The Fabulous Life of Binky Silhouette

Milk Tiger Lounge, Calgary

2009-05-16T23:43:00.005-06:00

Milk Tiger Lounge
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I've found a new favorite bar. It got off to a shaky start, but the meatballs with spaghetti on a stick brought me back.

I love anything on a stick. They even serve cheese wrapped in ham on a stick. What's not to like? I *heart* this place.

I love the 2oz pours and the "stick to the classics cocktail list." I love the fact that there's a tag rather than a sign outside. The eclectic music that makes me dance like Snoopy (or for Andree to do the running man). The doorman was reading "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" tonight. They know what I drink (a perfect Manhattan, in case you didn't know) and they serve the best freakin' waffles in the world.

Yeah. Waffles. With chocolate or vanilla ice cream, and maple syrup.

So tonight, we went for dinner at the Canadian Danish Club. And I happened to mention the waffles. And there was an unspoken moment of affinity across the table. We were going to eat the herring, and the salmon, and the shrimp tower, and drink the Riesling, and go and have waffles. It passed in a moment, like when you know you're going to kiss, or push that friend off a cliff in case they rat you out for the bacchanal you just had.

There's a prize if you name the novel I'm referencing. It will involve waffles and a Manhattan at Milk Tiger Lounge.

Milk Tiger Lounge is at 1410 4th Street SW, Calgary. Call (403) 261-5009. It's open until 2am, Tuesday through Sunday (edit: I didn't know the days of the week. Never blog when you've just got home from this place). It tends not to get busy until 10.30pm, so it's a great place for an early drink if you like to hear your date speak. But nothing beats a midnight waffle.

Sushi Man, Calgary

2009-05-10T22:27:00.002-06:00

Sushi Man: Tempura Shrimp
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I'm still searching for truly sensational sushi in Calgary, but if my first visit is anything to go by, there might be some good stuff at Sushi Man.

I was in a noodle mood; feeling a bit peaky and not having been to the Farmer's Market for a while, I didn't have any stock at home, so couldn't make my own. I'd noticed this place a few times, and decided to give it a try.

The service was great; prompt and polite and the decor is much nicer than the outside suggests it's going to be. This looks like a real hole in the wall as you walk past, but actually it's quite fresh and Japanese modern inside.

The tempura shrimp (pictured) were light, not greasy at all, and if they didn't contain about a squillion calories, I'd eat them every time I visit. Even better was a steaming bowl of beef rib udon noodles, all slithery, slightly firm to the bite and with a savory, umami-rich broth. The beef ribs were a little tough, but the noodles and broth made up for it.

I wasn't really in a sushi mood, but tried a single scallop nigiri, which, while not the best I've ever had, was very fresh. The rice was especially good, slightly warm, moist and seasoned well. Possibly the best sushi rice I've had in Calgary.

It's on one of my many routes for the walk home, so early indications suggest that this could become a regular haunt.

Sushi Man is at Bromley Square, 1004 1 Street SW Calgary. Call 403 205-3232.

Punk Rock Bingo, Broken City, Calgary

2009-05-02T20:56:00.005-06:00

Beer + Bingo + Wings = World Class Night Out
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

If there's a better night out, and I don't just mean in Calgary, then I want to know about it. There's great salt and pepper wings, the rockingest DJs this side of your favourite scrut-bag nightclub and...bingo.

But as Steve, our host for the evening, says, this is not the kind of bingo you'd bring your grandma to.

With prize ranging from machetes to sex toys to tattooing at Bushido, it's enough to make your maiden aunt blush. From cries of "fuck yeah" as we get started (or whenever Steve feels like it) to a paddle to the ass for a erroneous call (a "bullshit bingo"), this is a decidedly R-rated night out.

But a belt for the RPS champion, great music and a general joy in perverting the usual bingo shenanigans, means that Punk Rock Bingo gets a thumbs up from me.

Improvements? I used to love the bingo calls when I went to the Mecca bingo with my nan. Clickety Click? Sixty Six. Dancing Queen? Seventeen. Let's punk rock them up a bit. Sham! 69. Two Fat Johnny Rottens? 22. Year Punk was born? 74.

As long as no-one start spitting, I'll keep going.

Punk Rock Bingo is at Broken City Calgary. 613 - 11th Ave. S.W. (403) 262-9976

Manresa, Los Gatos, California

2009-04-27T22:13:00.004-06:00

Manresa: Parmesan Churros
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I'm a lazy blogger by nature. I lack discipline, and hence get around to writing about 5% of the food I eat. My laziness will bite me on the bum at times, and I realise that I haven't captured my thoughts about some sensational meal or other.

My 2006 trip to California is one of those trips I was really lazy about. My laziness is somewhat specific. I don't think anything of flying 9000km to eat dinner, I just rarely get around to writing about it. But in May 2006, I organised a trip around two meals at Manresa, in Los Gatos. One night a dinner for eight with some foodie friends from an online discussion forum, with poulet demi-deuil (chicken in half mourning, with truffles stuffed under the skin) as the centre-piece, and then a solo tasting menu the following night, just for me.

The trip, and meals, were sensational, marred only by the fact that my wardrobe smelled of cheese for the entire trip, as I'd smuggled two truckles of unpasturised Montgomery Cheddar into the country for some friends.

Manresa has gone from strength to strength since my last visits and I was excited to see what Chef Kinch was doing now. What would Two Michelin stars, a recent James Beard nomination for Best Chef: Pacific, and a mauling of Bobby Flay on Iron Chef have done to one of my favourite restaurants? Most excitingly, a partnership with Love Apple Farm means that diners get to eat the most amazing seasonal, mainly bio-dynamic vegetables.

The restaurant is tucked away in a little street in Los Gatos, and I was having massive shivers of excitement as we sat down to our glasses of champagne. Of course we were letting David cook for us, and we quickly decided to have both the premium wine tasting and the standard one. For comparative purposes. I will admit to some significant wine envy at Chris' "premium" pours, but it was great to contrast both selections. And the sommelier was kind enough to bring me a larger pour of one or two of the wines I especially loved.

The food was...unique and delicious and I lack the writing skills and superlatives to really do it all justice. We left, giddy and swinging jars of Pim's marmalade, which is available from the restaurant if the online shop has sold out.

Highlights for me? The parmesan churros (pictured), a signature dish, which seemed more refined than on my previous trip. The deep fried kale contrasted with the cheesy richness, and if you think there's anything more delicious than a deep-fried cheese flavoured doughnut, you'd better get along to Manresa. Because this is a meal that starts with amazing little nibbles like this, and the famous Arpege egg, and the olive madelines, and just keeps raising your taste buds a notch higher, a notch further into ecstasy, as the meal progresses.

Everything is finely balanced, beautiful and whacks a massive punch. I've had too many three star meals that are all about pretty refinement, and what differentiates Manresa is the all-out deliciousness of it all. One dish still stands out for me. Called "Tidal Pool", it takes abalone, sea urchin and slivers of foie gras, served in a dashi broth. Perfect balance, perfect broth and the foie/seafood mix was an inspired pairing.

Vegetables play a huge role in the Manresa experience, nowhere more so than a dish entitled "Into the Garden", a composed warm salad that Kinch wants to be "as if we had held a mirror up to the garden and it showed an edible reflection." The plate is beautiful, with shoots and flowers and a perfect piece of potato, with a "dirt" made of roasted chicory root and dried potato. Follow the hyperlink to read Chef Kinch on the evolution of the dish.

It's not all about the veggies though. Our centre-piece was lamb, served with ramps, that they kindly showed us before it was portioned out. To be honest, they could have just left it on the table, whole, and Chris and I would have happily carved. I am a huge fan of lamb and this was perfect, even though the proteins are slightly overshadowed by the vegetables at Manresa. We're still trying to work out how they kept it so rare while we ate the intervening courses (which included a sensational roast kid goat dish, with curds and whey), and did wonder if we'd been shown a stunt lamb. Or perhaps a lamb leg body double? If it was good enough for Julia Roberts on the Pretty Woman poster, it's good enough for me though...

Any wrong notes? Bananas for desert, which as we all know, need to be banished from our plates, but otherwise, a perfect meal. I need to make sure it's not three years before I go back. I am prone to hyperbole, but if there is a more enchanting restaurant in America, I want to go there next weekend.

Things went from the sublime to the ridiculous after dinner and we ended up drinking Kamikazes at Black Watch ($8 for a pint. Bit like drinking battery acid), dancing at Mountain Charlies (when did people stop dancing face to face?) and a three am raid on the mini bar in the Hotel Los Gatos (great, and they were very nice about the red wine stains).

I want to organise another trip to Manresa, perhaps in August. Who's in?

Manresa is at 320 Village Lane, Los Gatos, California. Call (408) 354-4330 for reservations.
Hotel Los Gatos is at 210 E Main St, Los Gatos, California. Call (408) 335-1700 for reservations.

The Slanted Door, San Francisco

2009-04-26T19:27:00.002-06:00

Slanted Door: Beef Pho
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

The Slanted Door...so good I went back the next day.

Vietnamese food is one of my favorites, and I was spoiled in both London and Sydney. San Franciscans are also spoiled, with this modern Vietnamese restaurant that showcases a lot of the very delicious artisan produce that California has to offer.

Originally opened in 1995, the Slanted Door moved from its original home on Valencia, to a spot inside the Ferry Building overlooking the beautiful SF Bay. The menu is extensive, with around ten different sections, from Raw Bar to Rice. The restaurant is expansive, but the bar area is a boon for single travellers looking for a place to park their derrieres.

I was spoiled for choice, so I started with a lillet blanc, while I decided what to eat. Everything seemed to be shouting out to me "pick me, pick me" and the only way I could have tasted everything I wanted, would have been to have had about 20 friends with me. So to begin, some wood oven roasted Manila clams with chilies and crispy pork belly, followed by some imperial rolls with shrimp and pork, and the most incredible dipping sauce and then some kick-ass shrimp with roasted pineapple and garlic (breaking my usual moratorium on sweet with savoury). Everything was sparklingly fresh, served with plenty of zip and incredibly well balanced. Apart from the huge amount I had ordered.

I still felt I hadn't done justice to the Slanted Door; I'd barely scratched the surface of the appetizers. So I went back for lunch the next day. The pho (pictured), came with a beautiful selection of fresh herbs, amazing, raw Prather Ranch beef and a deeply-flavoured broth. But this was firmly upstaged by the Vietnamese sausage with oysters. I love meat with oysters, and this was the best combination of the two I have ever eaten. Musky, spicy sausage patties, with a side of teeny little Kusshi oysters from BC (yay, go Canadia). The oysters had each been sprinkled with a little tobiko, a little chili, a little citrus and fish sauce. Nothing to overpower them, just a little decoration to help them stand up to the sausage.

If I hadn't eaten at Manresa two days before, it would have been the most delicious thing I'd eaten all year.

Slanted Door is at 1 Ferry Building, #3. Call 415 861 8032 for reservations.

Antony and the Johnsons and Fleur De Lys, San Francisco

2009-02-27T11:45:00.004-07:00

Life Is Good
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

In spite of what the content on this blog may suggest, there’s something that I love even more than food. And that’s music. I just never get around to writing about music. That's about to change...

Tuesday night saw the real reason for my trip to San Francisco, the Antony and the Johnson’s gig at the Nob Hill Masonic Centre. It was all shaping up to be a perfect Binky evening, with dinner beforehand at Fleur De Lys, although I wasn’t looking forward to walking up California in those heels.

I’ve written before about how I think I am over fine dining, and then somewhere will be recommended and I go back, like a dog returning to its own vomit. As I get older (or is it wiser? I’m never sure) I become sure that life is about what’s true and pure and beautiful. I don’t find a lot of restaurants that are any of these things, but I keep finding music that highlights all of the fan-tab-u-lous things in life.

So Tuesday was a a night of two halves. First up, a meal that contained very little truth or beauty. Just perfectly fine ingredients with lots of fuss and zhuzh. The menu read very well, with lots of things I thought I might like to eat, but I’d been called “madam” twice within five minutes of arriving and was getting really pissed off. When did I tip? There was a time when “miss” and “madame” ran concurrently, one pulling in front of the other depending on how recently I’d had a facial. But I no longer ever get a “miss”. It’s madame all the way. Waiters of the world, if a single lady is…actually, forget the single and forget the age. Just call me miss.

First out, an amuse of chestnut mousse with a slightly suspicious texture and little flavour. My starter, a sort of mega-mix of a lot of signature dishes entitled "Symphony of...", had got me all excited, because I love eating a miniature of anything, but it was all so dull, so soulless, that the most exciting thing on the plate was the salad with a nice bitey dressing. The centerpiece, a fondant of choucroute with caviar was notable for being the only time I have seen a use for a single sprout leaf (as the receptacle for the caviar). It was like the Borrowers were at the pass, doing the garnishing. Then a quail, boned out and stuffed with ris de veau, spinach and pine nuts, which was just dull. A cheese plate followed. I was glad I hadn’t ordered a desert. The visual highlight of the evening was my friend’s lamb, two medallions, which were garnished with two tiny pearls of carrot. They reminded me of teenage breasts with very perky nipples.

Which gives me a suitable juncture to tell you about Antony Hegarty. Six foot five, identifies as transgendered, Antony has one of those voices that has everyone reaching for the superlatives. His is a queer voice, different, non-normative, that fills your soul and has you humming lyrics about cutting off your breasts.

Antony’s music is challenging; he celebrates the emotional and often physical violence of relationships with lyrics like “It’s true that I always wanted love to be hurtful. And it’s true I always wanted love to be filled with pain and bruises” (from The Cripple and the Starfish.). It’s transformative, alternately hopeful and hopeless and about the flux of life “Still have too many dreams. Never seen the light. I need another world. A place where I can go.”(from Another World). It’s ambiguous; one minute he talks about being a girl, a sister and at other times he is a boy. It’s never clear if Antony is speaking about himself, a persona or perhaps even you. Judging by the crowd and the tears at the Nob Hill Masonic Centre, many people find their own truth in his music.

Given his roots in drag and performance art, it’s at first surprising to realise that he’s going to sit at his piano, with his chamber pop orchestra and sing. No visuals, just clever lighting that ebbs and flows along with the intensity of the music and the odd fluttering hand gesture. His voice is as powerful live as recorded, all the more astonishing for realizing that this glorious noise is coming from another human being. The set contained songs from all of his recordings, all subtly rearranged. So “Fistful of Love”, without the heating up from the scorching horns on the album version, is stripped down and more evidently about a lover celebrating his bruises. During tonight’s performance it was so tightly wound, without the release of the album version, like waiting for a punch to the face that doesn’t come. At the end I realized I had stopped breathing.

Antony has a unique way with covers, and while I don’t want him to become the new Cat Power, his version of Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love” removes the sassy, splashy sounds (and Jay-Z, thank god) and concentrates on the “crazy” rather than the "in love". It’s twitchy, itchy and in spite of getting a laugh when he sings “got me hoping you’ll page me right now”, perfectly outlines his talent to find truth and beauty in the oddest of places.

The whole tour is sold out, so I can't tell you go and get tickets. You can listen to him sing Crazy in Love though http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K9pzjarqQo

Bistro, Faena Hotel+Universe, Buenos Aires

2009-02-14T10:07:00.002-07:00

Bistro, Faena Hotel. White Salmon
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

The Faena's not just a hotel, it's an actual Universe, which made me all the more itchy to go. The entirety of space and time and a concierge? I wondered if they'd have a swim up bar with pockets of dark matter. What more could girl ask for?

Well, quite a lot, actually. I like a posh hotel as much as the next person (assuming that next person is not Paris Hilton) but the Faena just didn't do it for me. Designed by Phillipe Stark, you could be in any of his hotels, it's so identikit bonkers. Themed as a bordello, all red and black drapes, it is totally over the top and completely soulless.

We stopped for a drink in the bar before our dinner reservation, but the music was so loud and the lighting so low that we realised communication would be impossible, so we moved through to the restaurant. Having been greeted at the door by possibly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen (who job was simply to say hello as you walked into the restaurant), while wearing a floor length red ball gown and displaying skin like creme brulee, we entered Le Bistro. It's quite a shock, after all of that red and black and velvet drapery, to walk into a room that's almost entirely white. A bit like walking into a sanitarium.

The room has rows of unicorn heads with vivid red eyes stating down at you. Possibly the biggest floral display I have ever seen. White Louis XVI style chairs surround the tables, while white leather studded banquettes line the walls. It's truly breathtaking and truly awful.

The food? Everyone's had their panties in a bunch because the Chef used to work at El Bulli, and so there's going to be a lot of *technique*. This became apparent from our amuse bouche, a deconstructed tortilla, which had the texture of partially-hydrogenated liquid styrofoam and a slight flavour of potato. Tortilla is one of my favorite things. Such alchemy that something as simple as potato, eggs, onion, salt and oil can come together and be so delicious. Here, the chef may have the technology and the desire to innovate, but some things were perfect before you got your pacojet on them.

There were some good things; my white salmon was a fab bit of fish, and they have got their hands on some good ingredients. But someone really needs to issue a restaurant edict to stop Chefs striping their plates with sauces. Especially when those sauces are brown or black. Just not pretty.

The bill was, of course, astronomical. I don't believe that cost should ever be a measure when you're talking about food. Unless you're paying hundreds of dollars for food that simply doesn't have a soul.

http://www.faenahotelanduniverse.com/

Don't Cry for Me Argentina, Part Five

2009-01-04T10:03:00.002-07:00

View from the Final Leg of the Journey
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I wish I could say it was all plain sailing from then on.

Things seemed to be falling into place and the flight from Vancouver to LA was all on time and I had the good news that I was on standby for a business class upgrade to Washington. The room service club sandwich and half bottle of champagne that I toasted my (belated) birthday with were well deserved and the king size bed with six pillows and very, very soft, high thread-count sheets gave me the best nights sleep I think I’ve ever had.

A six am automated flight update message from United was the first indication that things might not run smoothly. We’d booked the flight with a five and half layover in Washington, because it was Christmas Eve and we were expecting delays. I truly never believed that there would be a chance I could miss the flight from Washington to Buenos Aires. But as United called every 15 minutes, adding an extra 30 minutes delay to my departure time from LAX, that five and a half window was disappearing. Eventually it happened. My flight was so delayed there was no way I could make the connecting flight.

I had my first gin and tonic at 12.04 and continued with an hourly topical application until I fell asleep. United put me on stand-by for another flight to Washington that wasn’t showing a delay and which would give me 25 minutes to get to the gate for the flight to BA. I was number two (of 28) on the standby list. The flight was showing 14 spare seats. Then 10. Then seven. And then two. Where it remained, for the next 30 minutes as I obliterated my manicure. They asked if any passengers might like compensation to take a later flight. Each area boarded. They closed the flight. I was still standing at the gate, like the runt of the litter waiting to be picked. Finally; “Will passengers Goncalves and Edwards please come to the podium.” They shut the door after me and started to taxi a picosecond later.

I’m still trying to work out what the lesson of all of this is. At first I was saying that the universe didn’t want me to go to Buenos Aires; that it was keeping me away for a reason. That something bad would happen if I went. I have never been as nervous as I was when waiting for that standby flight to Washington, and this is from a woman who can be as neurotic as a champion Weimaramer on the morning of Crufts. The hope that I felt when I thought I saw my passport in a snowdrift outside of the office was overwhelming, as was the disappointment when it turned out it was a piece of ice.

I called a friend for some advice and talked through the Universe is against me theory. He asked if perhaps the Universe wasn’t just throwing some challenges for me to sashay over, which I thought was a superb way of looking at it. I don’t want to end this with some sort of “Little House on the Prairie” homily, but the whole thing has changed my world view. Now, can you go and check that you know where your passport is?

Normal food blogging service will resume shortly.

Don't Cry for Me Argentina, Part Four

2009-01-02T15:06:00.002-07:00

First Real Snow of the Calgary Winter
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

There were many people who wouldn’t usually take a Greyhound at the bus station. The canceled flights meant that a lot of people, who would prefer not to be stranded in Calgary for Christmas, were seeking alternative means of transportation.

You could see who had taken the bus before. They had bags of food, blankets, many layers of warm clothing and pillows. Me? A tube of Nicorette lozenges and my iPod. You see, I’d been hoodwinked by the Greyhound website, with its talk of reclining seats, heating, entertainment and refreshments.

What followed was the most uncomfortable 16.5 hours of my life. The coach alternated between freezing cold and the burning pit of Gehenna. My seat didn’t recline properly, or much at all to be honest, and there was no entertainment other than the stories of the woman in front of me, who was travelling from Winnipeg to Vancouver, on the Greyhound, entirely of her own volition. For the second time this year. I finally managed to fall asleep, but was shaken ruthlessly awake at Kamloops because we had to change coaches. Finally, I knew what it felt like to be a veal calf in the 1980s, being crated across Europe. Although I am not sure a veal calf was ever as depressed as I was as I realized the new coach had no heating at all and was being warmed by the slowly condensing breath of my fellow passengers.

There was quite a lot of grumbling. People had already been questioning how they were going to match us with our luggage, as there appeared to be little organisation about which of the two coaches making the journey we were on, and which our belongings. For those people used to airtravel, the lack of any sort of automated luggage tracking system (or in my case, the actual lack of an official tag, other than one the security guy made with my name and final destination on it) was an especial concern.

So you probably won’t be surprised to read that when I arrived in Vancouver, two and a half hours later than expected and with a window of an hour to get to the Consulate, I discovered that my luggage was missing.

The Greyhound employees couldn’t have been less helpful. They had no idea when my luggage might arrive, because they didn’t actually know where it was. They thought it might be on the other even more delayed coach, which they thought might get to Vancouver in the next hour or so. They weren’t sure. I tried to explain my situation to a teenager with a singularly bored expression than can only come from being terminally moronic, who just shrugged. If I were to go to the consulate and my luggage did arrive, they would take no responsibility for it and it would be just left out at the station.

I eventually found a Greyhound employee who was willing to take responsibility and if my luggage was on the coach, keep it in their office until I got back. So off I went to the consulate to get my passport. They were the epitome of British steadfastness in the face of adversity and I had my temporary passport in 90 minutes.

When I got back to the Greyhound bus station, they insisted on seeing some ID before they would release my luggage to me. I smiled as I produced my passport from my handbag.

Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Part Three

2008-12-26T07:58:00.002-07:00

First Real Snow of the Calgary Winter
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

The British High Commission in Ottawa couldn’t help. Can’t remember why now. A couple too many G&Ts and a bottle of Ridge Chardonnay with my mussels had left me with Monday morning fuzzy head. They suggested I call the British Consulate in Vancouver.

Gillian answered. “Just need to take a few details from you. Full name? Date of birth? We can issue emergency documents under exceptional circumstances. Let me call you back shortly.” 84 minutes later she called with the good news. They would be willing to grant me a passport. All I needed to do was get to the consulate the next day and I would be able to travel.

One small problem. The consulate is in Vancouver. That’s OK, I can fly there. Pause for realization. Not without a passport I can’t. And being a non-driving type, I don’t have any other form of picture ID that would allow me to board a plane. I don’t even have two forms of government issued ID without pictures that would allow me to travel.

I am about to type something that people who know me very well won’t be able to believe. I checked out the Greyhound bus schedule. The idea of Suzi on public transport is a little…unusual. In truth, I had managed to live in Calgary since August and had taken the bus for the very first time on Friday. The day I probably lost my passport. I don’t wish to sound sensationalist, but bad things happen when you take the bus. More on this later.

I've been told the flight from Calgary to Vancouver takes 54 minutes. The journey time by bus? 15 hours. There was just one seat left on the 6.30pm bus. Dear reader, I booked it. It would get me into Vancouver at 8.30am, allowing me to pick up my passport and then fly at 6pm from Vancouver to LA. Overnight in LA and then, on Christmas Eve, LA to Buenos Aires with a five and half hour gap in Washington to make the connecting flight.

Of course I had to try a little Plan B in the middle of it. I gathered together a dossier designed to convince an airline employee to allow me to fly. It contains my completed passport application, my work permit, my Australian Medicare card, my police report about the loss of my passport, an old expired passport that I found in a drawer (why I brought that with me to Canada and not my birth certificate, I’ll never know), photocopy of the photo page of my lost passport and a letter from my junior school headmaster saying I was morally upstanding. I was probably pushing it with the Medicare card but it was the only other government issued ID I could find. Man, I’m basically living off the grid.

Vancouver had 30cms of snow on Sunday 21st December. People kept talking about this like it was somehow significant. I just kept thinking “Erm, hello? This is Canada. We appear to be at the start of the next Ice Age so stop your whinging and warm my feet”. What this meant though, was that some flights got canceled. Now if the UK had 30cms of snow, the country would grind to a halt and we’d all kill and panic eat our neighbours. In Canada, a few flights got canceled and people talked even more about how lucky we were that it was a dry cold in Calgary. Not that wet cold snow they’re having in Vancouver. Oh no. Let’s pause for a second and count our blessings.

Of course the airport was like Picasso’s slightly over-wrought early attempts at Guernica and after an hour in line I was told that there were no seats left on flights to Vancouver. Not even if I told them that it was my birthday today.

When I said that bad things happen on buses, I was being serious. A man was recently stabbed to death, beheaded and parts of him eaten on a Greyhound bus from Edmonton to Manitoba. The killer was found with a ziplock bag of bits including an ear. You know, a little something for later. I would soon come to understand the significance of this detail.

That said, the Greyhound website made the whole thing sound like a real adventure. They show movies, make a big deal of the reclining seats and serve refreshments. I thought it might be quite romantic and was just wishing that I could journey through the day because I knew the scenery was going to be outstanding.

Then I arrived at the Greyhound station and the realization hit me. It was going to be a very long journey.

Don't Cry for Me Argentina, Part Two.

