Entries Tagged 'Reviews' ↓

London has been at the heart of foodie fashion for several years now but, just like the mullet haircut refusing to die in the face of more current tonsorial trends, the capital still has more than its fair share of fried chicken outlets, kebab joints and tired sandwich bars serving coronation chicken on white sliced, grimly hanging on to their positions on high streets and back alleys across the city. So what’s a hungry tourist to do?

A sandwich and a juice at one of the endless Pret-a-Manger or Starbucks will provide the necessary to keep you fuelled for sightseeing. But to get under the skin of London a little and experience something more than these chain stores’ identical offerings, replicating themselves like a virus afflicting prime locations, you don’t need to head off the beaten track – you just need a few local pointers.

The redevelopment of Trafalgar Square some years ago transformed it from a traffic-ridden hazard to one of the great public spaces: grand, accessible and at the heart of all things London. A food mecca it is unfortunately, and most emphatically, not. Stepping off the Square, however, offers some excellent eating options at reasonable prices – a double act that’s particularly hard to pull off in this most expensive of cities.

The fantastic thing about London is how compact the centre really is. Looking to the Tube map is actually misleading: what may take several stops and require changing lines can, in reality at street level, be a matter of a few blocks walking. So it is that Trafalgar Square is connected to Buckingham Palace via one of London’s most pleasant walks, under the Admiralty Arch and through St James Park. The Park, conveniently for the hungry tourist, is home to Inn The Park, a light, spacious restaurant and upmarket takeaway. Overlooking the duck pond, Inn The Park is popular with both sightseers en route to or from the Palace, Houses of Parliament or Big Ben and government bureaucrats from the ‘Westminster village’ because it so successfully achieves a relaxed, child-friendly café atmosphere, while serving excellent, seasonal and largely organic food at – for London – reasonable prices.

On a warm day, choosing from the salad or sandwich options – no tuna-sweetcorn-mayonnaise here! – plus a delicious sweet something and an artisinal bottled juice and joining the office workers sunning themselves on the grass is an instant cure for sightseeing-fatigue.

If, however, you are heading the other way out of Trafalgar Square, braving the reheated pizza hell that is the 10 minute walk towards Leicester Square and in need of a quick refuelling pit-stop, Gaby’s on the Charing Cross Rd is the place. Unprepossessing from the outside and with old-school formica tables inside, Gaby’s offers a range of Jewish and mezze style dishes like chickpea salads, eggplant with tahini and butterbeans cooked with onions and garlic, making it a great option for vegetarians. It’s not a vege establishment though and their salt beef sandwiches with mustard are famous. With the feel of a typical English caff and offering both dine-in or takeaway, Gaby’s is a low cost option serving an outstanding selection of European Jewish and more Mediterranean oriented food.

Of course, you may have emerged from the labyrinthine National Gallery, blinking in the sunlight like a mole long under ground and in need of a restorative drink. Head down the Strand and right down Villiers St, towards Embankment Tube station, and you’ll be rewarded with Gordon’s Wine Cellars.

Overcome any doubts about its dubious appearance and take the precarious and rickety looking stairs and suddenly, what seemed like just a corridor, opens out into a surprisingly large underground drinking den. The small bar area stocks a wide range of wines by the glass or bottle – when I was there last, this included several sherries and a rather nice claret – but don’t ask me what vineyard it came from ‘cos I’d drunk quite a lot of it by then! Tucked into the subterranean foundation arches of the buildings above, perhaps even of Charing Cross Station itself, Gordon’s is intimate and highly atmospheric and not for the claustrophobic. Tables are close packed, candlelit and disappear into the gloom and the damp, curved brick ceiling is within touching distance. That’s touching distance when you’re sitting down. As a popular bar, there is spillover space outside, which would accommodate any severe claustrophobes or, indeed, any punter unluckily trying for a table on a busy Friday night.

If Gordon’s is too busy to fight to the bar, a short walk across the footbridge at Embankment Station to the Royal Festival Hall offers very different, but equally atmospheric drinking potential. Festival Hall has recently been stylishly refurbished at some expense and both the Hall itself and surrounds now offer chain and non-chain, budget and high end catering options. But for that riviera feeling, it must be the Riverside Terrace Café. Spilling out from the main foyer and overlooking Southbank promenade and its fairy-lit Plane trees, it offers tables with prime people watching positions and excellent light lunch. On a busy Sunday afternoon, tables on the Terrace Café can be in short supply, but views to accompany drinks need not be lost. Head up to the bar on the fourth floor for one of the most wonderful views in London. This nameless bar largely exists to serve audiences attending performances at the Hall, but it is open to the public and a ticket is not required to take the lift up, buy a drink, take up a position on the balcony and enjoy the spectacular views across the river towards Westminster and, to the east, Tower Bridge. Truly a magnificent experience.

