We’ve all got to eat so it might as well be good! I’ve been a restaurant critic for almost 20 years, and have been writing a weekly restaurant column in Melbourne’s Sunday Age since 2006.
My approach is to always take a restaurant on its own terms: there’s no point slamming a burger joint because it doesn’t have white tablecloths. I try to be constructive in my criticism and I’ve always got the diner in mind: there are many places you could choose to go. Why should it be here?
This month marks five years since Vue de Monde moved to the 55th floor of the Rialto. It has never been better. The room buzzes with energy and freshness, even as the kangaroo-skin table coverings are becoming butter-soft and worn. The food has ‘wow’ factor yet it is flavour and texture that impress most. Kitchen trickery has been reined in and most food is cooked in pots and pans. The view over Melbourne never gets boring: how easy it is to pity cars crawling over the Bolte Bridge when one is nibbling on duck breast with fermented truffle.
Every month or so I visit the lovely Clare Bowditch at 774 ABC Melbourne to talk food. This week being the first week of winter, I decided we should chat about ribs, marvellous ribs, because they are such good, hearty comfort food.
I had a blast chatting all things Thermomix with ace chef Jesse Gerner of Bomba, Green Park and Añada fame along with host Pete Dillon (at left) on 949 Joy FM‘s ‘Cravings’ radio show. Listen in here!
Turkish chef Coskun Uysal has been visiting Australia for 10 years, doing work experience at top restaurants like Vue de Monde and Attica, and popping up at Mark Best’s Pei Modern. In between, he worked and studied in London, (Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, River Cafe, Leiths School of Food) and ran hotel dining rooms and cafes in Turkey. Uysal always found Melbourne’s food culture thrilling but also lamented that the Turkish food here is often stuck in an immigrant time warp and doesn’t reflect the exciting modern food now seen in Istanbul.
Nora is the restaurant as trust game, the culinary equivalent of closing your eyes and leaning back into space. The chef is as much artist as cook. The food is a series of tasty tricks. The multi-course menu is compulsory but you don’t see it until you’ve eaten it.
When brothers Jad and Hady Choucair were growing up in southern Lebanon they lived in a small one-room house which was effectively all kitchen. “You could never escape the aromas,” says Jad, who credits the all-pervading proximity with the family’s activities at Mankoushe, a four-year-old restaurant which serves modest but delicious and truly seasonal food from all over the Middle East.
“Are you ready?” asks the waiter. “Yes, ready,” says the eater. Not to eat, you understand, but to point a phone at a brunch dish that’s a social media sensation. A glass dome, filled with swirling smoke, is upturned on a plate. The waiter lifts the cloche and flicks it back and forth to ensure artful wafting, slowly revealing a pretty dish in whites, pink and black.
Until I went to Uncommon, saying the words ‘mung beans’ made me put on a hippy-stoner voice and twist my hair into fake dreadlocks. I couldn’t help it. But the mung bean and turmeric fritter at this health-conscious cafe, open since December, has cured me of my mug mung moves. The fritter is a fetching early-sunset orange, made from those beans, quinoa and buckwheat. It’s set with nigari, the special salt that’s used in tofu production, giving it sturdy, compact body. A poached egg, chorizo and ricotta made from kefir (fermented milk) round it out beautifully. There’s so much roughage in the dish I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one of those mythical negative calorie meals.
Chestnuts. Are you an X or a _ person when it comes to scoring and roasting? I discussed this and all things chestnuts on ABC Afternoons with Clare Bowditch.
Every few weeks I drop in to ABC News Breakfast to chat about what’s happening in the food world. This time I shared tales from my recent culinary adventures in Japan: 12 days, 50 meals, hard work but someone’s gotta do it, right?