2008-12-26T07:39:00.003-07:00

Pedro in a snowdrift
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

So what constitutes an emergency? This was a question I asked myself as I perused the Foreign and Commonwealth website. It transpires that you can get emergency travel documents, only not on the weekend and only in extreme circumstances. I’d already cancelled my flights, because if I hadn’t, I would have forfeited most of the cost. So I no longer had any travel plans. Would the fact that I didn’t want to leave my brother alone in Buenos Aires for Christmas be a good enough excuse?

To be truthful, I gave up on the trip. The universe was clearly telling me *something*. I am not the kind of person who misses flights. I’m not even the kind of person who loses their passport. I am clumsy, prone to hyperbole, and kinda accident prone. Funny things happen to me. Especially since I moved to Calgary. I’ve been punched in the face as I walked down the street, scalded my face with a blender full of roasted tomato soup, been threatened with arrest for jaywalking and caused the evacuation of my entire building by accidentally setting off the fire alarm while making out in the lobby. At midnight. On a Sunday.

But back to the universe. Something odd was going on and I was at the point where I figured I wasn’t meant to go to Buenos Aires and, in the words of a friend, “something wonderful would happen to me if I stayed home.” So I made a shopping list for Christmas alone in Calgary

1. Food. My fridge was empty save a hunk of parmesan, a slab of coke zero, salted fermented black beans and some sambal oelek. I’d ran everything down in preparation for the trip and was basically left with condiments.
2. Alcohol. Sometimes it’s a bit frightening to calculate how much alcohol you conservatively reckon you’ll need for a week. Perhaps I am a high functioning alcoholic afterall. As I do my recycling, I’ve become accustomed to telling myself that I’ve had lots of people over to socialise.
3. Christmas decorations. Pedro just wasn’t cutting it on the balcony and I was starting to wonder if the Werepenguin wasn’t the cause of all this oddness.
4. Movies. I’ve always wanted to see “Elf” and I figured this was as good a time as any. And wasn’t Mamma Mia just out on DVD?
5. Cyanide pill. You know, just in case.

I cried a lot on Sunday. Then I pulled myself together, made some moules marinieres and had far too much to drink.

Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Part One.

2008-12-24T12:57:00.003-07:00

First Real Snow of the Calgary Winter
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

So I missed my flight to Buenos Aires.

Twice.

My brain’s up my bum at the moment, hence the first missed flight. I was sure I was flying on Friday and in spite of checking the itinerary twelve hundred times, well, needless to say I was flying on Thursday. The penny only dropped when I was on the phone to United, having attempted to check in online for a flight I had missed. I was about to get a bit snippy with the customer services executive as she asked me “why are you in Calgary?” for the fifth time and was resisting the urge to respond “because I did something terrible in a former life and am forced to pay for my sins by living on the ice planet of Hoth for a while”, when I realized what day it was.

Luckily I was rebooked, for Sunday, which was great because it meant that I was able to do all of the stuff I hadn’t got round to doing to prepare for the trip. Like pack. Get my inoculations. Do some Christmas shopping. Buy some summer clothes, because all of mine are in Sydney.

Of course it’s impossible to buy summer clothes in Calgary in December. It has been -35 for over a week now, a hitherto unknown temperature for me (and judging by the way that life in Calgary has crawled to a halt, an unknown temperature for it too. I had worked on the assumption that Calgary would continue to function in the cold, what with it being like Narnia here for about six months of the year, but all of the cab companies have just switched their lines to engaged and it’s impossible to get anywhere). I made the mistake of saying that cold all feels the same once you’re past minus seven, but once you’ve attempted to walk the six blocks to the office in -35, you feel like a fool for saying that. Your nostrils stick together. The air is knocked from your lungs. If you don’t have a wee before leaving, it freezes in your bladder.

And if I hear one more person tell me “but it’s a dry cold”, I will stab them through the heart with an icicle.

So I hired a cab driver for the day and went off to do my shopping. It was while I was purchasing some swimwear (at Commitments Lingerie in Dalhousie. I highly recommend them) that I realized my passport wasn’t in my bag but my work permit was. At this point I wished my wee had frozen in my bladder, because this was a disaster.

Is this the right time to mention I decided to give up smoking last week? After twenty years on the evil weed, I had decided enough was enough and wanted to use the trip as a chance to break my habit. Do you have any idea how much you want a cigarette when you think you’ve lost your passport? I was like some two dollar crack-whore, jonesing for a smoke, clawing at the cab windows as we drove back downtown.

My brain was telling me I must have left it in the office, when I was photocopying it for my friends’ PR application. Or it must be on the side at home. It cannot have just been whisked away by the Universe.

Of course it had.

It took me one online prayer to St Antony, two knots in hankies, three spirit guide messengers and four hours kicking through snow drifts and retracing all of my steps from the last time I saw it to realise that my passport was gone.

My passport. My most treasured possession. The thing that means I can split this joint with a second’s notice and go where my heart desires. This was really bad news.

Baba Ka Dhaba, Calgary

2008-12-15T21:15:00.002-07:00

Baba Ka Dhaba
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Plans had been afoot to eat at Baba Ka Dhaba for some time. Known as “the stand up” among my friends, I had been seduced with talk of totally delicious Indian food. It was reaching mythical status, and then everyone went into damage limitation mode, telling me to get drunk before I got there and to wear my oldest clothes.

A dhaba is a roadside restaurant throughout India and Pakistan. They are very popular with truck drivers, as they are often next to a petrol station. For British readers, this means you’re eating in the Indian equivalent of a “Happy Chef”, although pleasantly, the comparison stops there. The food served is often Punjabi, pretty spicy and with more of a homestyle feel that you’d get in a restaurant. If only the UK had roadside food as pungent and delicious as Baba Ka Dhaba. Perhaps I’d still be living there…

To continue the driving theme, Calgary’s Baba Ka Dhaba does look very similar to one of those illegal mini-cab offices you find in the east end of London. Not a lampshade in sight and it’s tiled, so you can either tell yourself it’s a bit like eating in a urinal, or that it’s really easy to hose down at the end of the night. To be honest though, this place probably hasn’t seen a good hosing down in a while.

The food, however, was glorious. Pillowy naan bread. Butter chicken in a sauce as silky as my underwear drawer. Chicken tikka, on the bone, all scrackly and charred from the oven. Pakora curry, a dish I had never heard of before, that was like eating the scrummiest dream you’ve ever had about your favourite person. Lamb chops and sheekh kebabs, be still my beating heart, that are better than Mirchi and rival those at Lahore Karahi in Tooting. We even got to go off-menu with goat hooves in a thin spicy gravy and some Nepalese fish, just flaking as you bite into the batter patina.

You’ll see my glamorous assistant Amit pointing out that the menu at Baba Ka Dhaba rotates through the week, so I can’t guarantee that what we had will be there when you go. In fact, I have an aloo naan winging its way to me as I type, as this is one of the Monday items.

Now, before you rush off there, remember that I don’t mind eating in a place that the interweb tells me has 16 health code violations. I cut some restaurants a lot of slack when it comes to things like this. Oddly enough, if I heard that a fine dining place was storing ice-cream on top of bones, then I’d be cautious. But this place is a hole in the wall and I’ve eaten pani puree on the streets of Bangalore, so I know I have a pretty cast iron stomach. What does make me weep though, is when people use the internet to complain that the chicken tikka wasn’t cooked properly and they got sick. Hello? If the chicken isn’t cooked properly, send it back, you cretin. Sometimes I find myself waiting for people to blossom from imbecile to idiot, and wondering why there isn’t some sort of test before people are allowed to post opinions on the web.

Baba Ka Dhaba is at 3504 17th Ave SE. You can call them on 403-207-5552.

Mirchi, Calgary

2008-12-14T23:31:00.003-07:00

Mirchi Kebabs
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

So what’s the restaurant that has been recommended to me the most in Calgary? Mirchi.

So of course I had to go.

This place is right next to the Safeway, and is almost a reason to shop here. Of course nothing is going to tempt me to frequent a supermarket that only seems to sell rotting vegetables, so until Mirchi opens a branch next to the Farmer’s Market, I can’t combine shopping for food to cook and a quick snack after.

Mirchi is a simple, no frills Pakistani/Indian café which has been open since 2007. We went on a cold, snowy Sunday night, because I’d heard the kebabs were amazing. I wasn’t disappointed. A lot of the food is served cafeteria style and we began by ordering at the counter, able to choose what looked most delicious.

I was with two people who like okra. They wanted it. Given I am in an “eat anything” kind of mood, I figured that now was a good time to see if my hatred of okra was ill-placed. Sorry to report that there will no further mentions of this evil vegetable on this blog for the foreseeable future. My fellow greedy weasels said that it was delicious though.

More interesting to me were the shish kebabs, all tender and moist, wrapped in some very good (although not perfect) naan with a really fresh salad. The salad in a lot of Indian/Pakistani restaurants can be a bit perfunctory, but as you can see from the picture, this is really pretty good. Chicken karahi came on the bone, lots of chunky pieces in a creamy, spicy sauce. With a couple of masala chai, this was a really, really good, very inexpensive meal.

Some chops were ordered as desert, when we saw a plate being delivered to the next table. The waiter thought we were joking though, and they never arrived. Luckily some friends brought some over a couple of nights later, and these are truly exceptional chops. The only tiny criticism I could make is that they might have been marinaded for a little too long, so the meat is very melting, lacking a little of the char and bite to the tooth from the best kebabs in the world (at Lahore Karahi in Tooting) But it is an exceptional marinade, so I may be being overly-critical.

All in all, this was a fantabulous meal, and a place that I am going to be visiting an awful lot.

Mirchi is at 101,825 - 12th Ave SW. Call 403 245-3663.

Silver Dragon, Calgary

2008-12-08T22:19:00.003-07:00

Silver Dragon, Calgary
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Which foods do you hate?

It’s one of my questions. Whenever I’m eating with new people, I love finding out what they don’t eat.

The first answer is generally the same. “Oh, I eat most things.”

But when you probe further, there’s always something.

Raisins. Peas. Butter. Red pasta sauce. Garlic. Lamb. Tongue. I’ve heard all of these in the past three weeks.

Me? I joke that I’ll eat anything as long as it's not endangered. And okra and bananas.

I’ve been trying really hard to eat anything that’s put in front of me. Guided by Jeffrey Steingarten, the former food editor of Vogue, who, when he took the commission, started a process of culinary self-modification to train himself to eat all of the things he had previously avoided. He wrote a book about it “The Man Who Ate Everything”, which you really ought to read if you haven’t.

I’m still working on the bananas and okra. Bananas, to me, taste like they are rotting. Okra provokes a visceral response, the kind that I am lead to believe many have to oysters. In the same way that I don’t understand how someone can’t eat peas, people are stunned when I tell them I don’t eat bananas. Blank stares of amazement. As one person said recently “You’ve eaten squirrel. How can you not eat a banana?”

Of course they are right. I think it’s essential to try new things, and attempt to re-educate your palate around things that you don’t think you like. I remember being told to have the turnip cake at Hakkasan in London, by a foodie friend that I really respected. When it was served, I assumed he was playing some sort of joke on me. What on earth is this flavourless, slithery, lumpy thing? I actually gagged. Given that Hakkasan serves some of the finest dim sum in London, I’d assumed that turnip cake was not for me.

So I had a bit of shock when I tried it again and discovered that I actually liked it. Maybe it was the passage of time. Maybe I’m a slitherier kinda gal these days. Maybe I learned that Chinese food is as much about texture as flavour and love it for that. Maybe Hakkasan’s turnip cake was having a bad day. Now it’s something I would always order.

A recent yum cha foray to Silver Dragon in Calgary gave me the chance to have some more turnip cake. I think some of the people round the table might have been having the same response as I first had…but this was a pretty good example of the dish. Best of all here were the egg tarts, warm and wobbly from the oven and we managed three serves. The har gao are well worthy of investigation too, and I was intrigued to notice that you get two prawns in them here, rather than the measly London one. Less interesting were the roasted meats, but a squeaky-fresh serve of gai lan (pictured) more than made up for that.

So tell me. Which foods do you hate?

Silver Dragon is at 106 3 Avenue SE Calgary (403) 264-5326. You will definitely need a reservation for weekend yum cha.

Hakksan is at 8 Hanway Place, London, W1T 1HD. They serve the best xiao long bao I have ever eaten and the place cannot fail to make you feel like a Bond Girl.

Mi Tierra Tu Taqueria, Calgary

2008-12-07T15:51:00.002-07:00

Chiles Rellenos
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Did you know that 21.4million people visited Mexico in 2006?

Nope, me neither.

I’d never been able to work out why internet food boards were always full of people complaining about the lack of decent Mexican food in their ‘hood. Of course part of the problem is that most of what we’re served as Mexican food is lowest common denominator meat product, coated in cheese and served with a battery-acid margarita, but I did always wonder why so many people were so passionate about Mexican food.

Having spent time in Chicago and cooked the whole of the Rick Bayless back catalogue, I feel like I know what good Mexican food is. After one particularly bad Mexican experience (in London, natch) I attempted to complain, but the owner had no time for me because I replied in the negative when he asked if I had ever been to Mexico.

I’ve never been to Pakistan either, but I can spot a good tandoori lamb chop at 25 paces.

All of this is a long way of telling you that I have found some good Mexican food. In Calgary.

This is somewhat surprising. Of course I tweeted it. “Stop the presses. Sensational enchilada verde found in Calgary strip mall”. An American friend replied “I would have been less surprised if you told me you’d seen a unicorn.”

But it’s true.

The enchilada verde is sensational, with the green chile sauce having a proper spicy kick. Now, some of the other stuff we ordered wasn’t quite as good; the chiles rellenos (pictured) were a bit flabby and a lacked sparkle, all of the rice was a bit lack-lustre, but who doesn’t love refried beans?

OK, so it’s a long way to go for one great dish, but I am sure that a further exploration of this menu will show up some more superstars. Oh, and the décor is a bit fast-food joint, so don’t go expecting a fine dining experience.

Mi Tierra Tu Taqueria is at 10015 Oakfield Drive SW. Call 403 238-1749. They are closed on Mondays and open 12-8pm Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 5pm on Sundays.

Movember Gingerbread Men

2008-11-30T14:41:00.002-07:00

Brady does Santa
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Some of my colleagues have been looking a little hirsute recently. Movember Madness has infected the Calgary office and there have been a lot of furry looking men around. I was even asked if I wanted to "pet" someone's mustache on Friday night.

I declined with thanks.

That said, I was once told that kissing a man without a beard is like eating eggs without salt. And you wouldn't do that...hmmmmn.

Anyway, I wanted to do my bit to support Movember, but wasn't sure that a handlebar mustache would suit me. So I gathered together a group of girls (henceforth known as the Gingerbread Elves) to make some gingerbread men to sell to our colleagues. I figured that we could ice some mustaches onto them.

Sunday afternoon saw us making and baking two batches of gingerbread dough. Monday saw us laying them out in the office and setting up an icing station so that people could decorate and then eat. My creative friends made some cowboys and a transgendered gingerbread person. These were to be sold at a premium.

We raised $85 which goes towards our team goal. If you fancy donating before Movember ends, go here https://www.movember.com/ca/donate/donate-details.php?type=team&team_rego=100246&country=ca

Nectar, Calgary

2008-11-26T22:43:00.005-07:00

Nectar, Calgary
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Oh dessert. How much I love you.

Of course I’m showing my non-u roots there. Dessert, in the UK, is one of those shibboleths that give away your class origin. You’re supposed to say pudding, unless it contains fruit, when you could, quite correctly, call it dessert. Especially if you’re dining with a pedant.

Either way, I always used to say I didn’t like desert. I was lying. I *heart* dessert, pudding and afters and I don’t care what you call it, as long as it’s delicious.

Dessert was the whole point of last night’s venture out to Inglewood. We picked a “tapas” place to begin, reasoning that we really all just wanted to go to Nectar, but felt that we ought to have something savory first. We should have skipped dinner at Village Cantina because it wasn’t great. But I am feeling nice, so I shall spare you the critique.

Let’s celebrate the good, right?

Nectar’s philosophy is simple:

“Dessert is special. Unlike regular foods, we use it to treat ourselves, celebrate important occasions, to thank, and to reward. Children beg for it, grown-ups sneak it. Nectar Desserts makes sure that each and every piece we make is a special event itself, from first sight, to last bite!”

Housed upstairs from a couple of chi-chi stores, the room is all hard-wood converted loft chic. They have some nice over-stuffed sofas, lots of cute mirrors on the walls, dim lighting and a glass cabinet full of gorgeousness that made me drool. Mental note, perfect date place. Should I have the chocolate and salted caramel tarte? Or the blackberry and passionfruit one? Perhaps a tasting plate of five different flavoured macaroons? A posh s’more? Actually, that one nearly won until an American friend pointed out that it’s illegal for my first ever s’more to be in an up-scale dessert bar and we need a fire pit to induct me into the world of s’mores.

I’ve been learning a lot about s’mores recently. I saw a post on Mike Czyzewski's blog entitled the Omnivore’s Hundred. It’s a list of 100 things you could/should/ought to eat. I’ve had about 85 of them (missing out on things like fugu, durian, fondue (!) the Big Mac, a root beer float, a Hostess Fruit Pie and the aforementioned s’mores). A lot of the ones I’ve missed out on are North American and I even had to go and look up s’mores. Hadn’t even heard of them, but then I realized that this is because I am allergic to camping and grew up in the UK. Turns out there’s an Alberta connection to the s’more though. Add some peanut butter and you have the Banff Blast. God, isn’t Wikipedia amazing?

Back to Nectar. I ended up choosing the salted caramel tarte. It’s the benchmark patisserie item for me, a modern day classic, and I already knew that Nectar was going to have to suck really, really, really hard for me not to be back. So I’d start with the basics. And a macaroon chaser. And a glass of Bonny Doon “framboise” which was the perfect partner. Sometimes I think I might be quite good at this food lark.

The tarte was good. Not perfect, amazing or likely to give Pierre Herme any sleepless nights, but they’d used Valrhona Guanaja, one of my favourites, a 70% bitter chocolate from South America and did a good job with the chocolate pastry crust. The macaroon was less amazing, but I am not sure that Calgary, a place I swear is drier than the Lut Desert, is the best place to be making and selling macaroons. That’s not going to stop me trying them again though.

Other lovely touches included some exceptional canelles and a wide range of take-home sorbets and ice-creams that don’t have any nasty preservatives or fillers. My ingredients list for the cherry sorbet says “sweet cherries, sugar”. Good to see and makes me miss my ice-cream maker less.

Any bum notes? A couple. They don’t take reservations and don’t accommodate tables of more than six. So they weren’t very pleased when nine of us turned up. We split into two tables, but were told “it’s quiet tonight so you can stay.”

Can you imagine walking into a clothes store and being told “we hate the way you look but sales are down this month, so come on in, fatty?” I still don’t understand why restaurants (or in this case, a dessert bar) can get the basics of customer service wrong. Luckily most of the rest of the service was sweet, kind, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and we did break their rules, so I shall forgive them. And go back next week.

Nectar Dessert Bar is upstairs at 1216 9th Ave SE

Chef's Table, Calgary

2008-11-24T20:19:00.002-07:00

Soup: Chef's Table Calgary
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Executive Chef Theo Yeaman has cooked in some interesting-sounding places I have never eaten at in Canada and has done a stage at the Fat Duck in Bray, where I have. His restaurant, Chef’s Table at the Kensington Riverside Inn, was just named the fourth best new restaurant in Canada by AirCanada’s enRoute magazine. It would appear I get all my best tips from airline magazines these days.

Let’s get the quibbles out of the way first. The table was booked for 8.15pm, but I wasn’t seated until 9pm. There are two dining rooms, one with a fabulous open kitchen, the other with a fabulous…open fireplace. I was sat in the latter. Now, I recognize that being dateless in Calgary on a Saturday night is probably reason enough to throw yourself in the Bow River, but the restaurant staff didn’t help matters by seating me, back to the rest of the room, next to the fire. Talk about being a social pariah. Luckily I was moved, without having to ask, when I took out my camera.

The service was a bit wonky all night. I like informal; I don’t like being asked how my food is tasting when I have a mouthful of it or trying to give some feedback on a dish and being asked if I have eaten monkfish before. But I know I can be a right old grumpy-pants at times, and these are minor compared to some delicious, bold pairings and flavours that made up most of my meal and service that is friendly and warm.

First up, an amuse bouche of a teeny two-bite Forme D’Ambert tart, just warm from the oven and formed from deliciously short pastry. Next, an earthy turnip and apple soup, with perky texture and sweetness from some candied walnuts. Yes, they called it a veloutè and yes, it’s not 1998 anymore, but who cares about menu anachronisms when the food’s this good?

A Queen Charlotte scallop with blood orange foam, edamame, salmon roe and orange segments really shouldn’t have worked, but did. The Heidi Schrock Weissburgunder which paired it showed the skills of the sommelier and a wine service and kitchen that are working well together. Yeaman’s food uses striking flavours and it’s good to see that the wine service is up to the task.

The fish course was the only bum note of the evening. The preparation was interesting; roasted Atlantic monkfish with beef jus and a take on cassoulet with some cannellini beans and pancetta, but the fish was mealy and poorly cooked. It’s a shame that the quality of the fish and the execution let the dish down, because I’m often bored to death by the fish course on a tasting menu and this was genuinely interesting.

Then, deep breath, an “intermezzo” of blood peach sorbet with a dash of prosecco. I was ready to be all scathing (seriously, when was the last time you were served a sorbet in the middle of the meal? Were you wearing legwarmers at the time?) but the sorbet had bags of flavour and I liked the deconstructed Bellini thing that was going on. So I stopped complaining and embraced my inner Irene Cara.

Next up, Ewenique farm lamb saddle with panella, roasted eggplant and a thyme jus. Served with a 2005 Poggio di Sotto Rosso di Montalcino, this was Italy on a plate. I’d never heard of panella before (and my interweb research suggests that it’s traditionally a Sicilian chickpea fritter, rather than the chickpea and polenta purée I was served) but how lovely when you learn something new from a menu. Especially when it tastes this delicious. The lamb was just fab, although any pun as good as Ewenique is going to get me on-side from the get-go.

Finally, some doughnuts with a compote and an exceptional custard. I would have lingered over the lingonberries, but the table of dentists next to me were getting kind of graphic, so I brushed off offers of a cappuccino (a cappuccino? At 11pm? Do I look like a hairdresser?) and made off into the night.

Best meal I’ve had in Calgary? By a long shot. Good enough for me to go back soon. The tasting menu changes fortnightly. This could be the beginning of a beautiful thing.

Chef’s Table is at the Kensington Riverside Inn, 1126 Memorial Drive N.W, Calgary. Call 403.228.4442 for reservations.

Ali Baba Kabob House, Calgary

2008-11-22T12:30:00.003-07:00

Ali Baba Kabob House
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

The restaurant that’s getting the most coverage in the Calgary blogosphere at the moment is Ali Baba Kabob House. Yes, there is a Calgary blogosphere. I was quite surprised too, but it’s well worth checking out the lovely Andree at ugonnaeatthat? and John Manzo at Creative Juices and Solids . I followed their lead and suggested that our CalgaryFoodie group trot along.

It’s often a bit stressful taking a large group of people to a place you’ve never visited before. Still, I had done my research and was prepared with a list of the dishes we should order. Of course I was late getting there and everyone else had already ordered. So they missed out on my research and looked a bit crestfallen.

Ali Baba is an Afgan restaurant, Calgary’s second, which has been open for a month or so now. Its very casual, more of a fast food place really, but some of the food is really good. My guide for dining here is as follows;

Have the qabali rice. It’s only a dollar extra and it’s fluffy, buttery, carroty and sultana-y all at the same time. I don’t have much time for sweet and savoury, but this is delicious.
Try the sultani dinner, mixed sticks of barg and korma kebab. I really hope that sultani means fit for a Sultana. This was.
Do not miss the boulanee. Street food is really popular in Afghanistan and the tabang walas (street vendors) often have these “turnovers” filled with leeks or mashed potato.
If you go before I get back there, try the choppan (lamb chops). I love a lamb chop, but thought it was a bit greedy to order these as well. Tell me what they are like.

Not everything is perfect here. The salad of iceberg lettuce and tomato is pointless and not livened up at all by the accompanying pot of yogurt and mint dressing. The salad with feta that someone else ordered looked very work-a-day. Most of the blogs that have written about this place haven’t praised the bread, so I didn’t bother.

But it’s cheap, tasty and cheerful, just as long as you stick to the guidelines above.

Ali Baba’s Kabob House 1602 14th St. S.W. Call 403-874-9791

Divino Wine and Cheese Bistro, Calgary

2008-11-11T15:06:00.003-07:00

Close Up Divino Door
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Oh Calgary, if you keep this up, I might have to change my culinary opinions of you.

Fresh from my new love, FARM (we're still in the early stages, I get all tummy-tingly when I think about this place and fragments of love poems keep popping into my mind) comes Divino. It's a sexy little wine and cheese bar on Stephen Avenue (of all places). I think I might have to have an illicit affair with it.

My first trip wasn't really about going to Divino. It was a place to meet before seeing a show. We were just going to have a glass of wine. But then we saw the cheese list and thought we ought to have a piece of two. You know, to be social.

This is how these thing start. You have the best intentions, no plans to let another into your heart, but they wiggle their way in, in this instance with some exceptional taleggio and superlative bread. Also great was the tête de moines, all coquettishly rosetted and fresh from the girolle. Finally, a British cheese, the king of cheeses, a Leicestershire Stilton, which had been beautifully kept and was in the peak of creamy condition.

Two glasses of Kung Fu Girl Riesling (Best. Name. Evah.) from Washington State, tipped the whole hour-long trip over into a sensational sixty minutes.

Can't wait to go back and try the food proper.

Divino is at 113 - 8th Avenue SW. Call 403-410-5555 for reservations.

FARM restaurant, Calgary

2008-11-09T09:59:00.002-07:00

Menu and Cutsey Tea-light
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Everybody has a type, right?

If you’ve got a shaved head, glasses, a couple of conspicuous tattoos and can use the work chagrin in a sentence, I will give you my number. And that’s just the ladies.