Being a tourist in one of the world’s great cities need not mean a diet of uninspiring and overpriced chain-store averageness, nor are Michelin stars required to avoid this fate. With a few pointers, it is entirely possible to eat well and drink in style in London, even in the most touristic of locations.

Instalments one , two, three and four.

I’m in lovely Warakurna community at the moment, located at the base of the Rawlinson Ranges in Western Australia. The remote Giles weather station, located just up the road, was built in 1956 and was the first permanent colonial occupation of the area for hundreds of kilometres in any direction. Many older people living at Warakurna now were children at the time, their families living independent existences centred around the myriad of rock holes and hunting grounds scattered throughout the ranges.

By virtue of its tenure as a piece of Western Australian Aboriginal reserve excised by the Commonwealth government fifty years ago, the weather station is the only place in the entire Ngaanyatjarra Lands where alcohol can legally be consumed, and officially only by the station’s six employees. Have I considered dropping into the weather station to say hi and flashing my big blue eyes in the hope of a cold one? Not for a moment. My research permit is far too valuable. Luckily for us, Coopers make a convincing birell (brewed without alcohol) that tastes great straight out of the freezer. While barbecuing steaks over our fire pit on Saturday night, for a brief moment I almost forgot it wasn’t the real thing.

With some time on my hands over Easter, some of the ladies organised to go out hunting for tirnka (little goannas). Armed with crowbars as digging sticks and billy cans as shovels, 8 women and 2 dogs packed into a troopie and made our way to tirnka country.

Tirnka country

We wandered through the bush for a couple of hours, stopping to dig at holes where there was evidence of recent action. It was a very successful hunt in the end, with eleven (!) tirnka bagged. We made a fire, sat down with a cup of tea and proceeded to cook up the catch. The preparation process involves removing gut then burning off the skin in the open flame for a couple of minutes. The lizards are then buried in coals and left to cook for about twenty minutes. The cooked flesh is delicious – pale white, smooth and tasty –hints of chicken (!) and fish and just a little bit smoky. No salt required. We got back to town on dusk, the ladies subsequently missing the Easter Sunday prayer meeting and making me three hours late for a sausage sizzle being hosted by the neighbours. Not good manners, but at the end of the day I think we were all where we really wanted to be.

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In sleepy Bermagui – the last unspoilt fishing village on the south coast – for the past six years Francesca and Alberto Cementon have made the most sublime range of gelati we have encountered outside Italy. (We still remember, don’t we, a kind of creamed rice gelato we sampled on the Piazza del Campidoglio, which set an aspiration standard for tradition and innovation). Go out of your way to visit the Bermagui Gelati Clinic – you can see from the snap below that it used to be the Veterinary Clinic, but the professional tone is appropriate. It’s between the Bottle Shop and Mitre 10. Here you will find an extraordinary range of gelato experiences, all freshly made on the premises.
 
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The first instalment of the tale of Pamela’s journey is here.

Day 1: Canberra to Mildura (700 and something kms)

This morning the Parents sent me off into the world with a stomach full of poached eggs and bacon and in a ute packed with donated blankets and clothes (thank you Wamboin craft group, and Trish and Glen). I only got as far as Yass before I stopped for a coffee (it was a slow start). It was the beginning of what turned into a disastrous day’s eating.

Handy Hint #1: If you are ever in the position of having to buy a tall flat white at McDonald’s McCafe, make sure you ask for a double shot.

The coffee was in fact so bad that I couldn’t drink it. But against all logic, I actually chose to stop at the next McDonalds (Gundagai) to buy another one. But this time, a long black. I figure there’s not too many people in this world who can ruin a long black.

Turning off the Hume Hwy, I made north for Wagga Wagga and then west through a landscape that produces so much of our food, gourmet or otherwise: the endless, empty wheat fields of the Hay Plain; the orchards and irrigation flats of the Murray-Darling basin rivers of the Murrumbidgee; the acres of land cleared for grazing around Balranald. I was playing tag with a truck carrying 600 sheep for live export to Saudi Arabia, the driver of whom stopped to check on his flock almost as regularly as I was stopping to pee.
 

 
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I’m not much of a cook but I’m a real hellion when it comes to ordering up a good meal. Would the kitchens of New Orleans (“It’s pronounced ‘Nawlins’ man! You sound like a fuckin’ limey!”) be up to the challenge?

I arrived in the Big Easy on the evening of Friday 7 November 2008 after 26 hours on the Amtrak Crescent train from Washington DC. My sleeper was very cosy and the views magnificent.

