson says.

Together with executive chef Orr, Parkinson has developed a cockerel neck sausage, served with puffed bread and onion jam ($25).

Aurum Poultry Co. is one of Australia’s largest privately owned poultry producers, but it started small. Melbourne-based brothers Danny and Sam Wong missed eating the type of chicken they’d grown up with in Vietnam: chicken with a deeper flavour and silky, dense texture similar to guinea fowl.

They now farm cockerel, ducks and game birds, and have become a professed favourite of fine dining chefs like Orr.

Beyond the heightened flavour, the production and consumption of cockerel also prevents waste — typically, male chicks are considered worthless to the farming industry and an estimated 12 million are culled in infancy each year.

“We’re always looking to innovate and showcase the myriad of ways our poultry can be presented,” says Aurum’s general manager John King.

“We’re eager to see how Melbourne’s finest chefs transform our products.”

Diners will be given a QR coded bingo card for the Snack Series, enabling them to record each snack they try. Once they’ve sampled all six, they go into the running for prizes like restaurant vouchers and a night at The Prince Hotel in St Kilda.

Snack Series presented by Aurum Poultry Co. runs from June 1 until June 30. For more information, visit the Good Food Events website.