In the same way that we humans often have an ideal partner-type, we food lovers often have a restaurant type. For some, it’s the linen-lapped formality of a Michelin three star place. Others love a gastro-pub, all stripped wood floors and a terrine. Many like a TGI Fridays, although there’s nothing for them to see on this blog.

Et moi? Well, I’m a sucker for those casual places that source great ingredients and just let them speak for themselves. I love cutsey, often mis-matched plates. Really, really fine wine glasses. Menus written on chalk-boards. A bar where you can dine alone. Small-plate menus that are made for sharing. Wait staff with piercings.

I was getting slightly depressed by the lack of these kinds of places in Calgary. But one just opened. And I *heart* it.

Janice Beaton has been a bit of culinary lighthouse for me over the past couple of months. Her cheese stores (Janice Beaton’s Fine Cheese) on 17th Ave and in Kensington prove that the restorative powers of a brie de meaux cannot go underestimated.

So the opening of her first restaurant is a big deal. Some say it’s based on Salt in Vancouver, but as I chatted to Janice, it’s clear that this place is all about her passion. Her passion for cheese and for bringing people together over food.

The format is simple. One list of 28g serves of cheese and meats, served on boards with a compliment. So your 3 year old Canadian cheddar is paired with a beautiful tomato relish. A chalkboard of daily muses, offers up the “specials” which generally include a soup, a salad and a couple of other dishes. The roasted tomato soup was sensational; creamy (although it contained no cream) with a hint of spice and a sludge of onions. The trout salad, served with a lemon-chevre mousse, caperberries and baguette croutons, was a very grown-up, deconstructed take on a smoked salmon bagel. These might not be here when you go, but there will surely be something equally delicious to tempt you.

What I can be sure of is that even without the specials, the short little menu has enough to capture your interest. Order the mac and cheese. Get the large one and fantasise about bathing in the mustardy, cheesy sauce and exfoliating with the crumb topping. The JBFC goat cheese fritter is also worthy of investigation, but you don’t need me to wax lyrical about the virtues of fried cheese. The confit duck salad, with arugala and spinach, is lifted to the sublime by some toasty hazelnuts and dried apple chips. The kitchen really knows how to get the most of their, often local, ingredients by adding in texture. This is simple food, with no superfluous flavours.

The drinks list including sherry, port, stickies, international and local beers, ciders and bubbles. The wine list has a really good selection by the glass and some which even come in even tinier tasting pours. I can’t move on from the pouilly fumè at the moment, but they have a couple of vinho verde which I need to try.

As we sat, munching, on Friday night, I turned to my expat friend and said “Tonto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” This restaurant is what Calgary needs and it really raises the bar here. It would flourish in any major city. There would be a line round the block if this opened in London. It’s modern, sexy, cosy, delicious and I want to live here. The only problem is that they don’t take reservations, and if they keep up the good work, it’s going to be impossible to get a table very soon.

FARM is at 1006 17th Avenue SW Calgary. Call 403.245.2276 if there are more than eight of you. That’s the only way to get a reservation.

Incanto, San Francisco

2008-11-05T22:52:00.003-07:00

Incanto Blood Sausage, Egg and Oysters
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I’d been meaning to write about this place for a while, but the food didn’t blow me away and so I never got round to it. However, the other evening’s “At the Table With...” on the Food Network Canada, reminded me of the place.

I’m a massive fan of “nose to tail” eating and I’d had my eye on Chris Cosentino at Incanto for some time. I think the moral of my visit here is never take a group that’s 50% vegetarians to a restaurant that’s all about the offal, because they’re not going to have very much to choose from.

That said, as a firm fan of offal, there wasn’t much for me to choose on this Sunday night. I did my best though.

My starter augered well. Entitled “Chef’s Last Supper” it was perfect comfort food; for the viscerally inclined. Soft, wobbly oysters, a poached hen’s egg and some crumbly morcilla, napped with pangrattato for contrast. Best starter went to the sardines with pickled fennel and radish salad. The sardines were spankingly fresh and Chris looked all smug about his choice. I broke my personal rule of not ordering risotto (too many carbs, I make a mean risotto myself and I tend to get bored after about seven mouthfuls) because it was a chicken giblet risotto. It was delicious- well cooked and the muskiness of the giblets made it more interesting, but ultimately it was just risotto, and I can make that at home.

Having watched this show tonight, I am 100% sure that we didn’t see 50% of what the kitchen can do. Chris Cosentino is the most passionate chef I have watched for a long time. I love his commitment to sustainability. His passion for the animals that he prepares. His willingness to face up to the fact that animals have to die to provide us with meat and that he cried when talking about slaughtering his first goat. This is someone that really respects animals (and I love that he jokes his son will probably become a vegan aged 16 in an act of rebellion).

There are too many places that I want to eat in in San Francisco, but I think I am going to have to go back to Incanto.

Incanto is at 1550 Church Street, San Francisco. Call 415-641-4500 for reservations.

Spice Hut, Calgary

2008-11-03T20:51:00.004-07:00

Kebabs at Spice Hut, Calgary
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Sometimes the story of how you find a restaurant is better than the restaurant itself.

Steve instigated Thursday night curry a while ago. He and a couple of friends would get drunk and then go eat a curry. Simple enough. Only Steve is one of those people whose surreal knob is generally turned up to 11 (ask him about his first attempt at web development sometime) and one night their cab driver basically kidnapped them, promising them the best curry they would have in Calgary.

Lo, Spice Hut, Pakistani restaurant extraordinaire, entered the restaurant consciousness of my friends.

I loved the story so much that I insisted we go there. So a few weeks ago, a group of us set off. During Ramadan. At 6pm. Hmmmn.

The guys in Spice Hut were very accommodating and soon brought us the piles of food we’d ordered. I insisted on some sheehk kebabs and breads, as these are the benchmark items to assess the calibre of any of any Pakistani restaurant. Given it was Ramadan we had to have some haleem. And almost everything else on the menu. Apart from the fish and chips. Turns out that Spice Hut used to be a fish and chip shop, and after they took over the place, so many people came in asking for them that they just added them to the menu.

You’ll notice I say kebabs. I don’t wish to be dramatic, but please shoot me in the face if you ever see my write “kabob” on this blog. And while I’m at it, send me home if you hear me order a “donair”. It sounds like a cut-price Turkish airline and I am wedded to the use of donner.

Come to think of it, if you ever hear me order a donner kebab, section me, because I’ve clearly lost my mind. We all know they’re made out of owl snouts and reconstituted rat penis.

I’m pleased to report that the kebabs at Spice Hut are very, very good. Well spiced, with good char and plentiful. The tikka was pretty good too but who goes to a Pakistani restaurant for the chicken tikka? Breads were a bit of a let down. No green chili paratha and the naans were very dry. No lamb chops either. ‘Sigh.

In their defence, we ordered too many different dishes and we were starving, so things got a bit of our hand and my critical capacities were just blown away by the variety of dishes. That said, the haleem was exceptional, much better than at Lahore Karahi, my favourite Pakistani restaurant in the world.

I’ll go back, mainly for the kebabs. Although the word on the street is that there’s a new great kebab place in town…

Spice Hut is at 6554, 4th Street NE, Calgary, 403 274 7687

The Maria Island Walk, Tasmania

2008-11-02T16:41:00.003-07:00

Tim's Feet and Shadow
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

“Four days that will last a lifetime”

I remember when I first read about the Maria Island Walk. I was sleep-deprived, having got a 6am cab for my flight to Melbourne. Luckily there was a new Qantas in-flight magazine and I was so taken with the mention of a marsupial lawn and delicious Tasmanian produce that I ripped out the article. As the plane was buffeted by force 21 gales as we squealed into Melbourne, I promised myself that, if I lived, I would do the Maria Island Walk.

Maria Island is a national park just off the coast of Tasmania. It’s split into two distinct areas connected by an isthmus with an amazing diversity of wildlife and scenery. Best of all, it’s home to many endangered species. The walk takes you across at least five beaches, past some of the most extensive fossil deposits in the world and across the colourful sandstone Painted Cliffs. Maria is home to the more unusual blonde wombat, along with Forrester’s kangaroos, echidnas, leopard seals, fairy penguins, pademelons and some snakes. Which I was really hoping would keep themselves to themselves while I was there.

The Maria Island walk has won all sorts of awards, including Gourmet Traveller’s best eco-tourism initiative for 2008. I sold it to my travelling companion, Inês, as an Australian walking safari, with amazing food. She had second thoughts when I mentioned that a night in the Henry Jones Art Hotel in Hobart might be a nice idea before we had a couple of nights in tents.

You see, Inês is like me. God wouldn’t have invented the boutique spa hotel if he had meant us to sleep under canvas. My ideal accommodation involves carpets, a take-home shower cap and, ideally, a Martini bar within staggering distance to the steam room.

So why was I was about to go on a four day wilderness hike?

Well, you see, I was seduced by the promise of gourmet food and the wombats. I didn’t realise we’d be carrying our own packs, and that a wilderness camp would involve the clivus multrum drop toilet and no hot running water. In fact, forget the hot. No running water.

But I just had the best holiday of my life.

It started as we sailed from Triabunna marina. We watched a seal wrassling a fish for its lunch as the gulls outpaced our boat. My glasses were misted with sea spray as a pristine white beach came into view. I was leaving life behind, on my first holiday for years without a laptop or mobile phone.

The walk is a total sensory experience. From the smell of musty rotting wood, to the feel of the pack on my back as I listened to the crashing waves in chorus with the black cockatoos. Watching the beaches curve away in front of us and tasting the convicts desire to swim across to Lachlan island and escape their penal solitude. I wasn’t a great travelling companion. I walked 14km on the second day and said no more than 50 words to anyone else.

This is billed as luxury camping. Now, I’d been stung with this before at the working ranch at the Grand Canyon. A tipi is a tipi, no matter how nice the painting of a elk on it. There’s a wacking great hole in the top and no built-in wardrobe. But each night on Maria, our guides conjured food and served wine that many restaurants would struggle to produce. Scallops from Shoal Bay with risotto. Marinated quail. Duck and kangaroo sausages. But at the end of the day (which comes earlier than you’d imagine when there’s no electricity) you are in the bush, in a tent, falling asleep to the sounds of the ocean. And feeling a bit scrutty because the only wash you’ve had was a thirty second dip in the Mercury Straits.

The reason that this is four days that will last me a lifetime is because I learnt that luxury isn’t 24 hour room service or someone to carry your bags to your room. I can be a bit of a princess at times, but I swear that I have had few happier moments than when Tim cracked open the Cadbury’s roasted almond chocolate as we gazed over the ocean. Or when I went off to walk by myself and watched an endangered Cape Baron goose and its three chicks pecking for grubs. Or when I petted a wombat. Or when I was surrounded by 300 million year old fossils.

There are too many moments that I could tell you about. Really though, if you have legs and want to really experience the power and beauty of our planet, you could do no better than take four days to do the Maria Island walk.

Maria Island walk website: http://www.mariaislandwalk.com.au/Maria.html

Henry Jones Art Hotel, Hobart is amazing old jam factory, converted into a boutique hotel. The restaurant, Henry’s, really wasn’t very good, but this is one of my all-time favorite hotels http://www.thehenryjones.com/

I also had a great lunch at Fish Frenzy before setting off. Half a dozen local oysters and fish and chips. Fish and chips taste a thousand times better when you’re sat in the sun, near the ocean with the taste of ozone on your lips. http://www.fishfrenzy.com.au/

Those tipis I mentioned are at the Grand Canyon Ranch. http://www.grandcanyonranch.com/

There’s a set of my favourite photos from the trip on Flickr.

Operation Crab, Sydney

2008-11-01T12:34:00.003-06:00

The Crab Whisperer
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

One of the best things about being into food, is all of the other people who are into food. We hide in the strangest of places, always ready to make a restaurant recommendation or share the best recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies.

I was blessed to meet a fellow friend in food during my time in Sydney. Jake Greenberg is a true budding greedy weasel, and one of my regrets about moving to Calgary is that I won’t get to spend more time with him.

My first sense of his gastronomic powers was when we went to a simple noodle bar. The whole family was there; grandparents, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, cousins and brothers. And me, the interloper, being welcomed for the first time, into the glories of a very large extended family. Most of the children were drumming with chopsticks and attempting to hide spring rolls up one another’s noses. As the other diners left, I was beginning to regret my decision to choose a restaurant with no tablecloths and the worst acoustics in the whole of Balmain. But over the noise, I hear Jake say that he was going to have the squid.

An eight year old choosing the squid? This is relevant to my interest. Said squid was duly delivered, and I was keen to get Jake’s view.

“It’s a little bland.”

I had found a new friend.

So I suggested to Jake that we cook together one day. Pick anything you like…we’ll make it, I promised. He chose crab. To go to the fish market and pick a live crab. And then take it home and kill it and prepare it and eat it. Of course an eight your old gourmet would want to do this.

I duly create a menu and work out the most humane way to kill a crab. My plan was that this would be a lesson about our moral obligation, as those at the top of the food chain, to treat our food well. To teach Jake how to choose good produce and prepare it simply and beautifully. We were going to have crab linguine, with some buffalo mozzarella bruschetta, and chocolate cupcakes.

Once back from the market, (where Jake eyeballed the pecorino with truffles as something he wanted to try, based solely on the $120 per kilo price as he scarfed down a half dozen rock oysters) I set to putting our two Queensland Mud Crabs into a coma. I was determined that they wouldn’t be thrown, alive, into a pan of boiling water and while my research suggested that a spike to the “brain” was probably a very good way of dispatching them efficiently, I’m no crab brain surgeon.

Jake suggested throwing them, alive, into a pan of boiling water. I was pleased and began my homily about moral obligation. Jake listened, nodding. “How about we put one into a coma and throw the other one, alive, into a pan of boiling water?”

With hindsight, we should have. It would have been interesting to see if there was any noticeable difference in the texture of the crabs with two different cooking methods, and Jake would have got his wish. However, I stood firm, and both crabs were anesthetized before death. The other thing I stood firm on was not untying one of the crab claws. This was just an instinct from me, in spite of repeated begging from Jake. It was only afterward that I discovered Mud Crab claws are so strong, they can pince off the finger of a grown man. Maybe I do have some maternal instincts…

The meal turned out well. Jake enjoyed his first taste of softly sweet imported buffalo mozzarella, and the linguine, with the crab, parsley, ripe tomato chunks and garlic, was enjoyed by all. Less successful were my cupcakes. Turns out that even a budding gourmet isn’t ready for 66 % Valrhona chocolate. He did enjoy licking the bowl though.

Aria, Sydney

2008-10-19T01:39:00.002-06:00

Aria: Passionfruit Souffle
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

They say that the food is generally inversely proportionate to the view. Guillaume at Bennelong put me off dining in Sydney's hatted harbour restaurants. But I'll admit it, I was wrong, and Aria has put me back on track.

This blog was always meant to be about celebrating the good. And there was only good to be found here.

OK, so maybe the bread wasn't perfect, but the butter was fabulous and really, that's what eating bread is all about. That, or cheese.

Luckily I was dining with two of my favourite greedy weasels in the world, so when I arrived (late, natch) the champagne was already being poured. They didn't bat an eyelid when I suggested we begin by sharing the oyster starter, and then move on to our own starters. So six beautiful local oysters arrived, with a vichyssoise mousse. I generally prefer my oysters on the half-shell, by the dozen and with nothing more than a flick of tabasco or a squeeze of lemon, but this composed dish was heavenly.

The amuse bouche did sort of pass me by, but starters more than made up. The duck consomme was the winner; amazing depth of flavour with a couple of slithery duck confit wontons to ring the textural changes. My scampi came a close second though, showcasing the amazing shellfish that we take for granted here. Seriously, move to Calgary and soon you'll be having the sort of carnal response these scampi and crab croquettes caused me.

Mains were equally good. My quail came with a couple of breaded, deep-fried legs, which basically were KFC for gourmets, and this should be applauded. . Giles went very quiet over his beef, but his silence said more than anything. I didn't get a taste, but this was mainly because I was being all territorial over my quail and working out how I might take the bucket of Robuchon style mash potato home and make it my life partner.

Jet lag kicked in at this point and I was sure I wouldn't stand the 20 minute waiting time for Damana's passionfruit souffle. Luckily the wispy lightness and lick of passionfruit syrup that had been smeared on the cooking pot perked me up enough to make it through petites fours and coffee.

Rumours that I threatened to vomit with tiredness if our cab didn't arrive soon aside, this was a wonderful evening with cooking of the very highest calibre. I'd rate it over any other fine dining experience I've had in Sydney, Tetsuyas included. It totally encapsulates Sydney fine dining, with amazing ingredients, informal but knowledgeable service and, of course, a view to die for.

Aria is at 1 Macquarie St, Sydney (02) 9252 2555

My Mum's Corned Beef Hash

2008-10-18T14:08:00.003-06:00

Old Court Gate
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

It starts with marking anniversaries. First week without, first month alone. First my birthday, first of yours. Time passes, and you count two years, ten months and seventeen days of without. Eventually you realise that before you thought of life as moving forwards, but now you're moving from.

Today would have been my mum's 69th birthday. Today feels like a good day to remember her.

When someone you love dies unexpectedly, you don't lose them all at once. I remember waking up the morning after she died, on the floor of the lounge in Coventry.and wondering what I was doing there. Now, admittedly, it's not *entirely* unusual for me to not know where I am when I wake up. Too much travel and too many wild nights out have got me used to that. So I was having a moment of early morning woozy-snugglyness. And then I caught up to myself in the present tense and remembered she was gone.

With hindsight, these are some of the worst moments of all. I don't think the human mind is very good at dealing with sudden loss and tries to play tricks on you. I still have moments where I think, "I haven't spoken to Mum for a while, I must call her". The thing is. people don't disappear all at once. It's not as simple as they are here one day, and the next they are gone.

So after nearly three years, I am back from my place called grief. I don't cry every day anymore. I can hold more than one thought in my head at a time. People can mention their mums without me wanting to stab them, repeatedly, through the heart with a bread knife out of jealousy. I remember, with pleasure, the time I had with my mum, rather than raging about the time we won't.

As this is a food blog, I wanted to share a recipe of my mum's with you. I would go so far as to call it her signature dish. She wasn't a great cook, or even a good cook. Food wasn't hugely important to her. She was a war baby who spent her early years on rations and believed that the best time to put the Christmas sprouts on was sometime in early September.

We did share some food experiences. Grilled sardines and beer in Barcelona. The worst octopus in the world in Mykonos (shortly before she was bitten by a pelican). Years of my teenage vegetarian angst and arguments about whether or not I could eat a Kwik Save economy beefburger. And she baked a mean apple pie.

Anyways, here's how to make corned beef hash, Jo Edwards style. Serves three, with a side of mash potato (which is potatoes boiled and then mashed, no butter or milk to be added).

Take one onion. Chop and microwave on high until soft. Chop a tin of corned beef into small pieces. Open a tin of tomatoes. Mix tomatoes and corned beef with the onion. Cover and microwave on high until molten.

Ruminations on Mac and Cheese, Calgary and Chicago

2008-10-10T17:18:00.004-06:00

Mac and Cheese (bubbling cauldren of) at Table 52
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

It’s possible that I may end my days by drowning in a bowl of mac and cheese.

Macaroni cheese wasn’t something my mum ever served when I was growing up. I would like you all to believe that my mum would only ever serve a perfect spaghetti carbonara, perhaps followed by a simple green salad and then a piece of reggiano she’d been maturing in the family cheese cave, but we were more likely to get an economy beef burger from Kwik Save. I don’t believe I even tried pasta until I was 13 years old. So really I have no right to laugh at the Canadian obsession with Kraft Dinner, because I am sure that this is the sort of thing mum would have loved. I’m just so anti food stuffs that come in packages and are jacked up with preservatives, sodium and e numbers, that I doubt I’ll ever try it.

Luckily, lots of places serve beautifully home made mac and cheese here, and I think I might have to try them all.

My mac and cheese of the year (so far) was at Table Fifty-Two in Chicago. I was somewhat suspicious at first, as it’s run by Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to get Fat Oprah or Thin Oprah food. Luckily it’s the former, and Art Smith is aiming to be “the home of Southern hospitality in Chicago”. It’s a cute little space, with a counter in front of the open wood burning oven, where singletons like me can go and try and chat up a chef. It’s great, they *have* to talk you and you don’t end up feeling all alone in a strange city. Of course one downside is that you also end up talking to the people sat next to you, who are also generally sad singletons and use words like “toothsome” to describe the cat-fish (yes, I nearly stabbed the man to my right) or keep telling you that you’re a food writer because you’re taking photos (no, I am not, as this blog attests).

The food at Table Fifty-Two is well worthy of investigation. The menu was full of things that I wanted to eat, most notable of which was a side dish of three cheese macaroni. However, I also really wanted to have crab cake with fennel and Georgia peanut remoulade and cat fish with bacon braised collard greens, hush puppy and cheese grits, and sadly I’d forgotten to pack my extra stomach for the trip, so I tried to score a half-serve of the mac. “Art doesn’t do half-serves” said the waiter. So I had to give it up and set to enjoying the wood fired biscuit they served me, along with a little devilled egg amuse.

Table Fifty-Two isn’t perfect, although the food and hospitality are pretty exceptional. They serve Fiji water instead of tap water and make a big deal out of serving Australian lamb. I get a little frustrated by this sort of ecological wastefulness. But these are minor points and this restaurant really wants you to have a good time, so I am going to forgive them.

And, of course, just after my cat fish was served, the chef came over with a cheeky grin and a bubbling cauldron of macaroni cheese. “I couldn’t let you not try it” he smiled. And I really wished I had packed that extra tummy. It was outstanding; amazing baked cheese lid, with lots of gooey cheese sauce beneath. I was counseled to stir the cheesy topping into the rest of the dish, but I always prefer to munch the topping first, especially the bits where the pasta has peeked out and you get these crispy, cheesy bits. Then you can enjoy the luscious, soft, creamy pasta and cheese sauce afterwards.

Another good mac and cheese, and much closer to me at the moment than Chicago, is at the Avenue Diner in Calgary. Their philosophy is about supporting local farmers and growers and serving really good, simple food to their customers. We couldn’t resist a side order of “Dad’s aged white cheddar mac and cheese” to go with breakfast, although we did forgo the optional truffle essence or marinated chicken. I really think I am going to have to start carrying that extra stomach with me at all times.

Avenue Diner is at 105 - 8th Avenue S.W. Calgary. (403) 263 - 2673
Table Fifty-Two is at 52 W. Elm Street Chicago. +1 312.573.4000

It's All Greek to Me, Calgary

2008-10-05T10:39:00.003-06:00

Baklava
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

So who woulda thunk it? The best baklava in the world is available in Calgary.

There's this place called Kalamata Grocery Store, located conveniently next to the Galaxie Diner, so you can have your breakfast and then stock up on deliciousness for the week ahead. The rose and pistachio baklava is, without doubt, the best I have eaten. The pastry is crackly-light, just shattering as you a take a bite, before the rosewater and syrup-soaked lower layers add more heft and luciousness to the mouthful. The pistachios are sweet, and the syrup not too over-powering. One mouthful will transport you to your Grecian island of choice (Mykonos, in my case) and suddenly your world is filled with the smell of oregano-rich roasting lamb, white church roof-tops against a brilliant blue sky and the smell of wet leather and poppers (in my case. You might have a different experience of Greece). Funny how the memory does that to you.

Kalamata also stocks the most amazing pressed Greek yogurt, which sells out fast, so it's always worth asking when they're getting some in next. I used mine to make tzatiki, which was rich, garlicky, cool and minty, all at the same time.

They also stock some amazing barrel aged feta, which I'll go into raptures over some other time.

I'm not sure if Kensington's Broken Plate restaurant uses any of Kalamata's ingredients, but it's a not bad place for a midweek supper. Portions are huge, and the bread amazingly moreish, so you probably don't want to do what we did, and order a couple of dips, some zucchini fritters, soup and salad. Actually, you can probably forgo the salad all together, for it was the biggest let down of the meal, with less than perfect tomatoes and a sort of chemically salad dressing. Don't pass by the fritters though. They are crisp, yet gooey mounds of zucchini, packed with flavour although served with some questionable zig-zags of beet puree. Just dip them in the tzatiki and enjoy.

Kalamata Grocery Store is at 1421 11 Street Southwest, Calgary.
The Broken Plate is at 302 10th Street N.W., Calgary

Vero Bistro Moderne, Calgary

2008-10-04T12:53:00.003-06:00

Chicken
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

The moral of this story? Never order the chicken.

It has always been one of my rules in a restaurant. Don’t order the chicken. Don’t annoy the waiter. I can make chicken at home and annoy my friends. At home I know that I’m eating a happy, organic chicken that lived a lovely life pecking at grubs and my friends won’t do anything indecent to my food.

I don’t go to restaurants to eat what I can cook at home.

That said, I have made two exceptions to this rule. There was a poularde en demi-deuil at Manresa, in Los Gatos, California that I crossed an ocean for and a roast chicken with bread sauce at Glebe Point Diner in Sydney that are worthy exceptions and worth seeking out. Chef David Kinch’s chicken in half mourning (as the translation goes; the name comes from the slices of black truffle that are stuffed under the skin before it’s poached) was specially prepared for us, and served with these slightly scronchy fingerling potatoes. Glebe Point Diner roasts their chicken and serves it with a solitary roast potato, nutmegy bread sauce and, when I have eaten there, some fabulous corn. Like Hoover for vacuum cleaner and Kleenex for tissue, when I see chicken on a menu, my mind leaps back to these two dishes. They are the quintessence of chicken for me.

So Vero was going to have a few problems from the get go. Because when they announced a special of poached chicken with black truffle, polenta and a lemon sauce, my mind went into munching mode and I was hopeful of a dish that had elements of my two favourite chicken dishes in the world. In Calgary. I’m nothing if not an endlessly hopeful girl. Things weren’t helped by the rest of the menu being all basic proteins plus some sort of culinary anachronism. Raspberry coulis? Is it still 1989 here?