Miles and miles and miles of forests in their glowing fall colours, tiny hamlets painted by Norman Rockwell, long stretches of failed dismal outer suburbs not painted by Norman Rockwell, more beautiful forests, enormous military depots in Georgia where the autumn light turned the ranks of Abrams Main Battle Tanks into squat bronze terrapins and then sunset over the plashy bayou before the final run along the Lake Pontchartrain causeway across oily black moon-rippled waters into the glowing crescent of Nawlins.

The sleeping car attendant was suavely attentive to my needs (“Smoking stop in 10 minutes Mr N.”) and the lounge car very damn elastic about bar closing hours. But the dining car offered some pretty fucking indifferent cuisine and service.

“We do steak and eggs. Or warm chicken salad. How would you like it?”

“On time?”

“You really don’t want to start dissing me here honey.”

So I was feeling distinctly peckish by the time we were decanted around 7.30pm at the Union Passenger Terminal in Nawlins – a chunk of 1950s moderne brave new world of mass travel – right next to the crappy concrete brut 1970s Louisiana Superdome (which is quite a lot smaller than the MCG by the way – but better lit up at night).

Five minutes later a taxi (helmed by a 300 pound bloke who appeared to live in it) dropped me at my hotel in the French Quarter – a 170 year old charmingly dilapidated, sprawling and eccentrically renovated southern mansion run by a charmingly dilapidated, sprawling and eccentrically renovated southern family.

After unpacking and frisking my whiskers, I asked the hotel’s matriarch where would be a good place for a louche gentleman on the loose to enjoy some quality local cuisine before flanuering into the night.

Thirty minutes later I headed out into the Vieux Carré armed with a hand-drawn map marked with Xs everywhere and much juicy gossip about local activities. (Corruption in Nawlins city council elections!!?! Shocked I was!)

So anyway, to cut a rumbling stomach short, I ended up in front of Oliver’s Creole Restaurant on Decatur St at about 9pm on a Friday night. The place was buzzing and looked unlikely to accommodate a lone traveler trying pot luck – but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I pushed through the swing doors and was immediately bailed up by the Restaurant Captain (An American variant of maitre d’) who looked and sounded like a wiry aging ex-hippy version of Burl Ives. Magnificent sideburns. Or as my grandmother called ‘em “bugger’s grips.” I chose not to share this observation with the man who was gonna get me a table.

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Pottering around the kitchen on Wednesday afternoon I heard Joanna Savill talking about restaurant reviewing on Alan Saunders’ By Design. (And so did Rita of Eating Hobart).

Savill is Co-Editor of the The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food Guideand has actually had dinner with a food blogger. Fancy that! But what does she mean by “a food blogger”? I transcribed the relevant bit of the interview, starting after Alan Saunders asks her if she takes notes at the table: she reacts strongly, saying no despite the fact that “half the world is a food blogger these days and people seem to be all around me taking notes and photographing and doing everything else with their meal. I think that discretion is the better part of valour“.

(Where valour comes into the role description of a restaurant reviewer is not exactly clear, but I’m snarking now.) Savill says that if she’s desperate to remember something precisely she’ll send herself a text or sit hunched in the loo scribbling into her moleskine. The conversation continues:

Alan Saunders – Yeah, well, I know people who do that [take notes at the table]. I take the view that if you and I are having dinner and I take out a notebook, well this could be a business meeting, I could be keeping notes not to do with the food.

Joanna Savill – Look, absolutely. But I can tell you I once went to dinner with a food blogger, you know people who, who, go out to restaurants and photograph it and then write all about it online, put it online, and there’s a huge community of people doing that these days, and he proceeded to photograph everything that moved in the restaurant and to take notes at the table and we had the whole restaurant galvanised. (Alan exhales!) And I was just – I wanted to hide under the table, actually, you really don’t want to stand out, that’s the bottom line.

Phil Lees of The Last Appetite opened his recent post on food blogging as Wunderkammer by saying:

More than occasionally I wonder what is food blogging and how can it continue to differ (and differentiate itself) from other media.

It’s going to be pretty hard for that differentiation to occur in the minds of food mass media professionals, it seems. It seems that they only see two kinds of food blogs – the cheese sandwich variety or sites that review restaurants but don’t need to observe the same kind of strictures that professional journalists do (other than legal ones, of course).

To me the issue is clearly one of differentiation – if it hasn’t happened already, there’s a whole taxonomy of food blogs that will make a nice thesis for someone one day. I wouldn’t mind it being me, but I can’t come up with the $27,500 that the University of Adelaide and Le Cordon Bleu charge for their Masters degree in Gastronomy. Yes, $27,500.

I do read some review-type blogs, and some recipe-type blogs, some cook-the-book blogs, some food-history blogs, some just-because-they’re-local and some smart-people-obsessed-with-food blogs. And about eighty others, from time to time. What keeps me coming back is snappy writing and a clearly considered point of view. There’s not a lot of that about in the broadsheet lifestyle inserts.

