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?
I love dropping into ABC Radio Melbourne to chat about what I've been eating, cooking and learning. This time, I came in to talk about gluts, those times when you just have too much of something and need to deal with it QUICK. But host Richelle Hunt had been talking about a new program to try to help teens with obesity and the topic kind of took over the show, so we chatted about that too. It's a fraught issue and there are no easy answers.
Fusion is a scary word, evoking clashing mish-mashes and monstrous melds. But in the right hands, it can be a lively conversation between unlikely new friends, a proof that combinations can indeed be greater than the sum of their parts.
A really weird thing happened while I was at the Galleon, the 34-year-old cafe that is an enduring, endearing hold-out of a grungier, grubbier yet also gentler St Kilda.
Eaten much ostrich lately? (It's a red meat, akin to venison.) Chomped on croc? (Somewhere between white fish and chicken.) Hoed into buffalo? (Like beef, but leaner.) The only place in Melbourne you can get all these meats – admittedly, not always on the same day – is Polepole, an African-inspired restaurant that's been open four years and is now setting its sights on game meats.
Given that I'm the kind of person who wakes up thinking about pork buns, I didn't leave it too long to get to Tuan Tuan, a new Cantonese-Filipino brasserie in Carlton. The restaurant is Australia's first incarnation of a brand that's famous in Manila, particularly for its "snow" buns stuffed with barbecued pork.
Shall we get the name out of the way first? It's pronounced "soul" and you're to think not only of the essence coursing through the corporeal shell but also of a very wise bird. It's an indication of the balanced, deep experience that chef and owner Yiannis Kasidokostas is striving for: heartfelt, meaningful and considered.
Twenty years ago, when I started writing about restaurants, I would sneak to the toilet with a pad and pen to scrawl notes about the food and mood. Occasionally, thus enthroned, I would sketch a plate so I could recall its composition.
Barbecue season is upon us. But before you conjure images of backyards, burnt snags and sauce, consider the Texan-style barbecue on offer at Bluebonnet.
There's so much gleam and glam going on at the Greville that I expected the food to be something of an afterthought, little more than a sponge to soak up the savvy blanc, if you know what I mean. But the first dish to come out of chef Casey Norman's kitchen proved how wrong I was.
You don't need to tell anyone you've been to a Korean barbecue restaurant. They can smell it on you. The smoky sizzle of charcoal-grilled pork belly and marinated beef are locked into the very fibres of your clothing, emanating evidence of your eating adventures as surely as a Google tracker.