Starters came and went, with the standout a Dungeness crab-cake that I wished I’d ordered rather than the sub-TGI Friday boneless-ribs. There was a nice touch and a nod to their tapas menu, with an amuse bouche of a single, glossy and fat Puglian olive and some small chunks of Parmesan Reggiano. But this was served after we’d started our appetizers. Along with the bread. And the heart shaped butter flavoured with sun dried tomato. And the wine.

The service here is sweet and well-meaning, but it needs some help. We were really rushed towards the end, with desert menus and coffee being offered before one of us had even finished our main. Which is no problem, just tell us if you’re doing a second seating and you need the table back (and generally speaking, I’ll go somewhere else. Because I like to decide how long my supper is going to take me to eat, thank you very much) but don’t rush us because the poached chicken special was running with blood and you have to send it out again.

They did everything they could to put it right. Apologies, comped the chicken, sent a glass of delicious wine (the name of which I never did find out) and offered us free deserts. I was half hoping for a snog from the chef, but this never materialized.

So I hate to be negative, and I really should go back for late-night tapas. God knows Calgary needs something chic and chi-chi for late nights. Perhaps Vero will be great for that. Just beware the chicken.

Vero Bistro Moderne is at 209 10 Street NW AB Calgary 403-283-8988
Manresa is at 320 Village Lane, Los Gatos, CA 408- 354-4330
Glebe Point Diner is at 407 Glebe Point Rd Glebe, Sydney +61 2 9660 2646

Calgary Pork Bun Tasting

2008-10-03T17:32:00.003-06:00

The buns
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Eileen kept bringing me delicious pork buns to taste and I got to thinking. Who makes the best baked cha sui baau in Calgary?

This is the sort of thing that runs through my head a lot. Sometimes the voices get so loud that I have to lay down in a darkened room to try and get them to quieten. Why haven't I read the complete works of Dickens? Who is the fifth cylon? What is the collective noun for bears? (Because I don't really like him, Cally and a sleuth, in case you were wondering). Sometimes it gets very tiring in my head.

Luckily I'm an inquisitive soul, generally determined to find out answers. So I gathered a small group, including the lovely Eileen, and we set out to find the best pork buns in Calgary.

Eileen did a lot of the leg work and had already pulled a list of five potential bun sources. So went set off in Taryn's truck, nearly running over Martin Fowler on the way.

Once back in the office, the buns were laid out in a blind tasting. Each was initially graded for appearance, specifically, how much were we looking forward to eating it. Bun B was "freaking Taryn out" because of the "sneaky peek" she was getting of the filling. I'd always seen this as a plus, myself, but I guess there's no accounting for taste. Bun D was marked down for the glaze being "uneven" (yes, we are bun fascists) and bun A was the aesthetic favourite of everyone.

So onto the tasting. We were looking for a bun that had a good ratio of filling to bun, with a "proper" barbecue flavour and that wasn't too sweet. Bun A got off to a good start with a good meat to bun ratio (so important, don't you find?) and Bun B was marked down for "gooey meat" and "way too much bun." Bun C was slightly criticised for some large chunks of fat but overall, the meat plenty was lauded. Bun D was left largely untouched because of the "chemical flavour", "low quality meat" and the fact that it "just tastes wrong." Bun E saw us all on some some sort of pork high and we started making talking faces out of the buns as we enjoyed the "lots of filling."

So the time came to unveil the winner. It turned out the Bun A, from Logos Bakery was the winner, and it was 10cents cheaper than all the others too. However, it is a bit of a schlep, so the best downtown pork bun went to ABC Bakery. Yum.

The worst one? I try to celebrate the good, but I think you'd do well to avoid Maxima's. There, I warned you.

Logos Bakery and Cakehouse is at 1623 Centre St NW (403) 230-1688
ABC Bakery is at 112C 3 Avenue SE (403) 266-2888

Tomato and Spinach Soup

2008-09-21T22:33:00.002-06:00

Veggies
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

It’s Sunday and I’ve had a hard day of shopping. I’d frozen a couple of servings of the lovely roasted tomato soup I made last Sunday, and needed to use up some spinach.

So, I was going to make tomato and spinach soup.

Easy enough, you defrost the soup, add some spinach and heat until the spinach has wilted. Blend, et voilà, a whole new soup for another week.

One thing you must always remember, is to wait until the soup is cool before you blend it. Because if you don’t, you run the risk of shattering the blender and, if the universe is really conspiring against you, the lid coming off the blender and ending up covered in an arterial spray of roasting hot soup.

Luckily only the latter happened to me tonight. I'm with Baudelaire. Laugher is human and often prompted by the misfortune of others. But never again will I laugh when someone slips on a banana-skin or a child gets hit in the head with a swing. Because a jet of soup to the face, chest, floor and kitchen cupboards is no laughing matter.

I’ve just picked a lump of spinach out of my hair and have spent the last three hours with an icepack on my face.

No, really, stop laughing.

Tomato Soup and Cafe Vue

2008-09-17T09:56:00.003-06:00

Tomatoes
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

You already know that the weather here was glorious on the weekend. I ate some lovely ice-cream, I spent a morning at a spa being massaged to within an inch of my life and I invested in a winter coat that, according to the sales girl, will see me to -20 degrees.

Sunday saw me eating at a vegetarian restaurant, and I think that this is where it went awry. It's called The Coup and, given I'd just done a really intense yoga session and was craving some protein, I bimbled merrily along, assuming that it was a chicken joint based entirely on the fact that chickens live in coups.

Of course, I was wrong.

We shared a platter of what can only be described as compost. Readers of a gentle disposition might want to look away now, but they served a curry cream cheese dip, garnished with banana. *Involuntary gag*. I'll admit that the yam chips were OK, but really, this kind of food isn't going to convince anyone that not eating meat is a positive lifestyle choice. For the record, I have nothing against vegetarianism or vegetarians. I save my disdain for the vegans. But really, this place was a new low on the deliciousness scale.

The irony is, I was going home to prepare some vegetables.

I'd had a sensational tomato and basil soup at Vue Cafe on Saturday, and so had spent more than a couple of hours attempting to procure some decent tomatoes to replicate the dish at home. Vue is a sweet little place, in the middle of an art gallery and serving a really simple menu, along with some wines and beers.

I love any place where the wine list has a sense of humour, and Vue is set up to put a smile on your face. The service is relaxed, chatty and attentive. The menu an example of knowing what you do well and not being scared to serve it. The cheese and herb biscuit that came with my soup was a perfect example of warm, busomy, biscuity goodness. They dealt well with an oil-slick Binky, so relaxed from my massage that I was at risk of sliding off my stool.

But back to the tomatoes. The ones in the photo weren't *quite* as good as the heirloom tomatoes I picked up at the Farmers Market last week, but once they were roasted, pricked with chili and soused with some smoked salt, then liquidised with some garlic and onion, they made a perfectly delicious roasted tomato soup that was head and shoulders above the vegetable abominations I'd been served earlier.

The Coup is at 924b 17th Avenue SW Calgary, Alberta Canada
Ph: 403.541.1041. Really, I would give it a wide berth.

Vue Cafe is situated inside Virginia Christopher Fine Art at 816-11 Ave SW. Ph 403.263.4346

The Newbury Spa is at 720 – 11th Avenue SW Ph. 403.265.7499

Gelato

2008-09-15T08:32:00.002-06:00

Gelato
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

What an amazing weekend! It was about 22 degrees in Calgary, so everyone was walking the streets semi-naked.

Of course when it's hot, it's gelato time* and I was lucky enough to find an interesting spot in Kensington.

So do you know what the difference is between ice-cream and gelato? I always prefered gelato. It was lighter and the flavours truer than ice-cream (although I'm never going to pass up a scoop of any icey-goodness, if the truth be told). Turns out that gelato is made with milk (generally full-cream, natch) but generally speaking, the fat content is much lower than that of ice-cream (7-10%, as opposed to 15+%), which is made using a hell of a lot of a cream (the clue's in the name, see?). You'll also find that a lot less air is added during the commercial gelato making process (cos traditionally, they'd use a really long wooden spoon), meaning that you're getting a denser, richer product. Which also means it melts more easily, as you'll see in the photo. Not that I believe Fiasco stir their gelato with a wooden spoon. It's the march of progress. *Big sigh*.

Hazelnut is my gelato flavour of choice, followed by strawberry. Or Ferrero Rocher. This developed during a lovely trip to Sirmione, where every day I intended to try a different gelato, but just couldn't get past the hazelnut. It can be an elusive flavour; if too much sugar has been added, the roasty, toasty flavour of the hazelnut is lost. It's also a bitch to make.

I think I am in a position to give you a round up of where to get the best hazelnut gelato...

1. Gelateria Cafe 2000. Sydney. Tonino Lo Iacono is Sydney's best gelato maker. I'd walked past this place a hundred times before I popped in, and my tongue nearly fell out of my mouth when I tried his hazelnut gelato. He makes tiny batches, all by hand and even makes his own fruit/nut bases. Sadly many people use commercial bases these days. He even grinds his hazelnuts by hand, to make sure that his hazelnut gelato is perfect.

2. Scoop. London. Everyone was wetting their pants about this place when it opened. London isn't really a gelato town...Let's just say that it was a good job I had left for Sydney when this place opened. It's about 150 meters from my old office. My gelato was served by a 13 year old boy. I'd like to see more child labour in the gelato industry.

3. Any gelato place in Sirmione, Lake Garda. Really. Just go. It's a lovely trip. I can recommend some hotels if you'd like. And a great place for osso bucco.

4. Fiasco. Calgary. OK, so it's probably not a world's best and the caramel gelato was just yeuck (think foamy, sugary nothingness, rather than strident, almost burnt caramel which I was expecting) but the hazelnut was pretty damn good. They'd got the sugar balance right and there was that extra creamyness that you get from the hazelnuts. Very yum.

Gelateria Cafe 2000 is at 650 Darling Street, Rozelle, Sydney. They also serve a limited Italian menu, which is variable in quality but earnest in its authenticity. I'd just have the gelato and a flat white, to be honest.

Scoop is at 40 Shorts Gardens, Covent Garden, London.

Fiasco has three locations. Check out their website for more details.

*Actually, I don't really care if it's hot, I'll eat gelato anytime, but I wanted to gloat about the weather. You'll get your own back when I am snowed in, eating triscuits.

Sun Chui Kee BBQ Restaurant

2008-09-13T22:42:00.002-06:00

Steamed Tilapia
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I’m lucky, I appear to be surrounded by people who know where to get the best out of Calgary’s restaurants. Tonight’s meal at Sun Chui Kee BBQ Restaurant was...delicious.

There’s nothing worse than going to a Chinese restaurant and discovering that everyone else wants chicken with cashew nuts or a spring roll. Luckily tonight I was surrounded by people who love to eat, as well as someone who knew how to get the most out of the menu.

We started with some tiny little dried, salted anchovies and peanuts, while Eileen ordered for us. We ended up with a feast. Some amazing crispy skin chicken with salt and soy for dipping. Sichuan style aubergine. Fabulous silken tofu with pork, dancing with bonito flakes sprinkled over at the last minute. Some amazing pea shoots, sweet yet metallic with freshness. Thai style beef flank with boy choi in a spicy, umami rich sauce. Clams with black bean. Singapore noodles. Shirley Bassey fried rice (oh, OK, Big Spender rice, with roe, scallops, squid and prawn). And a whole Tilapia steamed with ginger and spring onions.

There wasn’t a dish that wasn’t good or very, very good. Well, apart from the complimentary coconut tapioca pudding, but that’s just not my thing. I tried some, because you allegedly live for an extra 75 days every time you try something new.

The restaurant is next to a good sized Chinese supermarket, so I was able to stock up on fermented, salted black beans, wonton wrappers, tofu and bok choi. I just wish I had at least one of my Chinese cookery books with me…I would be cooking adventurously this week.

A pre-visit Google turned up very little, apart from the news that Sun Chui Kee was closed for health violations in 2006. I don’t care though, believing that the deliciousness of a Chinese restaurant, is often inversely proportionate to the cleanliness of the kitchen. I was proved right tonight.

Sun Chui Kee is at 1423 Centre Street NW.

Breakfast in Calgary

2008-09-13T17:55:00.002-06:00

Galaxy Diner Bill
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I'd started to give up on breakfast in Calgary. An historically bad plate of some sort of industrial by-products at Lido Cafe in Kensington (which online reviews had said served "great food at amazing prices", whereas the only amazing thing is that it's still in business after all these years) and the look of perplexion on my servers face when I asked for poached eggs at Moxies Grill, had re-calibrated my expectations to zero. And forced me to search out an organic, free-range egg supplier.

However, more searching has turned up two fabulous places.

First up, Diner Deluxe. OK, so it's a ways out from my downtown location and I had to wait in line for 40 minutes (and I got so lost on the way back that I ended up attempting to cross a 40 lane highway on foot) but this 50's styled diner is just rocking. It serves Kicking Horse coffee (from BC, using organic, fair-traded, shade grown beans, which means that you can drink three or four cups *and* be doing some good), Farmer Cliff's eggs (just outside of Calgary and free range) and amazing pork products from Regina's Fine Meats. They also grill a pretty mean Roma tomato, meaning that your plate of food looks all purdy. It's also next door to Urban Baker. Despite the fact they objected to me taking photos (and accused me of working for a rival bakery) their chocolate cranberry sourdough is a work of genius and will be turned into french toast the next time I go there. This batch was used to bribe waitresses to give me names of tattoo artists and for snacking on during the Calgary Tattoo Fair.

As good as Diner Deluxe (and within walking distance for me) is the Galaxie Diner. This place is smaller, but also retro styled. My steamed eggs benedict with Montreal smoked meats (served on a croissant, but I'll forgive them the inauthenticity) could have fed a family of four, but was just right on a morning when I felt like the floor of a minicab. One by-product of living in Calgary is that you find yourself doing the oddest of things, and my karaoke debut of "You're So Vain" seemed like a good idea after 74 Gray Goose and tonic.

Of course there's still the problem that I can't quite get my head around the bacon they serve here. It's a bit like eating bacon rind. But Diner Deluxe had a couple of bacon options, so I am prepared for next time. The search continues...

Diner Deluxe is at 804 Edmonton Trail NE, Calgary, AB T2E 3J6
(403) 276-5499. The website is worth checking out.

Galaxie Diner is at 1411 11 Street SW, Calgary, AB T2R 1G7
(403) 228-0001

De Cero

2008-08-02T18:20:00.002-06:00

Chicago Nighttime
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

One of the best things about Chicago is the easy access to a great Margarita and exceptional Mexican food. I can be as relentless as an anteater in my pursuit of a well made cocktail.

I had been in Chicago for less than three hours before I headed to Chipotle for some of their carnitas. Chipotle used to be a guilty pleasure for me, what with formerly being majority-owned by MacDonalds, but they’ve been free of the golden arches since 2006, so you can visit without putting your morals on hold. It’s worth a visit (although probably not worth almost missing an international flight like I did after one visit).

I’m not here to tell you about chain restaurants though. Monday saw me head off to De Cero, a “modern-day tacqueria”. Modern-day signifies that the tuna is ahi, the raspberry daiquiri has basil in it and they’ve gone for a “stripped-down” design ethos. If I worked for Wallpaper*, I’d call it “”a raw-urban aesthetic…with a hint of rustic”, but I don’t, so I’ll call it brown and acoustically-challenged with a hint of I’m sorry I can’t hear you. The only things capable of absorbing the noise in this place are the tamales. It’s busier than a one-legged Riverdancer, but they accommodated me. Chicagoans are nice like that.

I’d been guided towards the duck taco, so that was ordered, along with the ahi tuna, some ceviche and a goat cheese tamale. Oh, and a Margarita, because it was Monday and I am instigating Margarita Mondays from now on.

Chef Jill Barron (who has some interesting tattoos), describes the food as “fresh coastal Mexican” and I would concur, but suggest she tones down the lime in the ceviche as the fresh flavours of the baby scallops and rock shrimp disappear. It’s about as unbalanced as Amy Winehouse’s Glastonbury performance this year. Luckily the tacos are much better, especially the duck. It’s partnered with roasted corn, and the juiceness and sweetness of two make a nice two-part harmony.

Then my tamale arrived. I realise that I am about to have a restaurant malfunction. I don’t actually know how to eat a tamale, I had been seduced by the thought of hot chilli masa. I start scanning the room for clues, but my vision is disintegrating from the noise. I can’t see, it’s so loud. I’m beginning to panic. I’m an autodidact when it comes to restaurants and am happy to make mistakes. That said, most people don’t spend as long as me researching exactly what to do when you’re seated at the sushi bar (use your fingers for nigiri, chopsticks for sashimi, don’t ask the sushi chef for soup, don’t mix your wasabi and soy together and don’t dip the rice in the soy, just in case you were wondering. Any of those will have you pegged as a savage, quicker than you can say irasshaimase). I never expected to be defeated by a tamale though.

The essential problem is that I don’t know if the wrapper is edible. I have encountered a problem like this before, when I nearly choked to death on some edamame in Yo! Sushi! I didn’t know you were supposed to pop the beans out, so scarfed the lot. I soon realized you’d need the teeth of a ruminant to get through one and attempted to swallow it, rather than spitting it out discretely. This caused someone to have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on me. A tentative nibble on the tamale husk proves that it is, indeed, inedible, and akin to eating macramé. Crisis averted, I can dig in. It’s OK.

Of course I had to order another Margarita to get over the panic. Luckily that was delicious.

De Cero is at 814 W.Randolph. Call them on 312 455 8114 but don’t expect them to be able to hear you.

www.decerotaqueria.

The photo is of Chicago. I thought the photos of the tacos were a bit uninspiring.

Wahaca

2008-07-10T03:27:00.005-06:00

Wahaca, Pork Scratchings
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

Oh Thomasina Miers. You’re so clever. First you win Masterchef and then you make a book about soup. Everyone likes soup. Then you decide to start a restaurant. You begin with modern British, but come to realize that this is what every other pub is doing at the moment and the market is too tight. I can see you now, scouring the internet food forums to see what everyone thinks that London is missing.

And of course it’s authentic Mexican food.

You open in a big space in Covent Garden. You don’t take bookings, because this is casual street food. You make the portions right for sharing, because that’s what we’re all doing these days. You make sure your fish is sustainable and the pork and chicken free range, because we at the top of the food chain need to be nice to the things we eat.

And then you ruin it all by Anglicising the spelling. We’re not idiots. We can work out how to pronounce Oaxaca. You call it Wahaca. I gnash my teeth.

But it’s really not bad. The fish pastor taco is a bit too sweet and too oily but the salmon ceviche tostados are a real winner with great balance between hot chile, sweet salmon and sharp lime. The guacamole needs more salt and more spice, but the Mexican pork scratchings turn out to be one of the best things to dip into anything since food began. Crispy pork skin dipped in avocado or some refried black beans. What do you mean, you can hear my arteries hardening? Pass the salsa.

A quesadilla with broad beans, mint and feta wasn’t half as light and summery as I had hoped, but it was still a delicious cheesy treat. Another with chorizo and potato disappeared quicker than you can say mole. They make a mean margarita, but serve them in champage flutes, which means soon we all have salt rimmed noses. But it’s all fun, in a continental kind of way. World domination is next, with plans to open in a new shopping mall in Hammersmith. I hope they can keep it up, this is a worthy, if a bit posh-mex, addition to the London Mexican food scene.

Wahaca is at 6 Chandos Place, Covent Garden.

St John and the rise of the London Gastropub

2008-07-09T04:59:00.002-06:00

Sweetbreads
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

One of the things that I love has been the evolution of the gastropub in London. It has democratized dining by creating a reliable middle tier of restaurant. It wasn’t that long ago that your choices would be either high-end fine dining, or scampi in a basket from the brewery-owned pub down the road. Not that there’s anything wrong with scampi, but there was something wrong with pub kitchens making sole use of the microwave or the deep-fat fryer.

Of course it’s not all good, and for a while there wasn’t a boozer that hadn’t stripped its floors, painted the walls white and put a terrine on the menu, but generally speaking, the gastropub has raised the standard of casual dining across the country. You no longer need to go all white linen and fish forks to get a good meal.

So I make a concerted effort to get to some of the gastropubs in London when I am here. Partly because when you earn Australian dollars and the credit crunch is in full-flight, you can’t afford to eat high-end every night, but also because I like this casual dining thing.

Strangely enough, any look at gastropubs begins, not with a pub, but with a restaurant. It’s called St John and when chef Fergus Henderson opened the doors in 1994, he caused a bit of a stir. St John is now always in the world’s top 100 restaurants list, which is amazing when you consider that many people wrinkle their noses when you tell them what you ate there. I still don’t think Frog has forgiven me for eating that squirrel. What St John did was to reinvent the London restaurant. The menu reads like paired down Hemmingway, with no place for adjectival fripperies such as “pan-fried” or “on a bed of”. You get what you order, so “langoustines and mayonnaise” or “lamb’s sweetbreads”, (pictured) will be just that. Luckily this is sourcing and cooking of the highest order and the langoustines are so fresh and sweet that you don’t really need the raspy mayo, so I just smear that, quarter inch thick, on their exceptional bread. The sweetbreads are seared and served with a hint of wobble and their frying juices. “Salad” offered some contrast. It takes big balls to serve a plate of butter lettuce with spring onions, but when it’s dressed with the best salad dressing you’ll have all year, everything is elevated.

Most gastropubs follow the St John menu taxonomy, with starters blurring into main courses, some dishes meant for sharing and those sparse descriptions. The great thing about St John is that it has been around for long enough to have spawned some imitators and for its chefs to have moved on to do their own thing. The former head chef at St John Bread and Wine, Tom Pemberton, has recently opened Hereford Road and, based on my lunchtime experience there, is going to do very well. It’s St John but in a less austere room, with a wonderful skylight and burgundy walls. We shared most of the starters, including some great crab on toast that was more tasty brown meat than white (a Good Thing, in my book) and some great sand eels. The chips were superlative, all scronchy and golden and perfect to mop up the blood and juices from an onglet. This is simple, seasonal food with nowhere for mistakes to hide, although I was a little underwhelmed by the globe artichoke.

Medcalf in Exmouth Market was one of the first St John-a-likes and is always a reliable place, especially if Moro is unable to accommodate. The battered old metal tables always annoy though, especially when they flake rust onto your hands. Head Chef Mark Spence has moved on from here and opened Market in Camden, a place that has been crying out for this sort of thing for as long as I can remember. The service is charming, the chairs all old wooden school chairs and the slip soles were as good as any I have eaten. Portions are massive though, so be warned.

The Anchor and Hope, with its no bookings, wait in the packed bar like calves waiting to be crated across Europe-vibe was on the Binky boycott list for a long time, but I relented at Christmas and had a wonderful game pie. I completely understand why restaurants go down the no-bookings route, but it still irks me. Luckily the food is wonderful and the hectic atmosphere makes this a buzzy, fun place to eat. They opened Great Queen Street at the tail end of last year, and it’s basically Anchor and Hope, but with bookings. Last night’s hastily grabbed meal shows a restaurant that almost knows what it’s doing, but lets itself down with distracted service. I’m not sure you can ever serve potato soup with cockles and laver bread to a Welshman and expect him to not complain at paying more than 50p and my terrine needed more larding, but this is a reliable place in the West End. I’m not sure I’ll be rushing back but it’s a massive improvement on the Thai place that used to be there.

Hereford Road is at 3 Hereford Road, W2. 020 7727 1144. http://www.herefordroad.org

Great Queen Street is at 32 Great Queen Street, WC2B 5AA. 020 7242 0622.

Medcalf is at 40 Exmouth Market. 020 7833 3533. http://www.medcalfbar.co.uk

The Anchor and Hope is at 36 The Cut. They don’t take bookings, so there’s no point calling. Get there at about 5.30pm for the 6.00pm tables.

Market is at 43 Parkway, Camden. 020 7267 9700

St John has two branches and a very helpful website http://www.stjohnrestaurant.co.uk/

Introducing the NomNomNoms

2008-07-07T08:31:00.002-06:00

NomNomNomsGroup Pic
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

So it all really started when we discovered that I know two people called Giles. Actually, I know five people called Giles, but it turns out that the bloke from Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn't count.

It was clear that we needed to get these Giles' (or should it be Giles's?) together, to see if the world would implode and what are the correct rules for possession and pluralisation of names ending with an 's'. Oh yes, and to eat some good food. People called Giles like to eat.

So Damana came up with the name, because we're all greedy weasels and are likely to make ravenous noises when eating. There was *a lot* of discussion about where we would eat first. Emails like this flew about:

"Right, I love the B theme too. So the nominees for the first dinner are:

Bilsons
Billy Kwong
Bistrode
Balzac
Becasse
Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay

Three votes each. You can put all three onto one restaurant or spread them out. Idea is to get the broadest possible idea of where people want to go.

Rah."

Votes were purchased, gauntlets thrown down, handbags parried at dawn. Bilsons won. The fact that I wait until last to vote and was collating the results, means that one day I'll probably end up being dictator of a small African nation.

And then it all gets rather interesting. Bilsons had a dish on the à la carte menu that I had wanted to try for years. Lièvre à la Royale, or Hare with black truffles, foie gras and a sauce made of the hare's blood.

Calls were placed. Hares were caught. Bilsons ended up substituting the dish onto the Menu Fin Bec. We were hoping they'd actually create a whole new tasting menu for us, but they didn't seem to want to go that far. Either way, we were having a special menu created for us at a very special restaurant.

We've created a group blog about the NomNomNoms. The idea is that we'll all contribute. I still need to organise my thoughts about the meal but you might like to check it out.

Oh, and if you'd be interested in joining us, please let me know by either leaving a comment with your contact details or emailing me. Am sure we'll enjoy dreaming up a devilish hazing for new members

Bentley Restaurant

2008-06-27T19:08:00.002-06:00

Duck.
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I had a not bad three course meal at Bentley Bar and Restaurant in Surry Hills recently. Unfortunately it was part of an eight course tasting menu, so I left feeling financially mugged and gastronomically frustrated.