As for reviews – I almost never do them here because with two small kids I don’t eat out much. However I can offer some advice from Saturday night’s dinner at Sammy’s Kitchen in Canberra – Do Not Order the Ma Po Tofu. It’s shocking.

You can download or stream the By Design program here. Skip forward to about 43 minutes for this segment (then go back and hear about designing Orang Utan enclosures).

The food and wine section of The Canberra Times had an ad last week which piqued my curiosity:

It reads:

Red Hill Butcher Shop

If you are after something special from your local butcher shop, make sure you visit Red Hill. The owners smoke their own hams on the premises, have Certified Angus Beef and moisture-infused pork and sell a variety of home-made meals and treats.

They even have a selection of wines from Mount Majura and Lerida Estate Wineries to perfectly complement that medium-rare steak.

Moisture infused pork, hey? In the olden days, when pigs were fat, they didn’t need any moisture infusions. And wasn’t there a moisture infused ham scandal a while ago? So I called the butcher to find out what they meant. For those outside Canberra, Red Hill is one of the oldest and fancy-pantsest suburbs in town, full of large homes on large blocks and lots of very long established money residents.

Tony the Butcher was at pains to point out that they were advertising the “moisture infusion” not just because they had to for legal reasons, but because they wanted to establish it as a defined product and that Australian Pork Limited, the industry body, was eager to see it marketed as such. He said that the meat had two additives, Potassium lactate (326, acidity regulator, humectant, bulking agent) and Sodium acetates ( 262, acidity regulator). (Those descriptions are from the Food Standards Australia New Zealand list of food additives and their properties.) I found him very helpful and happy to answer questions and volunteer information. Full points there.

He said that he’d been selling this pork for 12 months, and his pork sales had quadrupled in that time. He sells mainly cutlets and loin steaks, ie lean cuts that need fairly quick cooking.

Tony said that the meat is marketed as “Murray Valley Pork”, which a quick google shows is “the premium retail fresh brand of QAF Meat Industries, which is Australia’s leading producer of pork for the domestic and export markets.”

They’re certainly pushing the premium angle, appearing at the Sydney Good Food Affare (shame about that name) where they’re described like this:

Murray Valley Pork, Corowa, NSW
Succulent and absolutely delicious Murray Valley Pork from the Riverina and Murray Valley region is a premium range developed in 2005 exclusively for quality retail butchers. Moisture infusing ensures that Murray Valley Pork is always juicy and tender and its neutral flavoured brine has been specially developed to provide customers with a consistently high quality eating experience.

No mention of QAF Meat Industries and their rather unpremium business name there. But checking
QAF’s site will tell you they “now supply 20 per cent of pork to the domestic market and account for 30 to 40 per cent of all farmed pork exports from Australia. We employ more than 850 people at 10 sites across Australia, with our largest site and head office for the group located at Corowa in the Murray River basin.”

I only eat premium pork, because what I found out about industrial pig farming was so horrible I couldn’t face supermarket meat anymore. (A hat tip to Noodlebowl for sending me off on that journey – thank you.)

It must be very difficult for the real premium producers, like the wonderful Mountain Creek Farm that we buy our meat from, when industrial giants prey on the ignorance of consumers who don’t know how to cook a particular cut of meat, and are afraid of a bit of fat. You don’t have to eat the fat, you know, but it really helps your cooking. And a little bit is good for you.

I found Mountain Creek Farm by emailing the Free Range Pork Farmers’ Association and asking. If you want a moist pork, I suggest you do the same.

(PS – Michael Croft of Mountain Creek Farm keeps a terrific blog (unfortunately no RSS) where he describes the farming life, the principles behind the farm, his recent trip to the Terra Madre artisanal producers’ conference in Turin and how a man who was a vegetarian for seven years became a beef and pork producer. I have since met an ex-vegan couple who are now his enthusiastic customers – that’s how good the meat is. The farm will be featured in the 10 December issue of The Canberra Times’ Food & Wine section. Sales details are on the website. And I have no connection with them, beyond being a really happy customer.)

The best thing about writing a blog is the relationships that you form with online friends. Anyone could work that out. The second best thing about blogging is being able to say things like this:

I have just read Gina Mallet’s book Last Chance to Eat, a book that claims cookery is dying, being killed by industrialised food production and nutritionist fear-mongering. It is a bad book.

Many food writers have had a privileged upbringing (like me, to a point). Some can write about it in a way that’s not only interesting, but graceful – say, MFK Fisher. Part of what makes her writing graceful and interesting is the clarity of her analytical intelligence. Gina Mallet does not share this virtue. She is just up herself.

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