Do I not like fine dining anymore? I’m really starting to wonder if my travels to eat in all of the temples of avant-garde cuisine were the mere folly of youth. Did I let my brain get in the way of my taste buds? Did I really enjoy all that molecularly modified food? Am I having some sort of gastronomic mid-life crisis?

I can’t actually remember the last time I left a fine-dining restaurant ecstatically happy. Tetsuyas? White truffle ice cream tastes of bad breath.. Hibiscus? Nice sausage roll.There are more, but I can’t actually remember any of the meals without going to Flickr and that’s part of the problem.

What I can remember are the roast chicken with bread sauce at Glebe Point Diner in Sydney. The locally caught mussels wrapped in home reared and cured lardo at the Sportsman in Seasalter. Neither of these are fine-dining (although the Sportsman does have a Michelin star) but both of these punch far above their weight in terms of their deliciousness, despite their lack of pomp and circumstance.

So why did I dislike Bentley so much and why I am writing about it, given I said that this blog was here to celebrate the good? Because sometimes you have to call people out when they are serving bad food. So here’s the new rule from the fabulous life of Binky Silhouette. I’m not just telling you about the good stuff anymore.

But I can’t resist some positivity. There was some good to be found here. The amuses bouches were unusual and delicious. I know I’m a patè whore, but serving jerusalem artichoke soup with a schmear of chicken liver patè at the bottom was a good idea, and one I will be stealing at home. The roasted duck breast with kohl rabi and black fungus was earthy and rich and showcased a nice piece of duck. The white chocolate and mandarin fizz with mandarin ice cream was a beautifully balanced desert, albeit with elements I first saw at WD-50 about five years ago. You can’t fault someone from re-using a good idea.

However, serving pork with salmon roe is not a very good idea. There’s a reason why pork and fish are generally kept apart. You can’t take a pork cheek, an unctuous, fatty piece of meat at the best of times and contrast it with the…unctuous, fatty, fishy richness of some salmon roe. You then can’t serve it with some smoked salmon and beetroot. Especially when the smoked salmon is inside an ersatz ravoli that appears to made out of purple-tinged polystyrene.

I’m going to stop here. I’ll let the Flickr set tell you the rest.

Bentley Bar and Restaurant is at 320 Crown Street. You don’t need the number. You won’t be going.

Glebe Point Diner is at 407 Glebe Point Road. You can make a reservation for one of their two dinner sittings on (02) 9660 2646.

I'll tell you more about the Sportsman very soon.

North Bondi Italian Food

2008-06-22T10:04:00.002-06:00

NBIF menu
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I think I’ve found a reason to want the Sydney winter to continue.

The Global Corporate Challenge has awakened my latent competitiveness and I now find myself walking everywhere. The planned walk from Spit Bridge to Manly had been cancelled (due partly to inclement weather and partly to 74 sub-standard Margaritas at La Cita the night before) but I had a terrible urge to “get the steps in”.

This is the only reason I have for why last Sunday, I was one of only three people walking along Bondi Beach in the sleeting rain and a force 12 gale. I’m fairly sure that the other two were also British.

If any Australians had spotted me, I’m sure they would have rolled their eyes twice. Once for the fact that they don’t think Bondi is “all that” and find my obsession with this beach risible. And twice because it was bloody cold.

But I was walking with purpose and I figured I would treat myself to lunch at North Bondi Italian Food, little sister restaurant to Icebergs.

It’s a casual (but not inexpensive), chic place, which doesn’t take reservations. It was already rammed at 12.30pm and the wait time for a table was an hour. Luckily, you can also eat at the bar, and given I looked like the wild wombat woman of Wooloomooloo (I love saying that. More “oohs” than a lorry load of adult DVDs), I can imagine that the Maitre’d was quite happy for me to be hidden by the door, away from the far more glamorous Sydney residents who’d already bagged a table. I love restaurants with a bar that solo diners can eat at. You feel much less inconspicuous (not something I generally worry about, but last night’s mascara was halfway down my cheeks and I was wearing a Yahoo t-shirt), you don’t feel the need to tip double (which I generally do in a nice place when I’ve taken up a two-top) and you can flirt with the hot barman (which, given I discovered the mascara when I got home was perhaps over-ambitious). The menu is utterly eatable and it took me a whole, very delicious, latte and about 26 complimentary monkey nuts to make my decision. It was meant to be a light lunch, so some salami and bread to begin and soup to follow.

Doesn’t sound like it’s going to amount to much, does it?

But this is a restaurant that takes its sourcing very seriously. So the salami is a cacciatore salami made from 90kg Black Berkshire pigs that have clearly had a very happy life. It’s served with some exceptional breads from Sonoma bakery and Fratelli Fresh olive oil. My only complaint was that you can’t get a tasting plate of the salumi and I really want to try to cutaletto and the guanciale. Next up was a massive, steaming bowl of twice cooked chicken broth with chicken polpette and chunky carrots. The bowl’s big enough to drown in and is everything that chicken soup could ever be. The stock was beautifully clarified, full flavoured and sparkling. The meatballs were firm and tasty, the chunky carrots all sweet and…well, chunky. It’s so easy to do chicken soup wrong, but all of the components were carefully thought-out and a lot of extra effort had gone into making this a wonderful dish.

I would have stayed for an averna (this place has a great digestive list) but it was getting hugely busy and I was being bumped and clattered from all sides. The noise level was unbearable. I’ll never understand the fashion for restaurants made entirely of hard surfaces that don’t even think to put some linen on the tables. I can imagine that this isn’t a problem in the summer, when the huge French-windows open and you can both see and hear the waves, but for now, my only criticism can only be righted by beautiful velvet drapes around all of the walls.

I cannot wait to go back here. It’s my new favourite place. Next time I want to get stuck into the (be still my beating heart) offal section of the menu, or perhaps try a roast of the day. And the marinated sardines. And some pasta. Oh God. I really can’t wait to go back.

North Bondi Italian Food is at 1 Notts Avenue, just opposite Bondi Beach.

Fresh borlotti beans with prawns

2008-06-14T03:18:00.001-06:00

Prawns
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I’ve become slightly obsessed with Giorgio Locatelli’s book “Made In Italy, Food & Stories” recently. Not just because I almost had to pay an excess luggage charge to bring it back to Australia (it’s slightly heavier than a small breeze block), but it’s a great overview of Italian regional cookery and the life of a chef.

So it was a rainy Monday public holiday in Sydney, and decided to cook from it.

I’d picked up some beautiful fresh borlotti beans from (yes, you’ve guessed it) the Norton Street Grocer and some prawns from David Jones Food Hall. The beans didn’t let me down and podding them was a joy, revealing the speckled beans that look like little pink lizard’s eggs. The prawns were a bit meagre, but luckily I had bought plenty, so we didn’t go hungry.

This could be classed as cooking for inept single men. You don’t have to make the shellfish stock or cook beans from fresh, but sometimes it’s nice to go to a little extra effort, isn’t it?

Ingredients (for two as a starter, one greedy weasel as a main course)
About 400g of fresh borlotti beans, podded
½ head of unpeeled garlic, plus two extra cloves, minced
1 stalk of celery
Some herbs, I used parsley and sage
Nice olive oil
As many prawns as you fancy. I used medium sized green prawns
1 long chilli pepper (not too fiery, don’t use a birds eye one)
Some nice white wine (I used a pinot grigio from Harndorf Hill winery in Adelaide)
A couple of tablespoons of passata

To serve
Some chopped parsley
Some minced garlic
Your best olive oil

Start by cooking your beans. You want to boil them in plenty of unsalted water with the garlic, herbs and celery. It’s important to not salt the beans as salting them now will make them really tough. Which is appealing in an action hero, but less so in a bean. Cover them in cold water, bring to the boil and skim off any scum. Reduce the heat and simmer, with the lid on, until they’re soft to the bite (probably about 45 minutes to one hour). Once cooked, keep them warmish (I just left the lid on the pan).

At this point, heat your oven to about 180 degrees.

Peel your prawns, leaving the heads on and remove the digestive tract. This can be a bit fiddly if you’ve never done it before. I recommend first running your thumb down the underside of the prawn, which loosens the shell, and then peeling from there. Save the shells for the stock. Once peeled, lay your prawn down and slice the tail in two (known as butterflying). As you slice through you’ll be able to remove the digestive tract which runs along the top of the prawn. If you’re unfamiliar with the anatomy of a prawn, it looks like a thinnish black line encased in a membrane. To be honest though, you’ll be able to tell. Prawn crap is quite distinctive.

To make your stock, heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and sauté the shells with a splash of white wine, about half a chilli, a couple of smashed garlic cloves and a tablespoon of passata. Add enough water to cover, but don’t go mad as we’re trying to concentrate the flavours. Cook for no more than 10 minutes and then strain through a sieve, making sure you scronch down the shells and push all the flavour through. Don’t forget to scrape the underside of the sieve, the stock will be thick and concentrated here. Just stir it in.

You’ll need your biggest pan. If all of the prawns won’t fit, cook in two batches. We want to fry the prawns and get them caramelizing, not steam them. Heat your oil, add the garlic and chilli and cook for a few moments to flavour the oil. Do not allow the garlic to burn. This is the critical part of the recipe. Burnt garlic tastes of ass. Season the prawns and drop them into the pans on their backs. Resist the urge to shake or stir, let them caramelize. Once this had happened, press down on the heads to release the brains. I’ll let you into a secret. Prawn heads are the best bit of a prawn. Next time you have them, suck the heads. Pure concentrated essence of prawn. Don’t want the heads, I’ll have yours. Once cooked, keep your prawns warm in the oven. You did turn it on, didn’t you?

Use a slotted spoon to add the beans to the pan that you cooked the prawns in, season and bring to the boil. You’re going to sauce the beans, either with some of the cooking water or the stock (depending on how much effort you wanted to go to). If you’re using the water, add the passata and some wine, but don’t let the sauce get too thin. Crush some of the beans to mingle the flavours from the prawns and to thicken the sauce.

I plated this by placing the beans in the centre of the plate and then artfully arranged the prawns ontop, drizzled with some best olive oil and some chopped parsley, a couple of rings of chilli and some garlic.

A full photoset is available on Flickr

Perfect Manhattan

2008-06-09T01:07:00.006-06:00

How do you know when you're in safe hands? Eating and drinking out is an act of trust and I've come to believe that there are benchmark items everywhere. I mean the single thing you need to order to know if the establishment knows what they are doing. A pain au chocolate in a patisserie, patatas bravas in a tapas bar, xiao long bao (aka Shanghai soup dumplings) in your yum cha joint of choice. And when I'm in a bar? Fix me a perfect Manhattan. It used to be a Margarita, but having drunk too many that reminded me of battery acid, I switched. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the world's best Margarita is at Adobo Grill in Chicago.

I've had some really good Manhattan's recently. The smoked Manhattan seems to be in vogue, and although I usually give short shrift to remixes of classics, both Cristal bar and The Victoria Room in Sydney do a fine job. Perhaps it's because we're in indoor smoke-free times (and the Manhattan is best enjoyed with a Marlborough light) but both drinks work. So The Victoria Room serve theirs with a smoked cherry and Cristal seem to waft some burning paper in the general direction of the martini glass.

So what goes into a Manhattan I hear you ask? Well, it's a drinkers' cocktail...No fruit puree, no sugar syrup, nothing sparking with bubbles. It's whiskey, vermouth, bitters and a maraschino cherry. All of the major food groups represented then.

I take mine straight up and perfect (meaning equal parts red and white vermouth) and, ideally, with Makers Mark. It's always nice when you have a choice.

Other great Manhattans I have known are found at Murmur in Melbourne (where the photo of my brother was taken) and at the Majestic Hotel in San Francisco. Both are, quite simply, perfect. Like my drink.

The Victoria Room is at Level 1 231A Victoria St, Darlinghurst, NSW 2010 (02) 9357 4488
Adobo Grill is all over Chicago, but my favourite is at 1610 N Wells (at North Avenue)
Murmur is at Level 1, 17 Warburton Lane, Melbourne, Victoria (03) 9640 0395
The Majestic Hotel is at 1500 Sutter St, San Francisco, +1 415-441-1100

Longrain

2008-06-04T05:53:00.003-06:00

I’ve only ever had one motto when it comes to food. "Never eat more than you can lift." For that, I have to thank my spiritual guide, Miss Piggy.

But now I have a new one. Never fight a Papua New Guinean for pork. Especially when the pork in question is the caramelized pork hock at Longrain.

Longrain is a terminally popular “modern Thai” restaurant in Surry Hills. They’ll tell you it has a “Manhatten feel” but they’re wrong. This is the quintessential Sydney restaurant. But, of course, they’ve gone and opened an even more glamorous branch in Melbourne. It’s my omni-restaurant, one that is suitable for all sort of occasions and I send *everybody* there. Fun first date when you want to see if your potential partner knows their way around a menu and can share? Longrain. Dinner for a group of less than nine that’s fashionable and noisy? Longrain because you can’t book. In need of a quick pick-you-up at lunchtime? Longrain and sit at the bar. The menu won’t tell you this, but about 40% of the dishes are available in smaller serves, so you can go by yourself and not have to just order one dish. Cocktails after work with some friends and you just want a nibble? Longrain and have a couple of plates of the betel leaves with smoked trout. The cocktails are sensational too.

I love this restaurant. It’s consistent, fun, delicious and even caters well to our vegetarian friends. They can have the salt and pepper tofu. You have the pork hock. You deserve it.

I’ve been so many times that I’ve eaten the entire menu. If you’re a first timer, have the crispy pork hock with five spice. It’s chewy and porky and fatty and the caramelized vinegar tips the whole thing over the edge. The soft-shell crab with pork and a papaya salad is the best soft-shell crab you’ll find in Sydney (that’s a challenge. Know anything better? Prove it). There’s a dab-hand at the fryer here, so the crab’s ethereally light and disappears in seconds. The barramundi isn’t killed to order (despite the fact that the menu tells you it’s from the tank. If you’re going to tell me it’s from the tank, I want to see the number of barramundi diminishing during the evening. I checked recently and the story is that it’s more humane to kill and skin them outside of service. I am not entirely convinced, but then, I am strangely into fish being killed to order for me).

Even the deserts are good, and I am not the biggest fan of the Asian banana/palm sugar/coconut combo. Have the sampler plate. I’ll eat all the roasted coconut ice-cream.

But best of all, for me, are the betel leaves with smoked trout. I think this one mouthful of food might have been what convinced me to move to Sydney. Obviously Bangkok might have been a more obvious choice if I wanted Thai food on-tap, but sitting at that bar in January 2006 and having that explode in my mouth made a lasting impression. It’s a bit like being mugged by a gorgeous man with a bottle of fish sauce, who tickles a chili under your nose and spritzes citrus in your left eye while he slaps your lips with a piece of smoked trout.

The light in there isn’t great, so instead of a photo of Longrain, you’ve got a similar betel leaf dish from Pomegranate Thai in Balmain. You could go there instead, but it’s not as good.

Longrain is at 85 Commonwealth Street in Surry Hills. I’ve developed a homing device that means I know when I am within about 400 meters of the place. I really hope you love it as much as I do.

Longrain is at 40-44 Little Bourke Street in Melbourne.

Pomegranate Thai is at 191 Darling Street in Balmain. They also have a place called Prasit’s Northside Thai at 77 Mount Street.

Broccoli Pasta (for inept single men)

2008-06-03T17:57:00.001-06:00

anchovy
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

I’ve had a request and am very excited. Someone has asked me for a recipe! It seems that finally I might have found my niche in life, and that’s to provide recipes for inept single men. I would request, however, that if any inept single men have any “success” with my recipes, you post a testimonial on the site.

I need to know if this stuff works.

It all came about when this chap shared his recipe for “pasta with vegetables” with me. It was more a jumble of misconceptions than a delicious meal. It was something along the lines of capsicum, tomatoes, zucchini and…yes, you’ve guessed it, pesto. The single man’s lubricant of choice.

I’ll never understand a. what possesses people to purchase store bought pesto and b.to add it to whatever pasta dish they’re planning. Pesto has its place, ideally when you’ve got a beautiful bunch of fresh basil, a pestle and mortar and a really great chunk of pecorino.

Anyway, I digress. Here are the rules of healthy(ish) pasta and vegetable dishes.

1. Pick one vegetable. Perhaps two. Certainly no more.
2. Plan your flavour accents. Garlic, olives, anchovy, onion, herbs, dried chili, perhaps some cheese. Not all of them.
3. Find a texture contrast. Pine nuts, hazelnuts, toasted flaked almonds, sesame seeds, perhaps some cheese.
4. Have some sort of sauce. Might just be oil, might be a splash of cream, could be some melted anchovy.
5. Keep it simple. This is easy cooking for a Tuesday night, not Iron Chef.

So, for this dish, our vegetable is going to be broccoli. The flavour accents are chili, onion and garlic. The texture is going to be pine nuts. I’d recommend using penne because the onions and pine nuts get stuck in the ridges but the smooth penne has worked for me because of the smooth pasta with broccoli floret contrast. Works for me.

Ingredients (to serve two)
A handful of pinenuts
A red onion, sliced into elegant, thin strips
A clove of garlic, mashed or sliced, up to you (I don’t wish to be proscriptive)
About ten anchovies in oil
A teeny tiny dried red chili, crumbled
A very large head of broccoli, perhaps two
Enough pasta to feed you both

Begin by toasting your pine nuts. Pop them into a cold frying pan with no oil, and watch them constantly. Pine nuts are slippery buggers and will burn in a pico-second if you leave them unattended. Set aside.

Add some of the oil from the jar of anchovies and a little extra EVOO, warm and add the onion. We’re aiming to wilt the onion so it’s slippery, not crisp it. Add the garlic, chili and the anchovies. The anchovies will melt into the onion and garlic.Yum. Keep warm.

Find your largest pan and fill it with boiling water. Wait until it’s at a rolling boil and then add lots of salt. Most people don’t salt their pasta water enough. It needs to be as salty as sea water, although don’t use sea water for convenience and don’t ever try tasting your boiling water to see if it’s salty enough. You’ll burn your tongue. Just throw in a really good handful of (preferably Maldon) salt. Bigger than you think you should. Live a little. The reason restaurant food tastes better is because they use more salt and butter than we do at home. I cook the broccoli and pasta in the same water (to save on washing up) and I steam the broccoli over the top of the pasta. You could just mix them, but the broccoli will cook first, so you’ll need to fish it out.

Drain the pasta, reserving a cup of water. Mix all the ingredients together, adding some of the cooking water for lubrication (not pesto). The cooking water contains a lot of starch, so it will, curiously, help to thicken your sauce. Don’t use too much though. Sprinkle on pine nuts. Or toasted sesame seeds. Or some nice hazelnuts now I come to think of it. Chow down.

Ribollita

2008-06-01T20:08:00.003-06:00

Ribollita Ingredients (this time in focus)
Originally uploaded by Suzi Edwards

There’s an old Italian proverb about soup.

Sette cose fa la zuppa, cava fame e sete attuta, empie il ventre, snetta il dente, fa dormire, fa smaltire, e la guancia fa arrossire.

Which, for those of us who don’t speak Italian, translates as;

Soup does seven things; it takes away hunger and thirst, fills the stomach, cleans the teeth, makes you sleep, makes you slim and puts colour in your cheeks.

I always cook soup when it’s cold and I’m feeling a little peaky. I find making soup restores the soul, so maybe there’s an eighth thing in there too. Whatever case, soup is the thing I turn too when I need a bit of cheering up. Well, that and shoe shopping.

So today I set about making some ribollita, while listening to Micah P Hinson and the Gospel of Progress. Truly great stuff for the soul. Especially as I’d got the last bunch of Tuscan cabbage at the Norton Street Grocer.

There’s just no point making ribollita without Tuscan cabbage, also known as Cavolo Nero. Its dark green leaves are packed full of iron and it’s also great sauted with some chilli and anchovy. But today it was the soup pot for these leaves. My version isn’t exactly authentic, as I couldn’t resist adding some pancetta, but feel free to leave it out.

Ingredients:
A good size bunch of Tuscan cabbage. It should be squeaky fresh.
Two white onions, diced
Four sticks of celery, sliced and diced (I sound like Hannibal Lecter)
Three fat cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
A tin of cannelinni beans (I like La Gina brand), rinsed
A couple of slices of pancetta dolce, cut into batons
A tin of chopped tomatoes (I like Annalisa brand)
At least 200ml of good chicken stock
A good chunk of slightly stale ciabatta
Your best olive oil

Begin by rendering the fat from the pancetta in some light olive oil. The idea is for the fat to melt, rather than for the meat to crisp, so keep the heat down low. Once the pancetta is soft and plump, add the onions and soften. Then add the garlic and the celery. The idea is to build up layers of flavour, so it’s important to give each ingredient time to coat in the porky oil and give up their goodness. I took a shower and blow-dryed my hair once everything was in the pot, to allow the flavours extra time to mix. Once you’re happy with your blow-dry (or the base for the soup, depends on which comes first) add the stock, tomatoes, ¾ of the beans and bring to a good simmer. Add the cabbage and cook for around 30 minutes.

While this is happening, you want to puree the rest of the beans (you can use a blender or just mush them up), as they, along with the bread, will thicken the soup. Add the puree and the stale bread, which you’ve ripped into chunks and return to the heat. Check the seasoning and the consistency, ribollita is meant to be thick. If you've used pancetta, you probably won't need too much salt.

Serve with a glug of your best olive oil on top. World becomes better place.

Universal Restaurant, Sydney

2007-11-27T05:54:00.001-07:00

Things have changed since I last posted. I'm just back from a long vacation and Australia has had a change of government. Change is good, especially when it's a move from a party that's slightly to the right of the Nazis to a man who appeared on one of Australia's most popular TV shows and told us who he'd "turn gay for" (his wife, rather bizarrely, but I guess we all now know who wears the trousers in that relationship). More excitingly, the lead singer of Midnight Oil (remember them?) is Minister for the Environment, and the drummer from INXS is Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Amid this cornucopia of change, Christine Mansfield has moved back to Sydney and opened Universal in Darlinghurst. I never got to East@West in London, a comment I heard from several people when she closed and that probably explains why she didn't make it. She's moved back home with several of the team from London and has set up in a rather odd place in the Inner East. I like the space; it's bright, colourful and the open front blends indoors and outdoors really well. Guess I can't see how it's going to work in winter, no matter how many artfully rolled up blankets they leave on each banquette. But never-mind, this is a space that doesn't really look like a restaurant and at least it's not owned by Gordon Ramsey. The menu is "tasting size portions" but doesn't seem to be designed to share, so it's actually clever marketing to get you to spend more money on less food. And you get to be all territorial over your plate. Still, they supply lots of cutlery, should the desire to share overtake you. Each plate on the tempting menu comes with a wine suggestion, which is fine if you want to build your own degustation menu and wine flight, but it was Tuesday night and I really just wanted a simple bite to eat. I must be getting old, but it's nice to not have a "concept" to get from time to time. Matching one wine to a possible 12 different dishes across the four of us was going to be impossible, so we had a bottle of Twofold Riesling from the (I thought) quite expensive wine-list.

Mansfield's famed for her spicing and ability to build harmonious plates of complicated food. I'm not sure she succeeded tonight. A beginning of lamb sweetbreads with surface ripened goats cheese and hazelnuts was a selection of well sourced ingredients, slightly wrongly matched. Everything was high quality and well executed, but I'm still not convinced by a cheese and sweetbread pairing. Worse was a lobster hot and sour soup with an incendiary broth, and a complaint got an unhelpful "did you think we were joking when we said Hot and Sour Soup?". No, but neither did I expect the Universal Gaytime on the desert menu to involve Liza Minnelli and a bottle of poppers.

Luckily our final plates picked up a bit and my rosy veal (don't shudder, all of us who drink milk have a moral responsibility to eat veal) with caramelised foie gras was a juicy piece of sous vide veal and a nice sliver of foie. Sous vide meat can be a bit like nursing home food, but this hit the spot and started to live up to some of the hyperbole lavished on this place.

A chocolate Extravaganza and a decaf long black (with a very rich, very tiny fruit and nut brownie) finished off one side of the table and I managed to make enough puppy-dog eyes to get a couple of spoonfuls of a fairy-floss garnished but otherwise very grown-up peach and vanilla yoghurt panacotta desert from Giles and Kerrie.

The bill? $500. And there's the rub. This isn't cheap and it could be more filling. That said, it's a good way to try a DIY degustation style menu in glamorous, relaxed, informal surroundings. But I don't need a starter restaurant, and this just didn't quite do it for me.

Universal Restaurant
Republic 2 Courtyard, Palmer Street, (between Liverpool & Burton Sts), Darlinghurst
(02) 9331 0709

The Pizza Rules

2007-10-08T04:47:00.001-06:00

I'd never had cause to doubt cousin Howie's sanity before, but I'd definitely heard him say "lamb pizza" at least twice now and I was going to have to investigate. He'd mentioned the word "delicious" too. He'd always struck me as someone in charge of all of his mental faculties, but clearly he hadn't heard of the Pizza Rules.

Rule One: Only Italian Style, Pork-Based Meats.
Forgive me Rabbi, but there's no place on a pizza for lamb, chicken or beef. Pizzas need pork based products; salami, San Daniele and Parma are the pizza holy trinity. Oh, and anchovies. Even though they're not made of pork.

Rule Two: No Pineapple.
The Hawaiian pizza was invented in 1984 at Anglia Polytechnic by man called Gerald who, having smoked far too much weed, called his local pizza delivery place and basically tripped out. Seriously though, I've tried to find the origin of the Hawaiian pizza and it's shrouded in mystery. Which is a Bad Thing.

Rule Three: No Sweetcorn.
I might actually change this rule to no tinned stuff, because there's clearly a correlation between things from tins and badness on pizzas.

Rule Four. No Fusion.
Thai style satay with snow peas and roasted red onion.
Tandoori chicken with sweetcorn.
Roast duck with plum sauce and spring onions.
Ignoring the fact that satay isn't even from Thailand, all of these are the culinary equivalents of a nuclear war. If you want duck, go to a Chinese restaurant and have it with some nice pancakes. It's delicious.

You see, what's happened is that the pizza has become a sort of omni-cultural open sandwich. You wouldn't expect your local Indian restaurant to serve you a fish and chip biryani, so why do pizzerias prostitute themselves this way? Luckily there are some places that are trying to keep the flag flying for real pizza. RossoPomodoro, tucked away in White Bay in Balmain, is one such place. They have their own rules and make a very authentic, yeasty, Neapolitan pizza with a slightly floppy middle and a blistered crust. Their range is split into two- pizza rosso like the San Daniele and mozzarella one I had last time and pizza bianca, like the gorgonzola and prosciutto I first tried- and it's all the better for knowing what it does, and doing it well. This place is so popular it's impossible to just tip up on a Friday or a Saturday night but I'm happy enough to get take out and scarf half of my pizza by the time we've driven home. Because everyone knows that the final rule is

Rule Five: No delivery pizza. Because there's nothing worse for pizza than a 2km bike ride in a steamy cardboard box.

Oh, and the lamb pizza? It's at the Centennial Hotel and it's not bad at all. The base is thin crust, a little floppy and too crisp at the edges, with a rich tomato and aubergine topping. This would have been enough for me, and while not authentic at all, it was delicious enough. It was topped with a couple of large, rare, char grilled lamb filets. Well, you wouldn't serve a steak and kidney pie with a Cornish pasty garnish, and the lamb pizza had about the same cohesion. If they'd rolled the whole thing up and served with with a slick of the Caesar sauce that came with, I would have been very happy with my kebab.

RossoPomodoro is at Shop 90/91, 24 Buchanan Street, Balmain. Call 02 9555 5924
The Centennial Hotel is at 88 Oxford Street, Woollhara. Call 02 9362 3838

Vulcan's, Blackheath

2007-08-01T05:33:00.000-06:00

Vulcan's is one of the iconic Australian restaurants. Tucked away in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, a good two hour train ride from central Sydney and housed in a former bakery, chef Philip Searle has built a really uncompromising restaurant with a big reputation.

The service is reputed to be brusque, locals are preferred and a serious bottle of wine is supposed to be one of the few things that will get the wait staff to crack a smile. The restaurant itself is quite easy to miss, next door to a serial killer's idea of a garden-centre that only seemed to sell dead plants and nails.

The menu is short and to the point with a 3,4,4 configuration and more signature dishes than anything. Searle runs this as a bit of a labour of love, so I guess there's little need to innovate. Vulcan's is such an institution that there's no way he can take the duck sausages, pot roast beef and chequerboard ice-cream off the menu. I wonder to myself if this limits return visits as I nibble on some exceptional bread and watch the sun streaming in through the large plate glass windows. I'm enjoying myself so much at this point I'm not sure I care...

First up was a steaming dish of thai-style soup with tofu and octopus. This is real big balls cooking from a man who's totally in control of what he's doing. Chunks of slithery, wobbly tofu and a tangle of baby octopus compete with a spicy fish broth with amazing depth of flavour. It's like eating essence of ocean. Not the best match for my wine, but the perfect dish for a freezing cold day. Having not chosen the signature dish starter I went for the pot roasted beef, wanting to try the dish that Searle thinks sums up the restaurant's ethos. "It’s back to the hearth, to the shared table and people love it...We don’t divide dishes into portions. We do the whole thing and everyone shares in it and enjoys that experience. They know that they are getting a bit of what everyone else is having." As a regular solo diner I love the way this dish makes me feel. I am sharing in the food that everyone else is having, even though I am only earwigging on their conversations.

I was not disappointed, although it's fair to say that I could cook this at home. So, best I have desert, and try something I couldn't make, right?

The famous chequerboard icecream. I'd read a lot about this dish. Today the sorbet was pineapple and the icecream was vanilla, although I have seen a version with a couple of squares of lemon sorbet in there too. There's a subtle star anise flavour caramel holding everything together, that just ties everything together perfectly. I'm thrilled that the person who serves pot roast also takes the time to craft something as intricate as this.

I'd go back. This is probably one of the best places for a sunday lunch I've tried. It's not fine dining, it's one man's vision. And you can't say fairer than that.

Kiva.org

2007-06-29T04:10:00.000-06:00

I invested in a butcher's shop in Tajikistan and a smoked-fish seller in Sierre Leone today.

Social responsibility is one of our core values at ThoughtWorks, my employer. There's lots of conversation at the moment about what we should do. A colleague, Angela, mentioned that she is a micro-lender on Kiva and I followed her link.

I saw a documentary recently about micro-loans, but in the same way that I quite often think "I should buy/eat/organise/think/read about that", it went out of my mind. I have several criteria for charity. The overheads of many of the large charities mean that the money we donate doesn't always do quite as much good as we think it might. I'm interested in Africa. I like to support women. I think that education is essential in developing nations. What delighted me about Kiva is that I am able to direct my money to individuals, and the site UI allows me to choose which people I support based on their gender, location and business.

So instead of checking out Facebook at lunchtime today I made a loan to Mbalu Kholifa, a mother of two who runs a business producing and selling smoked fish. She wants her children to have a good education, and the loan will help them to buy materials for the business and improve profits. Flushed by my success I wanted to find more women to help, but couldn't find any involved in food. So I made a loan to Abdumavlon Salimov, who rears and slaughters his own cattle in Tajikistan. I figure that if I am ever in that part of the world, I'll know where to get a good steak.

Cupcakes on Pitt

2007-06-21T05:44:00.000-06:00

There's something about a cupcake. I brought the box on the left into the office and there was lots of cooing and oohing. There's something about the scrummy moistness and the swirly frosting that makes the sanest of adults all excited. I reckon it's to do with getting to eat a whole cake. I'm a sucker for anything that I can have all by myself. Maybe it's a mini Melton Mowbray pork pie with a slick of English mustard. A crisp skinned poussin which I can devour with my fingers. A Vacherin Mont'Dor and a loaf of bread. A leg of lamb.

Cupcakes on Pitt reminded me of Peyton and Byrne in London, only with less frosting (this is no bad thing in my eyes, I am All About the Cake) but friendlier service. They have two branches, one in Bondi and one at 323 Pitt Street. Their best seller (and most delicious cake) was the Lemon Meringue Pie, with its sharp lemon curd filling and swirl of soft French meringue ontop. Slightly less sucessful was the Honeycomb, as the frosting was too sweet, but I heard great reports on the Milk Chocolate.

I'll be back, because as you can see from the photo, there's nothing like a box of cupcakes.

Cupcakes on Pitt, 323 Pitt Street (02) 9264 4644

Wildfire (and a rant about Oscillate Wildly)

2007-06-13T01:03:00.000-06:00

Restauranteurs put a lot of effort into tempting punters into their dining rooms. So I still can't work out why they're so rude when people call to book a table. These days I can't really be bothered to do the whole reservation thing. I'm over the whole faxing El Bulli in Catalan to secure a reservation six months before you want to eat. I understand that having your restaurant booked up three months in advance is good for the restauranteur, but it's just not for the customer. I can see how a three month wait might be feasible if you're making me a sofa but three months notice to cook me dinner?

I called Oscillate Wildly, one of Sydney's hottest restaurants, when I first arrived. I knew the buzz was insane so I was happy to go when they had a table. I'm neither rich enough nor beautiful enough to expect to eat at 8.00pm on a Friday or Saturday night. So my pitch was "I'd like to eat in your restaurant, I know you're booked up, I would like a table for two any night of the week in May, I can come as early as you like. I'm at your mercy."

The person who answered the call laughed and told me they were fully booked until June and hung up.

This was in March.

No wait-list. No attempt to find me a space. No offer to take my number and call me when one of the people who booked six weeks in advance can't make it. I'll try a walk in early one day and I'll probably get a table. Because here's the rub. Restaurant reservationists seem to revel in pissing off the people who call, but when they see the whites of your eyes, they'll generally accommodate you. Funny that.

My mate Dave was over from London and I needed to find somewhere for us to have dinner. I was busy, so I left it until 3.00pm on the day we wanted to eat before I started my search (the best time I find as the restaurants have generally confirmed their reservations by lunchtime and they have a better idea of who's tipping up.) Wildfire is just up from Circular Quay, right opposite the Opera House and so as far as I'm concerned, not a bad spot to eat supper in. They make a big deal about their woodfired Churrasco, and Dave and I were up for a bit of a meat orgy.

First up, the little tapas they bring to get your started are very delicious. The warm flatbread with a tomato and Kryten goat curd dip is especially good. The mini venison sausage rolls were also suitably flaky, although not a patch on the sausage rolls from Mr Christie's in London. But here's the rub; linger over the tapas and a bottle of wine from their extensive list and suddenly you're not hungry anymore.

So we sort of wimped out on the meat orgy. Churrasco is meat on a stick, Brazillian style. The waiters will bring over a spike and slice off what you want, you're even given a handy pincer to help them with their meat. Being Sydney they also do a fair seafood selection, although Dave and I were agreed that this wasn't quite as good as the meat. The highlight for me was the Angus sirloin which had been aged for 30 days, although the lamb wasn't bad too. I'd go back but more likely to their bar, ember, where you can get the flatbread and an amazing selection of wine by the glass.

Here's the backstory though. When I called we were told that they'd have to have the table back by 8.30. The reservationist gave a lot of attitude and I nearly didn't take the table because there's only one thing I hate more than having to wait three months for a table, and that's being told how long my meal is going to take me to eat. What happened on the night? The restaurant was half full and we sat on the harbour until 10.00pm. I really don't understand why restaurants make such a hash of making a good first impression.

New Camera

2007-06-10T20:54:00.001-06:00

Hopfully the quality of photos is going to improve on this blog. No more camera phone! I've just bought a Leica D-Lux and plan to do a photography course once work calms down a little bit. I have a couple of meals I want to write about and only have the phone pictures for that, but otherwise there's going to be lovely pictures like this one of the Spaniels I looked after last weekend; Toby and Tassie.

Lemon and Blood Lime Marmalade.

2007-06-10T19:41:00.001-06:00

As autumn turns to winter and as the rain pelts down over Sydney, a young girl's thoughts turn to preserving. I've been inspired by some of my friends' attempts and was determined that this autumn would not pass without me putting some things into jars (and coating the whole kitchen in sticky substances along the way).

My marmalade making begins with a trip to the Sydney growers market where I picked up some blood limes. I had a vague idea what I'd be able to make marmalade out of this uniquely Australian fruit which is a cross between a mandarin and a finger lime. Their flavour is described online as sour, although I'm assuming that someone wasn't feeling very poetic that day. I'd say they have very high acidity with less of a perfumed flavour than your average lime. The flavour of mandarin isn't very pronounced at all. I then popped to my local chi-chi cookery store and picked up a dozen of the world's cutest Bormioli preserving jars and a citrus reamer ready for the following weekend.

I did my research, scouring my books for marmalade recipes. I knew that nowhere would have a blood lime recipe, so I was trying to work out the best method and a way to convert my blood limes into another citrus fruit. I read what the myths are about preserving (there's no need to warm the sugar no matter what Delia says) and fretted if I'd need to pasturise the jars after I'd filled them. There was a brief flirtation with making a tequila flavoured lime marmalade, but I chickened out as I was worried that it wouldn't set. This was, afterall, my first attempt. I plumped for a Delia recipe in the end, from her Winter Collection.

I scrubbed the fruit in some scaldingly hot water and set about juicing it. It was at this point that I started to regret the whole blood lime thing. Turns out you can squeeze six lemons in about 35 seconds, but it takes far longer to juice 450g of blood limes. Next up came the chopping of the skins. Then lemons were fine once I got over my panic about what to do the with left over flesh and connecting tissue but it took me about 45 minutes to shred the blood lime skins.

The pith and pips of citrus fruits contain large amounts of pectin, the magical stuff that sets your preserves, so I had juiced the fruit into a jug (to keep track of the quantities, I ended up using about three quarters lime to lemon) before adding it to the preserving pan. You're supposed to put your pips into a square of muslin, but of course I couldn't find any. Let's just say we're lucky that Myer's had a 30% off sale on tights. I'd probably go with a lower denier next time (I used 20) as it can be quite hard to squeeze the pectin through the reinforced toe. Otherwise a (brand new) leg of a pair of tights is a really useful option as you can easily tie it to the pan, or just knot it and drop it in.

The skin and juice goes into the pan with the pips and pith tied in their tights. Bring to the boil and then simmer for two hours, or until the peel squashes easily between your fingers. It only took an hour to get to this stage for me and I started to worry as most of the lime shred had melted into the liquid. I trusted my instinct and stopped the simmering at this stage. Take your tights out of the jam and leave them onto the side to cool as you're going to squish and squeeze all of the gooey pectin out and then whisk it into the pan. Heat the oven to about 170 degrees at this point and pop four saucers into the freezer.

Now for the dangerous bit. My brother still bears the scar of the last time I heated sugar to any great temperature and asked him to check that it was at the hard crack stage. I was about 11 years old and was already bright enough to recognise that I didn't want to stick my finger into the sugar and see it if was at 150 degrees, although obviously not bright enough to know when you need to buy a sugar thermometer. I did what all precocious children do and got my older brother to do it for me. I don't think I'd prepped Carl very well, as rather than dipping in and pulling his fingers apart to tell me if the sugar was hot enough, he screamed, put his fingers to his mouth but missed and glued his fingers to his moustache with molten sugar. So, I added the 1.3kg of sugar to the pan and brought it to a rolling boil, leaving it there for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes you can start checking for your set, by putting a teaspoon of the marmalade onto a chilled saucer. If your marmalade is set, it will form a skin as you push your (or your older brother's) finger through. If you don't have a set you keep boiling for another 10 minutes before you check again. My marmalade took about 30 minutes to reach setting point which was worrying me a little as lemons and limes are high pectin fruits. I wonder if I should have left it to simmer for a little longer?

It didn't seem to matter as I got my set in the end. It's a good idea to leave your marmalade now to settle for about 20 minutes. This allows the shred to settle throughout the jam and makes sure that you get even distribution of shred. It also means you can pop your washed jars into the oven to warm and call one of your best friends to tell them what you're doing. The filling is the bit where things get slightly messy. I'd recommend getting a jam funnel rather than using a sterilised jug like I did. My jars had little vacuum seals on the top so I was planning to have to pasterise the jars after filling them, but hot filling seemed to do the job and the vacuums "set" (or whatever the technical term would be). Wait until the jars are cold before you label as otherwise they'll just fall off.

I was planning to wait for a couple of weeks before opening the jars but I was planning to give some as gifts so I needed to test it the next morning. For quality control purposes you understand...

Terrines I Have Known

2007-05-22T17:41:00.000-06:00

I've actually had a request to post one of my pictures! Given that I am the world's worst photographer, this is a first.

I know that the requester is a bit of a terrine fan, so it struck me that this might be a nice time to do a compilation post. I ate a lot of terrine at the beginning of this year but ended up never posting about most of it.

So I give you Terrines I Have Known.

Terrines have been around since Roman times. Originally a mix of a scraggly leftover bits of pork and fat, they stemmed out of a need to make the most of the meat you had. A terrine, with it's wrapping of fat, bacon or later pastry, is a great way to preserve your food for a bit longer and make a little meat go a long way. As cuisine evolved the terrine became a good way for chefs to show off their creative chops and use more luxe ingredients. No British gastro-pub menu is complete without a terrine and it can be a good yardstick to see what the chef's capable of. I tend to order terrine when I'm looking for something big, ballsy and meaty to kick start a meal, although one always hopes that the actual testicle content is minimal.

Let's start with a fairly standard example from The Fox in London. You can see the bacon wrapping, the different chunky meats and a reasonably high fat content. This is what I would call a standard terrine; the chef knows what one is and has has a passable go at making one. It was enjoyable, if a bit fridge cold. It was served with some gherkins and bread, both quite standard . The gherkins (I think) add some acidity as terrine can be quite fatty . I don't need to tell you what to do with the bread.

Next up we have a glossier terrine from Simply Simpsons in Kenilworth. They used to have a Michelin star. This terrine struck me as being a bit pornographic at the time. It was very meaty, rather moist and set with jelly.

You can see a lot more technique here, with the distinctive bits of ham, the foie gras and the carrots. I enjoyed this much more than the previous terrine.

And finally we have the modernist, deconstructed Terrine of rabbit with foie gras and pistachio mousse from Vue de monde in Melbourne. Even the terrine virgins among you will come to realise that the presentation here is a little different to your average terrine.

This is a very haute terrine, despite the slip of the claggy butter. It's served with some fresh pistachios and a pistachio mousse which is a nice nod to the more rustic terrine style which often has pistachios for textural contrast. Chef Doherty has deconstructed the dish well; the bacon which is usually used to wrap the finished terrine is represented as a ham slush (third row down) and there are layers of rabbit rilettes and foie gras. The confit carrot and the pistachio mousse frame the meats.

A vegetarian friend pinged me as I was writing this and said that they'd never had a good vegetarian terrine. I'm annoyed with myself as I had a great Tuscan terrine with layers of pesto and tomato and wrapped in provolone cheese rather than ham on the weekend, but I forgot to take a photo. I'll try and get the recipe and report back.

Vue de monde, Melbourne

2007-05-21T04:01:00.000-06:00

Given that Melbournians will tell you that Melbourne is the best food city in Australia, it's fair to assume that the best restaurant in Melbourne will be the best restaurant in Australia right? Vue de Monde, which has won Australian Gourmet Traveller's restaurant of the year for the past two years and was named by the Age as the best restaurant in Melbourne, gets higher plaudits than that. The Age says "Here’s the proof that not only is fine dining in Melbourne not dead, it has soared to unprecedented heights. Vue de monde is not just one of Australia’s best restaurants; it’s probably one of the world’s."

I went with a couple of friends last week and I'd say that it's a good fine-dining experience, but one that just misses out on perfection too many times to quite merit that hyperbole. That said, it's the first restaurant that I've been too for a while where I am interested in getting to know the Chef a little better, so I will be back.

The "twist" with Vue de monde (I hate that missing capital) is that there are no menus. You tell your waiter how hungry you are and how much money you want to spend and off they go. Our pass side seats meant that we were able to see everything that went out of the kitchen and there were points where the three of us were craning our necks to see what people were getting. This place is cooking as theatre, in fact Chef Doherty talks about competing with theatres and shows rather than other restaurants for customers' money and the kitchen is completely open, right in the dining room. There's even a mirror above the pass so you can see exactly what your neighbour is getting. Perfect for the voyeurs among us.

First up was a pumpkin puree with scallops marinated in yuzu with Sterling caviar. I can see where the dish was going, but the pumpkin was a little too sweet and overpowered the scallop, which in turn overpowered the caviar. This is posh nursing home food (no chewing...) and wasn't a patch on the snail amuse with mouselline chicken that really set our palates going.

Things took a turn for the better with this cep risotto which was paired with one of Vue de monde's own wines, a 2005 Pinot Gris by T’Gallant on the Mornington Peninsula. This was a very successful pairing, the wine really enhancing the earthiness of the ceps. Some good technique here too (I sound like Ron Atkinson commentating on the FA Cup) with dehydrated cep powder and a cep foam adding layers of flavour to the risotto. Chef Doherty amkes judicious use of some more modern techniques and uses them throughout the meal to add accent and contrast, but never just for the techniques sake.

Next came a dish I was really looking forward to; a terrine of rabbit with foie gras and pistachio mousse. I love the visual of this, it's a really modernist, bright and colourful terrine, that my terrible mobile phone camera doesn't do justice so I won't share the photo. Each part of the terrine was carefully thought-out; the foie gras contrasting with the pistachio mousse and a layer of serrano sludge that was really well flavoured. And serving rabbit with carrot always makes me smile. The terrine was let down by a layer of clarified butter between the rabbit rillettes and the ham that was just too claggy and fatty, especially on a cold terrine. So, a really beautiful well conceived dish with great elements, just let down by a slip.

Our fish course, red mullet wrapped in crayfish and then blanketed with carrot julienne was an interesting fish course, but was just a little sweet for me. I think I've been ruined for all fished courses ever since I had that seabass cooked tableside at Moto in Chicago. There was something about the simplicity that just was the perfect expression of the ingredient. This dish was a little too complicated and lacked depth in terms of the flavour profile. Might be improved by serving the essence of bouillabaisse that came in a little stopped test-tube with the fish, rather than as a shooter.

The wine pairing here was phenomenal though, a premier cru Chassagne-Montrachet that made up for the slightly unsuccessful dish.

We were then served a palate cleaners of an intense tomato consomme which appeared bubbling with dry ice. We've all seen the trick before, but it did make me smile.

On the left is the lamb dish that was our last savoury course. I've never eaten lamb belly before and the consensus was that it wasn't the best treatment. The sweetbreads were my favourite, all unctuous and savoury, although my companions preferred the confit lamb loin which you can see on the right. This was all really well flavoured meat and the whole dish was really well balanced.

Desert was a classic Souffle Rothschild which showcased the kitchen's some solid French roots and I enjoyed the counterbalance to the frozen kiwi fruit lolly we were served as pre-desert palate cleanser.

All together an enjoyable meal with some neat technique and good flavours. I'm looking forward to getting back here and understanding a little more about what Shannon Doherty's food is all about.

Eurovision Weekend- Part 1

2007-05-15T02:46:00.000-06:00

More homesickness as it was Eurovision Song Contest Weekend.

Eurovision reminds me so many British things. Saturday nights at my Nan's during the early 80's, being able to count to twelve in French by the age of seven (but not knowing eleven or nine), begging my Mum to let me change my name to Suzi G (after Bobby G of Bucks Fizz fame...I probably shouldn't be telling you all this). The 80's turn to the 90's when we choreographed a routine to the British entry rather than studying for our finals and I start planning elaborate buffets based on the host country's cuisine. I like to think my Eurovision Party is a bit of an event, although I'm still annoyed my friend Mark, a Eurovision nut, won't come because I don't take it seriously enough.

For the uninitiated, the Eurovision Song Contest is an institution. Started in 1956, it's either a chance for a variety of countries to showcase their songwriting skills or a chance to get together with your gay mates and eat a Ukrainian themed buffet. Despite the "Euro" in the title it's open to all of the countries that are part of the European Broadcasting Union rather than the European Union, so this explains the inclusion of Russia and Israel. Lebanon is actually rather interested in taking part, but their unwillingness to recognise Israel as a state is stopping them. Given that this year's Israeli entry was about a suicide bomber it's probably for the best...

The show has changed over the years and the Orc rock of last year's Finnish winner Lordi has opened the diversity gates. 60% of this year's semi-finalists were hoary-old rockers from the former Soviet Union. I counted eight pairs of leather trousers and more curly perms than the Bigg Market on a Saturday night.

Ah yes. The semi final. Eurovision is so popular these days that there's no way all of the countries who want to play can, so a semi-final was introduced in 2004. There are now 14 guaranteed places in the final, going to the Big Four (UK, Ireland, France and Germany) and the top ten from the previous year. If you're not a Eurovision fan and find the main attraction interminable, the semi final probably isn't for you...Luckily Bri indulges my passion and I got to see both.

You can't have Eurovision without food though. I've finally found a good butcher, and so I have been cooking meat for the first time since I got here. I needed to counter-balance the European-ness of the TV with something really Australian, so we had lamb and rosemary snags (Australian for sausages) from TJ Quality meats on Darling Street. It's a Demeter certified, organic butcher (more on this soon) and the sausages were damn good. I served it with my favourite lentil salad.

This is a really versatile dish and you can perch some griddled chicken or salmon on top, serve it as part of a salad selection, or with sausages like I did on Saturday. All quantities are up to you; you cannot be prescriptive about lentil salad.

The basics:
Some little green French lentils (as many as you need)
Half a head of garlic
A bay leaf

Rinse the lentil, cover with boiling water, add the garlic and a bay leaf and boil until cooked. Should take about 15 minutes. Rinse when they're done as I find lentil water a bit unappealing and drudgy. Fish out the garlic and bay leaf. Moisten the lentils with some of your best olive oil.

The dressings:
A white onion, diced finely or some shallots or scallions
A good handful of rocket or some leafy herbs. Parsley and mint have worked well for me in the past
A couple of tomatoes, skinned, seeded and sliced
Some little slips of roasted red pepper
Something creamy, like some nice fresh goats curd, ricotta or feta. I used some marinated feta from Meredith Farm and it was sensational
A little chopped chili if you like
Olives, capers or gherkins

Once the lentils are ready, just mix in whatever you have handy from the list above. I didn't bother with any olives, capers or gherkins as I wanted the little dots of feta and red pepper to be the stars. I toned down the chili too, although I'd use more if I were using a blander cheese like ricotta. A swish of red wine vinegar might be good at the end too to make more of a dressing than my olive oil alone.

Weight Watching...

2007-05-02T02:22:00.000-06:00

Sometimes a girl looks at her wardrobe and realizes that some of it is a little tight. Othertimes you quietly put all of your jeans into one of the containers that’s going to take three months to get to you and hope that no-one notices you’re the size of a camper van.

So I’ve joined Weight Watchers. For the uninitiated, WeightWatchers is the slimming club where “no food’s a sin”. Food energy values are measured in “points”, arrived at by doing something mathematical with a kilojoule and the saturated fat content. WeightWatchers also provides a support structure for your weightloss. The theory is that the weekly meeting gives you a network and stops you feeling alone in your diet. To quote from the literature “you can discuss what works and laugh about what doesn’t”. In reality, you find yourself wearing chiffon every weigh-in day and considering the use of laxatives.

I know that WeightWatchers works because I did it eight years ago and lost lots of weight. I used to go with my best friend, Emu. I fondly remember “pointing up” (as we called writing down our day’s food) every evening over several glasses of wine. This memory makes the whole Australian WeightWatchers experience bittersweet for me, because Emu’s a very long way away now. But still, each evening I write down everything I’ve eaten that day, get terribly homesick and work out if I can have that second glass of wine.

Eating healthily can be a challenge in Oz as the portions are insane. There are at least two sandwich joints within walking distance of the ThoughtWorks offices that are known as “the sandwich as big as your head” place. I had a wrap the size of my leg last week and of course there’s the muffin the size of my left breast coffee shop. The food halls are Valhallas of deliciousness, with multiple tempting choices of salad bar, fresh sushi roll, Portuguese burger, rice paper roll. Pho and stir-fry places. Given that a food hall in the UK usually consists of a McDonalds, KFC and Spud-U-Like all congealing away under the heat lamps, this is heaven for me. But the thing that has impressed me most is the freshly tossed salad bar concept. I have no idea why this hasn’t caught on everywhere, but London is just crying out for some of these.

You pick your salad leaf base and size. You add up to six extra ingredients from a list of about 30. These include lots of raw veggies like capsicum, carrot, onion, some roasted bits like aubergine and pumpkin, protein like tuna, egg or marinated tofu and some highly flavoured things like olives, capers and anchovies. It can be a recipe for disaster if you’re not thinking about flavour combinations and I don’t generally approve of any eating establishments where you create your own dishes. Trust the chef, I say. But this really works. You can add something more substantial like marinated octopus, steamed chicken or salmon and then it’s tossed for you and your dressing added.

The whole thing takes about 2 minutes and the result is the best lunchtime solution I’ve ever come across (apart from lunch at Arpege, natch) Beats the compost from Neal’s Yard Salad Bar which I used to have most days by miles.

Herbies, Rozelle

2007-04-22T05:18:00.000-06:00

Deciding where to live in a new country is hard. I posted on a couple of food forums asking for help and I am still working out if the suggestion of Redfern was a joke. My criteria were quite simple; good fishmonger, butcher, bakery and grocer all within walking distance of each other. I'd got used to not using the supermarket when I lived in Islington, managing with a weekly organic box delivery and the local great butcher, although the winter when I got so serious about food miles that I only ate locally sourced produce will never be repeated. There are only so many things you can do with a swede.

We haven't done too badly with Balmain. It's centrally located so anything that isn't in the suburb is in the next, and Sydney suburbs are really small, so the difference between Balmain and Rozelle is barely noticeable. We're eating mainly vegetarian at the moment so haven't troubled the butcher yet, but I am looking forward to getting to know the guys at AC Meats in Leichhard. Emile's Fruit and Veg seems to be catering to my fruit and vegetable needs, although my lovely new bike means that I am going to be able to get to the farmers market really easily. Once I stop falling off.

But no-one told me about our local amazing food shop. Herbie's Spices is a food mecca. It's only tiny, but this is the sort of store that you'd cross town for. I've just started to stock my pantry so I was just there for the basics but I felt like a WAG in the Selfridges sale. It's quite simply the best selection of spices I have ever seen.

I picked up some garam masala, ground ginger, and some slightly cheaty sambar power to make a vegetarian feast. So last night was lots of dhal, chana masala, garlic naan and brown rice. I'm also on a real allspice kick at the moment and tonight was a roasted pumpkin salad.

Ingredients:
750 grammes of pumpkin and butternut squash (you could use either, I was emptying the fridge)
100g chickpeas (I used tinned because I am not organised enough to soak dried pulses)
1tsp allspice
1 clove of garlic, pounded to a slurry with a pinch of salad in your pestle and mortar
couple of handfuls of wild rocket
1-2 tbsps olive oil

Dressing
3tbsp tahini
1 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp lemon juice
Another clove of garlic, pounded
warm water to thin

Preheat the oven to about 200 degrees. Begin by peeling and chopping your pumpkin/squash into inch large chunks. Don't go too small or you'll be left with minuscule pieces. Add the allspice, garlic and oil and mix well. Roast the pumpkin for about 20 minutes, or until it's starting to go all roasty and stick to the bottom of the pan. If your oven is fan assisted, I suggest you turn it off, as I find this can make your veggies steam rather than roast.

While your pumpkin is roasting, mix the tahini, rest of the garlic, lemon juice and oil together. It might all seize up, especially if you add the lemon to the tahini first, but the water is there to thin it down. You want the consistency of single cream.

Assemble your salad with the rocket at the bottom, then the pumpkin and chickpeas. Drizzle the tahini sauce over the top. Eat while watching the first night of Australian Big Brother.

Why bother?

2007-04-03T21:12:00.000-06:00

My old friend John Scott taught me a saying. "Life's too short to drink shit coffee."

Sydneysiders take their coffee very seriously, and while I am not yet ready to proclaim that it's impossible to get a bad cup of coffee here, it's bloody hard. Part of this is because it's an espresso based coffee culture thanks to the large Italian influx way back when, and the lack of chain outlets. Starbucks just hasn't got a foothold here. There are currently only 50 branches of Starbucks across the whole of Australia (only one or two more than in Islington then) and there's a completely different coffee lexicon here.

No more double tall skinny soy extra hot moccachinos with wings or venti frappuchinos with a caramel swirl and java chips. If you want a milkshake, go to a juice bar or the local gelateria (more on these another time) If you want a perfect coffee, you need to learn about the flat white and the short/long black. It's quite simple really. The flat white is an espresso based drink, roughly one third espresso to two thirds steamed milk. It's less milky than an latte and less foamy than a cap. The short black is an espresso, the long black basically an americano. You are allowed to add milk to a long black. The standard size is about 220-240 ml, slightly smaller than a Starbucks tall cup. To my mind, the perfect amount.

But what I love most about Sydney is that I haven't had a bad cup of a decaf yet. I don't take caffeine, what with it having the effect on me that crack cocaine has on most humans, so I'm all about the decaf. And if you think it's hard to get good coffee, try getting a good decaf in 98% of the developed world. The only problem is that some Sydneysiders* find this a bit weird and I experience some ribbing at every morning's coffee run. It has got so bad that my cup today had "why bother?" written on the lid, rather than the contents.

I'll try and get round some more places and hope to report soon on where Sydney's best cup of coffee is. Suggestions are welcome!

*you know who you are

Sydney Fish Market

2007-03-31T04:22:00.000-06:00

We finally got round to a trip to the Sydney Fish Market today. I had no real expectations about what it was going to be like, I was just hoping to pick up some squid and prawns.

Sydney Fish Market is amazing. I feel like a whole new world of cooking has opened up to me. I used to think that the selection at Steve Hatt or Shellseekers was pretty good. I was living a lie.

Based in Blackwattle Bay, just under the Anzac Bridge, the market is the largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. You'd have to go to Japan to get a wider choice of seafood. It's a wholesale market and auction in the wee hours of the morning and the retail market opens at 7.00am. You could do all of your shopping here, although I didn't see a butcher, as there's a grocer, baker and deli alongside the smorgasbord of fish. There's also a cookery school so you can learn how to cook your spoils. I wanted to cancel my weekend's plans as soon as I walked in to De Costi seafood and just spend all of my time cooking. Bri just wanted to get some calamari and sit on the wharf.

The plan was to buy some squid to make a stew for supper tonight and perhaps pick up some prawns for tomorrow. First decision of the day was which squid to go for. There was Queensland Squid, Hawkesbury Squid, cleaned squid, tiny squid, medium squid, squid rings and, probably, Oscar winning squid. It was a whole new world of squid. We went for Hawkesbury Squid from just round the corner. I think I went slightly into shock at this point and basically just wanted to photograph and then eat everything. Even Bri was open mouthed in amazement.
Down one side there was a "filet" bar where you can pick up ready filleted pieces. Across the back were mussel and pippi tanks as well as mud crabs, disabled with masking tape below signs warning that they are dangerous creatures. To one side, the largest swordfish I'd ever seen, bisected and ready to have huge steaks cut off. In the middle, the most perfect seafood stage, with piles of prawns, alternating raw and cooked, all graded by size. I managed to resist but concocted an evil plan to get some tiny green school prawns (to be an appetiser tonight) and some large prawns to get the garlic treatment tomorrow. I was planning how I might be able to get a whole snapper, perhaps roasted with chilli, into my eating plans and some scallops, which I want to roast with some soy and drizzle with balsamic when Bri dragged me away so we could explore some other parts of the market.

In Musumeci Seafoods I saw things that I had never seen before, like the bailer shells pictured above and the red cod below. Musumeci is a little more cramped than De Costi, but I think their range of whole fish might have been bigger. They had the most beautiful looking striped bonito and I was wracking my brain for recipes. I managed to keep myself on track though and ended up purchasing the tiny school prawns and some bigger ones too.

We were off to see family for lunch, but as we'd missed breakfast (and as this was our first trip here) we felt that we deserved a little snack. So Bri got his calamari and I scouted out some oysters. I haven't had oysters for a while, so I deserved a dozen, and I picked out some large Pacific and smaller Sydney rock oysters from Peter's Seafood, inside the main hall. This is a very slick operation with a delicious looking sashimi option with the fish sliced to order. Prices may be a bit higher here, it's definitely smarter than the freestanding shops outside, but I felt that the selection was a tiny bit more limited.

The oysters were delicious and needed nothing more than a squeeze of lemon and the smell of the sea, although I could have purchased mornay or kirkpatrick style to take home with me. I was expecting (there I go again) to enjoy the Pacific oysters more, as I usually prefer the looser, brinier ones. But the Sydney oyster was a revelation; creamy, close textured, muscular even, and a lot smaller than the Pacific. This was as good as snacking gets! Bri loved his calamari, although I thought they'd been sitting around a bit too long.

So tonight we're having the squid stew with pasta, a recipe from Neil Perry's new book. We just ate the school prawns, which I dusted with some paprika and semolina and then deep fried for 30 seconds or so. This was some seriously good eating; the sweetness of the paprika and tiny prawns contrasting with the semolina coating and the shells. You eat these critters whole, although I gave their tendrils (antennae?) a trim to stop them getting all tangled up. Below you can see the school prawns before they had their oil bath, and after. Now, can you guess where we're going next weekend?

Garfish

2007-03-26T20:59:00.000-06:00

We went to the Manly Ocenarium (Australian for Aquarium) the other day to see their lizard show. The theory was that exposing me to a 3.5 metre long olive python would help cure me of my phobia. To some degree it has worked, and I managed to touch the snake and I was allowed some gelato afterwards for being a brave girl. The trip also introduced me to some new fish. Which I then ate later that evening. I've often been puzzled by my reaction to aquariums. I really love them, but they make me really hungry. I can't listen to the helper telling me which toys the octopus loves to play with, or watch the cuttlefish squirling about without thinking about a spritz of lemon and a good hot griddlepan.

It's strange, people don't walk around zoos saying "ooh, panda, that's delicious" but I see to think it's a perfectly valid response at the aquarium.

We had our first encounter with Jewfish at Manly. Yep, Bri and I did a double take on the name too. Turns out they're members of the grouper family and Jewfish is a catch-all name for a number of fish round here. The name's not considered derogatory in Oz and you'll also hear them called Jewies. In Florida, where they are a protected species, they're known as the Goliath Grouper. They can grow up to seven feet long, eat anything that gets in their way and were living quite merrily with Manly's nurse sharks.

They are also quite delicious as we discovered at Garfish, in Kirribilli, that night. I really quite liked this restaurant. More seats outside than in, a large selection of fish where you choose the method of cooking and the garnish and a good selection of wine by the glass. They say that their aim is "our fish, the way you wish" although our waitress was keen to tell us that that certain fishes respond better to different cooking methods. There were several fish that we'd never heard of, like the Blue Eyed Trevalla (bad deep fried it turns out) and the Leather Jacket. The fishes provenance was next to the name on the menu, so it was really easy to choose local fish and not add too many food miles to the bill. Bri went for the Wild Jewfish (he couldn't not, really) with soft polenta, roasted tomato and asparagus as his garnish, while I chose Ocean Trout with a pistachio, orange and plum salad. The trout came very rare and the salad lacked a bit of zing. The plum dressing was just a tad too sweet and some chili would have been a nice contrast to the rich, sweet fish. The Jewfish was excellent though; a good, thick slab with the skin griddled until crisp on a creamy bed of polenta. It's rare I get dish envy when I'm with Brian, but he totally won this time.

I drank a really amazing Tasmanian pinot grigio and am really looking forward to learning more about ANZ wine. We just got a flat today, so once we're settled I can start all of the courses, learning and cooking I've been planning for so long!

Garfish Restaurant,
2/21 Broughton Street
Kirrilbilli
9922 4322

Branches also at Manly and Crow's Nest.

The Eagle Has Landed...

2007-03-19T00:35:00.000-06:00

This is the view from our apartment! We're only in this place for a month, but I still can't believe that we're finally in Sydney

I have limited email access at the moment and lots to write about. Today has been spent trying to get an apartment, but you can't do that unless you have a bank account, a letter from your primary school teacher confirming you're morally upstanding, a rent book, your passport and birth certificate, 42 official letters with your name and Australian address on them and a DNA sample.

So marginally easier than getting a BlockBuster video card then.

Of course we packed all of these things, along with our Sydney guidebooks, in the luggage we sent separately. With hindsight, we could have planned this much, much better...

Hong Kong Day One

2007-03-13T07:34:00.000-06:00

I don't know what day it is anymore, but we've left London and are now in Hong Kong, on our way to Sydney. I think I'm in a state of shock to be honest.

Our cabbie to the airport couldn't have taken a route better designed to show off London and the weather continued to taunt us. As we scooted past the Natural History museum I commented that I still hadn't been there. I guess next time I am back in London will be as tourist...

So we're now at the Jia boutique hotel in Hong Kong. Our suite is amazing; two chaises longues, "the comfiest bed in the world" according to Brian (although I think this might have more to do with the fact we've been in smelly twin beds for the past month in that horrible appartment), power shower and three gnome stools. Indeed. You can really tell that it was designed by Phillipe Starck. I am slightly reminded of the Long Bar at the Sanderson (only with fewer high class hookers and no Dean Gaffney) It's the sheer white curtains...Bri keeps walking around and touching things and saying that it's the lovliest hotel room he has ever stayed in.

We completely screwed up on the jet lag front and I forgot to set an alarm, so rather than having two hours sleep, we slept for six, wasting most of our first day and missing two meals. We took a longish walk to Victoria City Seafood ((which the concierege really didn't want us to do for some reason. Kept saying it was far too far to walk. With hindsight I can see how this is the case in the middle of summer and the humidity is up, but it was really pleasant today) in the Sun Hung Kai Centre for dinner, skirting through Victoria Park and getting our first view of Kowloon from HK Island through the haze.

Dinner was a brightly lit affair in a very quiet restaurant. I'd been warned that tables were hard to come by here, but I think that Hong Kong might take dinner a lot later than two jetlagged Brits. We started with deep fried century egg and pork dumplings with roe. The eggs were one of my things that I really wanted to eat while I was here. The individual eggs are packed in a mixture of ash, lime and salt and are buried for 100 days. The lime petrifies the egg and makes the yolk harden and turn a bluish colour while the white becomes gelatinous, translucent and brown. The eggs were then breadcrumbed and deep fried. The results are a very complex textural dish, with a nice contrast of hot on the outside and cold inside and the flavour is musty and slightly cheesy. The dumplings were much more familar to me and a really great example and I enjoyed watching our matriarchal waitress make sure that Bri didn't burn his tongue. The dumplings did lack the advertised roe though, so I wonder if we got the ferengi ones.

Next up were some prawns, simply sauted in ginger and garlic, which squeaked with freshness and some beans with minced pork which were sweet, savoury and healthy all at the same time. Our centre piece was a half roasted chicken (pictured) which had lots of scrakly skin and creamy flesh. We also managed some choi sum, sauted with garlic, because it felt like days since we'd had anything healthy to eat.

The bill came to about £42 which seemed like a good price for carefully cooked, very fresh ingredients. We travelled back on the double decker tram (or rather, we went to North Point on the tram because we were loving the ride so much and then just got off, crossed over the road and came back on the top deck)

Bri's now on the sofa asleep. Am sure it's time for bed for me too.

Peyton and Byrne

2007-03-10T13:56:00.002-07:00

I'm not sure there's anything sweeter than iced cupcakes. They make me come over all Doris Day. Peyton and Byrne, squished, somewhat oddly, between Heals and Habitat on Tottenham Court Road, offers about 10 different flavours and it's almost impossible to choose. Add to that a wonderful selection of savouries, pies and OH MY GOD is that a scotch egg I see? you may find it hard to leave.

The store is the latest offering from Oliver Peyton and is, allegedly, based on his mother's recipes. I say allegedly because Roger Pizey is in charge of the kitchen, and I know that he's an amazing patissier. I know this because my mate Paul told me.

I called by on my last day in London, with my brother. We were planning an early supper, but we really couldn't leave without sampling a couple of things. I can recommend the chocolate praline cupcake, even though there was a little more icing that I generally like. The cake was moist and fudgy, not too sweet, and tasted homemade. I didn't even get to try Carl's raspberry and coconut concoction, but he was brushing crumbs off in a very satisfied manner. The scotch eggs are good too, with a good herb flavour to the meat, although I'm still noticed convinced about cold scotch eggs.

The only low point was the coffee, which just wasn't great. I'd recommend buying a box of cupcakes (the packaging is too cute for words) and getting to the Monmouth Coffee Company on Monmouth Street for your caffeine. If you like cake and good design (and really, who doesn't?) this is a must visit London store.

The Perfect Morning In London

2007-03-09T07:59:00.001-07:00

Sometimes only caffeine, fried dough and chocolate will do, so today started with breakfast at Churreria Espanola on Queensway with Moby, Maggie and Martin Amis. OK, so Martin Amis wasn't actually with us and I didn't actually recognise him but I never see famous people so I had to mention it.

This was a bit of an excursion for me. Since moving to Islington I rarely venture far from the number 19 bus route, but I took one of those lovely little black buses that drop you just where you want to be and beat the rush hour. 8.30am seemed like a hellish time to meet, especially as I knew that Arbutus would be a late one, but a croque monsieur, two caffe con leche, some chocolate espagnol and three churros with sugar and cinnamon soon put me right.

From here it felt like London was all mine and so I headed to the West End for a little more retail therapy before I leave. TopShop was my first shop, and is actually slightly less hellishly frantic than usual at 10.30am. It's no wonder that Kate Moss always looks so good, not having to shop on a Saturday when it's total carnage in here. Next up Jaeger and probably the cutest dress I have purchased in, oooh, three days. A walk through the back streets of Soho in the sun (with the wind making sure that the whole of Carnaby Street saw my M&S control tops) took me to Liberty, my favourite shop in the whole world. Who knew that I needed a peacock feather Liberty print, silk jewellery roll? Who even knew one existed...I restrained myself (a little) and just purchased some thank you cards from Billet Doux that are really sweet. Given that I still haven't got round to sending my thank you cards from my trip to Jo'berg before Christmas, it may be sometime before this self-gift becomes useful.

Next up, Covent Garden. Rough Trade records for a friend's musical education, Neals Yard Dairy for some samples of cheese (because I haven't had enough saturated fat yet today) and I end up buying some Berkshire, gherkins and petit lucque olives. I can't miss out on the Monmouth Coffee store, the best coffee in London, either. Even their decaf is delicious. Next I decide that I will try on bikinis and discover that they look much better if you're wearing hold-you-in-tights. Who knew? I decide not to buy as I am not yet sure that Bondi is ready for this beachwear innovation. It strikes me that I might look better in a bikini if I ate less, but lo, I magically find myself next to Beard Papa.

A trot up Tottenham Court Road takes me to FOPP for some more CDs not bought in a chainstore environment and then to Heals, for more lovely things for a little girl to have. It's not far to Drummond Street from here and great Masala Dosa at Diwani.

Then its home and I spot a chap wearing a bowler hat, entirely unironically, on the bus.

I can't tell you how much I am going to miss London.

Tom's Kitchen

2007-03-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

"Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."

Alexander Pope wasn't talking me about me when he wrote that. Over the past few years my expectations about food have got a bit out of control. I find myself starting any critisism about meals that I enjoyed with "It was delicious, but..." The fact that I typed criticism when I meant conversation tells you a lot.

So I went to Tom's Kitchen with very high expectations. New venture from Michelin starred Chef. Laid back atmosphere. Classic English food prepared with passion. Critics clambouring over one another to heap plaudits.

It was good. I'll get the criticism out of the way first. It's tiled. So it's a bit like eating in a toilet, only with worse acoustics. You sit refectory style, so should you have a small accident with the ketchup, your neighbour looks like an extra from a Tarantino movie. Moby says the butter was cheesy. They didn't have many sharing dishes when we went, and I was sort of looking forward to a casserole with a big ladle. There go the expectations again. I turned up to a restaurant where I know the menu changes daily and then I think it's fair to critisise it for not having a dish that I sort of fancied. I am turning into that man from Little Britain who wants a picture of a slightly churlish owl and nothing else.

The good stuff is really good. They have baked Alaska (for two), the promise of which, along with the duck ham on the charcuterie platter (for two), perked up a tweaky Fi and some cheesy butter with good bread (which is my kind of butter no matter what Moby says.) They use a lot of this butter in the chicken liver pate, pictured above, which made me want to bury my head in it and go "whubba whubba whubba", but a sense of decorum meant I just spread a lot of it on my sourdough toast. They served a burger which is made from proper chopped, aged beef, the likes of which we would have crowned King of the Burgers if we'd come across it when we were doing burger club. That said, I prefer a burger that's less aged and made with a less fat. Oh, and a burger thickness that you don't have to dislocate your jaw like a snake to eat might be good too. The sirloin was well aged, well cooked and came with some triple cooked chips that I found better than the ones at the Hinds Head. Maggie was pleased with her haddock and chips, which tasted properly of fish and we were assured that it was off the boat that morning.

Deserts are homely and proper; the baked Alaska was ignited at the table and the profiteroles filled with some of the best vanilla icecream I've had for a while. The hot chocolate sauce is made with a very good quality, high percentage chocolate that needed just a little of the vanilla icecream to sweeten it up. Espressos came in cute stainless steel cups, but could have been punchier.

I'm sure it was expensive, but my friends kindly picked up the tab so I don't know exact prices. That said, the richness of the food meant that it was the next evening before I was truly hungry again and I effectively saved the money that would have been spent on three other meals. Which, along with my concept of any item bought in a sale actually saves you money, is your introduction to the world of Suzi economics.

Nobu

2007-02-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve been eating quite a lot of sushi recently, ironic given that the general consensus is that London isn’t a great sushi town. Nobu is one of those restaurants that I’ve always meant to go to but never made it. I think I might have thought it was a bit too cool for me. Judging by our table, which was in Siberia, so did the maitre’d.

Nobu Berkeley gathered a lot of press when it opened. There was no booking policy and Chefs Nobu Matsuhisa and Mark Edwards installed a woodfired oven and were offering a much wider menu than in other branches. It took off and I remember reading some really good reviews, especially of the new dishes. Two years on, the no booking policy has been scrapped and reservations are strongly recommended, although they do run a list on the night which we wanted to be on. Which is where things started to go wrong. Emu was running a bit late so I’d asked the Maitre’d to put me on the list, but I was assured that we’d be able to have a table without that because they weren’t that busy. So I tripped off to the very dimly lit bar for a Lillet Blanc and listened to the City boys boasting. Emu duly arrived, we had a drink and went upstairs to our table to be told there would be a wait of at least an hour before we could eat. To cut a long story short, we eventually got a table, next to a Dita Von Teese look alike, but only after Emu told them her life wouldn’t be worth living if we didn’t eat before nine.

Our waiter really pushed the tasting menu but we were happy to go it alone. We started with a sashimi and sushi platter, with sea urchin, salmon eggs, eel, chu-toro, mackerel and bream. There was also some tobiko, which we hadn’t ordered, but which was very, very good. Overall, the quality of the fish was high, but the rice wasn’t quite there for me. Next up was a signature dish, rock shrimp tempura, which is basically KFC popcorn chicken for supermodels. Served with jalapeno, creamy ponzu and another sauce that I can’t quite remember now, it showed a deft hand with the fryer and disappeared fast. Then, after a 25 minute wait, two woodfired dishes; cabbage with black truffles and Gloucester Old Spot belly pork. The cabbage was a disaster; chunks of partially cooked savoy cabbage, burned in a couple spots on the top, allegedly drizzled with truffle oil and served with some dusty black truffles. The old spot was better, rich, unctuous chunks of pork, but it was no more than the sum of its parts. We were a bit bored by now and our ears were hurting from the volume, so we asked for the bill and got ready to leave.

Then there was a first for me. A 15% service charge had been automatically added to the bill. 15% I tell you. We asked for it to be taken off and we tipped a more modest 10%, because our waiter was energetic and knowledgeable and very cute.

So, that’s Nobu out of the way. I don’t think I’ll be going back. Cocktails in the Polo bar in the Westbury hotel afterwards were delicious, and their snack selection one of the best I’ve nibbled in London.

Paul A Young Fine Chocolates

2007-02-19T18:05:00.001-07:00

I had one of my best ever work moments this week. I've been helping Paul in the shop and we were working on the Easter range. Paul left me with the words "Can you do 80 of these and make them all exactly the same?" It's the perfect thing to say to someone with OCD.

I don't think I've had such a sense of satisfaction in my work for ages. 80 bunnies, each with a necktie at exactly the same jaunty angle. 80 bunnies, each facing left. 80 bunnies, each with the sticker on their wrapper in exactly the same spot. I even worked out how long each ribbon closing the bag needed to be so that they're all the same length.

Best of all, I got to wear white cotton gloves while I was doing it.

I'm wasted in recruitment you know.

On Meatballs

2007-02-19T18:03:00.001-07:00

Sometimes only meatballs will do. They're one of my foods that I cook when I am grumpy and I need to cook myself into a better humour. There's something about mulching everything together, rolling out the balls and plopping them into a vat of tomato sauce that I find incredibly soothing.

I once had a major arguement with a boyfriend over meatballs. He insisted that they had to be fried before being coated in the sauce, while I believe in poaching them. From the effort to my left, where they were fried, I still think I win.

So, my meatballs recipe goes a little like this. Take enough minced meat for one more person than is going to eat the dish and mix it with a couple of minced cloves of garlic, a very finely chopped onion that has been gently fried in some olive oil, a good handful of chopped parsley and whatever other herbs you have in the fridge and season with salt and pepper. One of those tiny Italian dried chillis is also nice or some fennel seeds. I use pork and beef for preference and this time also added a little chopped black pudding that I picked up thinking I might make a less saintly potato soup. Bind with a scant egg yolk, just enough to mulch things up. Roll into mouthsize balls and pop in the fridge to set. Meanwhile, mince a couple of white onions in the food processor and fry. Be warned, it's like mustard gas. Add a tin of tomatoes that you've also popped in the processor and a good glug of passata. When the sauce is cooked, add a couple of cups of full fat milk and then plop in the meatballs. Bring to the boil and then simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes. Serve with brown rice if you're being good, spaghetti if you want to seduce someone.

And why made enough for one more than is eating? These meatballs are amazing in a sandwich the next day. Speaking of which, don't ever have the meatball marinara from Subway. It's totally bleugh and a meatball abomination...

The Fox

2007-02-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

I'm just not in the mood for cooking at the moment so I took myself off to the Fox at 28 Paul Street on Thursday. I ate here a couple of times years ago, and fondly remember the mismatched crockery and hearty food. I'd heard that it had recently changed hands and figured I should give it a go, before I go.

When I eat out I like to try food that I can't make at home, so I struggle a bit with gastropubs. Short of not having to do the washing up, I can usually rustle up the same. So things like really good service and some distinctive choices become really important to me. The menu here changes weekly and I'd heard good reports about suckling pig and eggs bourgignon so I was hoping for some dishes a cut above the usual.

I was a bit disappointed with the limited menu, but this was more down to high expectations set by other reviews than anything the Fox does wrong. The menu changes weekly, with about four starters and four mains, and a couple of daily specials. I chose the terrine, which was a bit fridge cold, but was very porky and was a good excuse to eat another two slices of their rather lovely warm bread. A main of rabbit with olives was just that, a leg, a saddle and whatever you'd call a rabbit's arms and some green and black olives. It was all suitably rustic and certainly beat anything I could have been bothered to rustle up.

Am still not totally convinced about this gastropub thing you know.

On how Fishworks let me down

2007-02-15T01:50:00.000-07:00

You'll notice a distinct lack of fish in the dish on the left. Being of sound mind, I don't eat out on Valentine's Day. I'm sure that there are some restaranteurs who aren't guilty of profiteering on February 14th, but I can't be bothered to find them. So for many years now, I have cooked for Valentine's. I asked Bri what he'd like and he requested the scallop and lentil dish that I'd recreated after my trip to the River Cafe. I called Steve Hatt (the bestest fishmonger in, oooh, N1) but he didn't answer, so in a fit of desperation, I ordered from Fishworks. Four hours later I get back to my phone and see I have a couple of missed calls from a mystery number, but no message. Being a nosy bear I call and find myself speaking to Fishworks. The time is 4.30pm. They don't have my eight diver caught scallops. I hang up and consider putting a rock through their window. Of course Hatt's are answering now, but they're out of scallops.

So what did I cook? Well, my feet were killing me from another day in Paul A Young fine chocolates (more on this in another post) and I really couldn't be bothered to go shopping so poor Bri got a store cupboard supper of roasted onion squash with chestnut mushrooms, Dolcelatte and rocket. I'd also roasted some pine nuts so these were sprinkled over and the whole thing was given some ooomph with a drizzle of really excellent balsamic. Not bad, considering.

The Ambassadors

2007-02-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

Living in London means that I've learnt there's nothing worse than sleeping late on a Sunday morning and discovering that your chosen venue stops serving eggs at noon. I'm always on the look out for a nice place to get brunch.

I'd been meaning to get to the Ambassadors in Exmouth Market for a while now so Bri and I took a break from delivering unwanted furniture to a variety of Australians and dropped in to read the Sunday papers.

It's a funny old space; all formica and plastic banquettes in a palette primarily of sludge green. There's a table full of newspapers for the grown-ups and some colouring books for the kids. I was heartened to see the table next to us were having tea and sharing a large, old-fashioned brown teapot. The menu, in a sludgey plastic folder, natch, was short, but offered many distractions. Should it be the Londoner's sausage sandwich? A goat cheese omlette? Homemade waffles with sweet-cure bacon? Oooh, you can have a poached egg with that too. The menu's not long, but it's perfectly formed. You could have a simple breakfast, some museli with sourdough toast and their very moorish homemade seville marmalade, or go the whole hog with a three coure lunch. We took a middle road, with some toast and coffee to start and then the sausage sandwich for me and a parsnip, bleu d'Auvergne and walnut salad for him.

It was all very, very good although the sandwich defeated me. This is seriously good sausage, but they might want to think about serving it in a smaller bap. I'll be back; I'm already planning a post-Killy supper with John!

Mutton Hotpot

2007-02-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

A late afternoon trip to my local butcher, Frank Godfrey, turned up some lovely looking mutton last week. I'd been meaning to try some for a couple of weeks but the rush to move and finish work hadn't left me with much time for cooking. It's a rare day I'm out of the office early, but I took advantage of a cheeky half day and the cold snap to make an old classic.

I was in the mood for lots of veggies and I know that hotpot is traditionally served with no accompaniment so I went a bit mad on the veg. I chopped everything into good size pieces because I knew this was going to get about two hours on about 160 degrees. Four carrots, a small swede, two white onions, three celery sticks and two turnips went in, along with about 600g of mutton which had been coated in flour and fried until caramelised without. Some chicken stock, bay leaves, seasoning and garlic completed the picture. I sliced some lovely Cyprus potatoes and layered them up after about 90 minutes of cooking.

The whole house smelled amazing amazing and Bri went back for thirds. The snow came the next day...but this was the perfect insulation.

Beard Papa Creme Puffs, London

2007-02-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

All good things come to those who wait. So goes the saying. A friend had blogged about the arrival of Beard Papa’s just before Christmas, and I was determined to try these delicious sounding vanilla puffs. So I set off for Oxford Street. In my inimitable style I’d neglected to make a note of the address and I was slightly vague on the name. I think I’d figured my food radar would somehow just get me there. I even called directory enquires and shouted at the operator when they told me that “Papa Bears in WC1 doesn’t exist”. Yes, I am that stupid.

So I went home empty cream puff handed.

The puffs slipped from my mind until yesterday when I was thinking of a treat for a friend who wasn’t feeling so good. This time I knew the name and that it was on Oxford Street, as I’d spied the bright yellow facade as the number 73 crawled past one day. I’ve always hated the new bendy buses, but never so much as when we were stalled outside a provider of cream filled choux pastry and I couldn’t get off. Bring back the RouteMasters, I say.

But yesterday I finally got my paws on these puffs! You get five for six pounds in a cute little yellow box. The nice waitress asked how long it would be before I ate them (clearly not recognising my greasy weasel tendencies as I had planned to scarf a couple on the tube, but she shamed me into saving them until I got see David) and kindly popped an ice cube into the box to keep them cool on the journey. As one of those people who finds it hard to sleep with snack food in the house, I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to wait to get my hands on my first Beard Papa puff. But it was worth it.

I love the packaging and I love the product. The contrast between the cool, thick, creamy custard and the short, crisp choux bun was a delight. There’s even contrast on the bun with the powder sugar coated, thin top and the thicker, crispier base. The word on the street is that the vanilla is the best flavour, but I shall be back to try their chocolate éclairs, which they claim are coming soon.

I love them so much I went back the next day for more. Everyone in my office loves me now.

Beard Papas: Corner of Oxford and Berwick Street, opposite the Plaza shopping centre.

Delicious and Healthy? Perhaps not quite...

2007-01-31T04:27:00.000-07:00

I'm currently torn between Gillian McKeith and Nigel Slater.

The McKeith thing is part of my annual January detox and my intake of raw green things, seeds and wholegrains has gone up, while my consumption of Vacherin Mont D'or has gone down. I think it can be hard to eat clean and eat deliciously but I have been giving it a go.

The soup on the left is based on a very Nigel Slater concept, a vegetable soup with a really chunky garnish to ponce it up a bit. He recommended his leek and potato soup served with slices of fried black pudding but I felt this wasn't saintly enough so I improvised with sauted potatoes and the weeniest bit of chorizo dulce. You'll notice my use of the term "quite" saintly. No-one's perfect!

The soup really benefitted from being made with chicken stock rather than vegetable. I find it gives it more body and much, much more flavour. The potatoes were marfona, from the supermarket, with a couple of little charlottes thrown in with the skins still on. The leeks, while not as sweet and perfect as the organic ones from last year, were still good and I am wondering if the recent snow might have improved the flavour.

My McKeith bit? A couple of handfuls of rocket chopped and stirred through at the last minute to make up for the chorizo. And a really easy way to get another portion of veg in! A real winter warmer and one I'll make again.

The Zetter

2007-01-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

OK, so first off, this is the worst photo in the world. I'm still using my camera phone and it's really useless in dim light. The photo is of a small sliver of foie gras parfait with quince and a scattering of pomegranate that we shared at the Zetter on Saturday night.

I don't know if it's just that my diet has got in the way of my eating over the past few weeks, but Saturday felt like the first really delicious restaurant dish I've had all year. The Zetter was a last minute choice, I was really looking for a gastropub near to the Barbican where we could get supper at six to make our show at 7.30 (an almost impossible combination it would appear) and all of my choices didn't start serving until 6.30. I'd had a really good meal at the Zetter when it first opened and this was the ideal chance to revisit and have a drink in the bar.

I'd wanted to have cocktails, but when I saw a Bonny Doon Malvasia by the glass, that was it for me. I was first introduced to their wines at Trio and have been a fan ever since. Given we were short on time we ordered the slice of foie from the bar menu to tide us over until the restaurant opened. Luckily we weren't starving because if I were being critical, and I'm not in the mood, this was small for the £5.50 price tag, although it was perfectly formed. We filled up on the perfect bread. This is the real indicator that you're in the good hands of Sam and Sam Clarke of Moro. More moist than the bread at Moro and with a softer bite, this is seriously good sourdough. I'd meant to ask more, but all I could ascertain was that they make it themselves. It came with delicious, peppery olive oil.

Next up we both ordered the rare yellow fin tuna with garlic broccoli and cauliflower. I'm not usually a huge tuna fan (unless it's sushi) but this was perfect. Thinly sliced, seared on the outside and ruby red inside, it came on an iron skillet with a puree of cauli and some perfectly al dente broccoli. A side order of roasted new potatoes completed the picture, along with another glass of Bonny Doon.

So, a very quick meal before a performance of "Child of Our Time" and "Spring Symphony" at the Barbican, and overall a most delicious evening.

The Zetter,
St John’s Square
86-88 Clerkenwell Road,
London EC1M 5RJ
(0)20 7324 4444

Thai Corner Bistro

2007-01-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

I stopped writing horrible things about restaurants a while ago. I'd really enjoyed doing the odd hatchet job on places (especially Flamin Nora's which thankfully has closed for business) but realised that I preferred reading about the great places that I really should go to. I think I was vaguely remembering a quote from Bob McWhirter, an influential developer I'd been talking to. He said it much more articulately than I can manage in his post "Everything Sucks".
So since then I've kept the invective for the journey home and for the odd conversation on food boards. I just didn't want to spend my time writing up meals that I really hated.

Until yesterday. I'd been told that the Thai Corner Cafe on St Paul's Road, N1 was a delicious, homey authentic Thai. Well, I am sad to report that it's none of those, and it's also probably guilty of profiteering.

My chicken and prawn salad (left) came with two small prawns and four strips of chicken, not much larger than my little finger. I called the waitress over and asked if this were normal. She snapped yes and walked off. The picture was taken shortly before we asked for the bill and not one person asked if everything was OK.

It's a rare day that I don't tip...but they didn't get a penny last night. Which was unsurprising since the most depressing meal I've eaten in months cost me three thousand five hundred of them.

River Cafe

2007-01-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

Oh I have been a naughty and not been updating at all. I've got too much stuff to catch up on, so there'll probably be quite a lot of activity over the next few days. Not that I am insane enough to imagine that anyone is actually reading this....

So, River Cafe with Emu. I'm embarrassed to admit that this was my first ever trip and I'm still kicking myself that I hadn't been earlier. I lived in West London for years for crying out loud. The cab ride home cost me £30 this time. Which was as much as the scallop dish pictured on the right.

In some ways the River Cafe exemplifies everything that's wrong with eating out in London. It's basically serving the sort of food I eat at home (oh, get me). Really great ingredients not mucked about (I appear to be channeling Jamie Oliver today. Apologies) but £30 for four scallops and some lentils? I cooked the exact same dish two days later and it came out at £7. Including an extra scallop. What's wrong with London diners? I'm sure most people that night were having a lovely time, cooing and ahhing over the delicious food and then trolling off, confident they'd had a quintessential London dining experience. They had, as long as you recognise that paying the bill in London can often leave you thinking you need one of those victims of crime leaflets the Met like to hand out.

But I shouldn't be mean. This really is delicious food and I can afford it, so what matter is it to me that I can do this at home? I'll tell you why. Most people in that restaurant are probably completely unaware that they could make that exact dish themselves. The adventurous might try to re-create it, perhaps using some nice lentils de Puy like I did from the Sainsburies Special Selection. But their scallops, perhaps from M&S, will be lacking tlusciousnessess of the River Cafe's, because it's impossible to buy good fish in the supermarket these days. And no-one seems to care.

Luckily the River Cafe is here to show people what food can really taste like. From the start, every ingredient had been sourced with the most care and then treated with the most respect. So my lamb had just been roasted, perhaps after a rub with a little garlic, in a proper wood burning oven. My potatoes with trevisse were deeply savoury, cooked long and slow to bring out the sweetness of both and melt them together.

Desserts were unnecessary, but the caramel ice cream, while not quite up to St John standards, was delicious and Emu declared her almond tarte divine. What was best though was the company, and the feeling that I'd managed to cross a place off my list before I leave. If I were staying in London I'd be planning a trip back now, but the move means that I have too little time, and too many things to do!

Cay Tre

2006-12-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

I think that Cay Tre is really hit and miss. It's one of those restaurants with a really long menu, but only about ten items are actually worth eating. So the first time I went, I followed Guardian food writer Jay Rayner's advice from 2005, had an amazing meal and went back a week later. Being a creature of habit, I ordered the same thing again. I keep finding myself stuck on dishes in certain restaurants, especially Vietnamese places. So Viet Garden on Liverpool road is golden pancake and then pho...and so on.

So I liked Cay Tre so much I started taking people there. At first, people who hadn't read the review, but who were adventurous eaters and who liked the same kind of things as me. And then I got cocky and took non-adventurous eaters who don't want to eat the specials. And then it all went wrong. I remember one dish, I think it was squid in tomato sauce and I asked for a taste and the sauce was watered down Heinz tomato soup.

So, off the top of my head, the pho sate is OK, but the normal pho isn't. The summer rolls get by and the Imperial spring rolls are good. There's a pho roll as well, with beef, that was pretty tasty too. The La Vong fish is the best stater and I'd just go for that. Avoid the soft shell crab. Mainswise, I'm stuck on the mackerel in banana leaf and despite being told the cat fish in caramelised sauce is great, I haven't tried it. Campfire sirloin steak was overpowered by a crazy hand with the red chilli on my last visit.

There's a simple rule of thumb, and if you follow it, you'll eat well here. Order anything with a smiley face next to it, otherwise you're on your own!

Upper Glas

2006-11-01T04:25:00.000-07:00

I never got to Glas in Borough Market. I also rarely ate at Lola's, despite it being within hopping distance of my flat. I thought it kind of serendipitous that Glas then opened on the old Lola's site. They're in their first week of business, so are offering 50% off the food bill, which was a very pleasant surprise at the end of last night's very pleasant meal with the lovely Alan Dinlion.

I love the room and the Scandi makeover has make it even cuter. I can't imagine anything nicer than sitting in the window seat, watching the tossers of Foxtons out-quiff one another and the children of Islington happy-slapping to their hearts content. OK, so nice room, shame about the vista.

The menu is split into hot and cold dishes, and our waitress suggested we have three cold and two hot. Having never eaten Swedish food before (I'm assuming the Ikea canteen doesn't count) we were guided by our waitress. So we sat back and waited, and waited, for our herring three ways, toast Pelle Jansen and smoken reindeer to arrive. OK, so the kitchen might need a little while to bed in.

It was well worth the wait though and we had some very good caraway studded hard bread with butter to keep us company. I'm very new to herring, having spent most of my life believing (for no good reason) that I wouldn't like it. So I got a bit excited to try three new presentations in one night. My favourite was a slightly changed version of a dish from the old Glas, with vodka and citrus, being smooth, creamy, fishy and citrusy all at once, although the matjes, cured over sandalwood, was also intoxicating. The toast Pelle Jansen, think venison carpaccio on toast, with a beautiful raw egg to smear over, is not for the faint-hearted, but the meat was sweet and gamey and too good to miss. Reindeer with wild mushroom pannacotta was less successful, which was a shame because the reindeer meat is a real treat, but the pannacotta left us wondering what was in it and what was going on. Reminded me a bit of that vegetarian pate you can get from Holland and Barratt.

Mains were utterly unnecessary after those delights. But we had a half bottle of wine left and we'd ordered, so we soldiered on. The vegetarian spatzle was proof that a life without meat is merely a joyless existence and, like most things, would have benefited from a couple of rashers of bacon. Meatballs with mash and lingenberries is a treat of a wintery dish, but is just meatballs and mash at the end of the day. OK, so the cold dishes, on last night's showing, are nicer than the mains.

I loved Glas. I loved the waitresses, the wee willie winkie candle on our table, the herring and the meat. It's charming, cute and probably the most genuinely different offering in London at the moment.

Caribbean Dream

2006-10-01T07:35:00.000-06:00

So my biggest adventure in the past two weeks happened last Thursday when I tootled down to Brixton to sit on David's sofa, rather than my own. A girl needs variety in her life.

We stopped off at Bamboula, a local Caribbean restaurant, for some spicy sustenance to see us through a hard afternoon of "Diagnosis Murder". I'd been craving some goat curry since I returned from Edinburgh, having had an amazing meal at Coyaba. That was my first experience of Jamaican food in the UK, and it eclipsed any Caribbean food I'd eaten in the Caribbean. Chef Ras Mahlon has been cooking for over 20 years and Coyaba is Scotland's only Jamaican restaurant. They purchase all of the organic goat that Scotland produces, and create the richest, spiciest of curries from it. Brixton's Bamboula could learn a bit from Coyaba's sourcing; my jerk chicken could have been jerk turkey given the size, but at £8 for a half chicken, plus plaintain and rice and peas, you certainly get a lot for your money. Me being me, I'd rather have less and know that the chicken had had a happy life.

Both restaurants serve salt fish and ackee, again with Coyaba edging ahead in terms of execution. That said, both get the spicing levels just right and us lucky customers get a plate of creamy, dreamy, fishy spiciness. The ackee is soft, almost like scrambled eggs and it's just perfect with the salt fish and spices.

Bamboula wins the plantain round, serving thick fried slices, that were scarfed down quick as you like. The goat curry deserves note too, even though we doubt it was organic, goat isn't intensively reared and hence a more ethical choice. It's a shame the calalloo rice wasn't on that day; but the rice and peas were OK, if perhaps a little too starchy.

So, two restaurants, at opposite ends of the country, serving food that leaves your tummy sizzling for the rest of the day. Coyaba's the better restaurant, with carefully sourced food, delivered at a Caribbean pace, but Bamboula's certainly worth a visit if you're in Brixton.

Lahore Karahi, Tooting

2006-09-27T13:53:00.001-06:00

My last meal before the famous Primark funny turn and two weeks in isolation.

Lahore Tooting is a shabby looking cafe style Pakistani restaurant. If you thought that Tayyabs was a bit scruffy looking, you probably don't want to eat here. I have to be dragged past if we're not planning to eat here, salivating and begging to be allowed a green chilli paratha.

We started with some shammi kebabs, having forgotten that I prefer their sheekh ones. These patties are just a bit too perfumed for me, and I found them a little dry. Still, my mango lassi cheered me up and Emu was happy enough to eat all of the kebabs herself.

We had my favourite curry, bitter gourd with mutton in a sizzling karahi, along with some sag aloo, haleem and lots of chilli paratha. I love the flavour of bitter gourd, and you don't see it a huge amount so it's always ordered when it's there. I don't understand why bitter flavours aren't more popular in food. The bitterness is a delicious counterpoint to the rich, spicy sauce and the melting mutton. Amazing.

As good were the chilli paratha but I was slightly let down by the haleem. This dish is very popular during Ramadan as the mixture of wheat berries, spices, ghee and meat is very calorific and hence a good way to break the daily fast. It was just a bit sludgey for my taste.

The bill was about £15. Utterly unreal prices for really tasty food.

Risotto! Risotto!

2006-09-27T13:36:00.000-06:00

So today's supper choice was a bit like Ready Steady Cook. I'd immed one of my colleagues (I'm now so bored I bother my colleagues at work for stimulation) for inspiration. A quick trawl through my fridge revealed that I had a butternut squash that I wanted to use up, and I had a vague recollection of a squash risotto on Celebrity Masterchef.

So, I made a basic white risotto with an onion, some thyme and vegetable stock. Chicken would have been preferable, but there was none around. While the risotto was cooking I roasted some little dice of butternut squash in olive oil, again with some thyme. They took about 15 minutes.

Once the risotto was ready I stirred in some roquefort, the squash dice and let it all sit for a couple of minutes. I finished everything off with a bit more cheese (that in truth it didn't need) and some toasted pine nuts.

It was pretty bloody delicious, although I'm keen to do a vertical risotto rice tasting soon. I'm not convinced by the carnaroli from Tescos that I have been using. It's not as creamy as I would like.

There was also quite a lot of squash that didn't want to be cut into dice, so I roasted that too, cooked up some onion in the left over risotto stock, added a bag of spinach, some cumin and, voila, I have a roasted squash and spinach soup for tomorrow.

Shana Tova (belatedly)

2006-09-26T07:03:00.000-06:00

I made hallah for Rosh Hashana on Saturday. I followed the recipe from Claudia Roden's "The Book of Jewish Food", adding some raisins and shaping into new year rounds. It was amazingly delicious and I am keen to have a go at brioche. I made four loaves in all, but the last one wasn't quite as risen as the others. Still tasted good though.

Bri now thinks I have magical powers.

Illin'

2006-09-20T11:17:00.000-06:00

So after several weeks of not feeling very well, it would appear I have shingles. Am currently taking root on my sofa, convalescing. I'd completely forgotten that word, but was reminded of it by the masseuse who came by this morning to try and get some movement back into my limbs.

I have been consoling myself with lots of chicken soup, daytime TV and sleep. Hopefully I'll get round to writing about the dim sum I had on Friday and the great Pakistani meal I had over the weekend while I am off.

Otherwise it's just going to be pictures of poaching chicken and my lovely new bear slippers for the time being.

L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, London

2006-09-13T14:26:00.000-06:00

The opening of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon has had the UK food scene's knickers in a twist. Mentioned on the BBC news, every food forum gasping for photos, reservations hard to come by. Is it worth it?

Having chosen to eat at Robuchon at the Mansion in Vegas earlier this year over their branch of L'Atelier, I was excited to try the less formal experience. So, having had a great day at work I deserved a glass of pink champagne and anticipating a tough day the next, I needed mash potato. Specifically, I needed Robuchon's mash potato, a dish close to my heart, being 50% butter and 50% potato. Listen carefully and you'll hear the sound of my arteries hardening for the rest of this report.

So what does L'Atelier bring to the London dining scene? Well, it's good to see a high-end restaurant that isn't owned by Gordon Ramsey, great to see a place where you don't need a reservation and excellent to see a room that's buzzing, rather than a cathedral to gastronomy.

The menu is extensive and roughly split into portions of three different sizes; tapas, starter and main. Sadly the bucket of mash didn't seem to be on that night, so I satisfied myself with "Tomate", "Palourdes", "Noix de Saint Jaques" and "La Caille" (served with mash). Things didn't get off to a good start. "Tomate" is gazpacho, but imagine peppery, watered-down supermarket ketchup and you get the idea. It was left after two mouthfuls. The clams were sent back, seeing as they had been cooked for about 45 minutes too long. I was starting to wonder what the Chef of the Century was up to. But then things got interesting...There was a huge apology and then "Langoustine" arrived. One lone, perfect langoustine, wrapped in the lightest pastry and fried. Things were looking up. Next, while they were sorting out the clams, the most beautiful mackerel tarte. Imagine the lightest filo pastry, topped with a tomato concasse and layered with sashimi thin mackerel, just warmed by the pastry. Add some parmesan and olives and you have a dish that's the perfect expression of umami.

"Noix de Saint Jacques" is a single scallop with citrus butter and seaweed flecks. But at £9 you could start to wonder about the quantity to quality ratio. I only ever worry about the cost of food when it's cheap and this was a very good scallop, cooked perfectly and just quivering in the centre. So I shan't complain. The clams re-appeared, much plumper, but no more than the sum of their parts.

And then the mash came. I'll gloss over the quail (although it's very good, especially the breast piece, stuffed with foie gras) and get to the point. This is the best mash potato you will ever eat. I think that a look of rapture must have spread across my face because the chap who was milling around behind the counter (who I was told was Robouchon, but I'm not sure) came over to chat. He took my critisism that the truffles were really sub-par and added nothing to the dish well. And then brought me over a small le creuset dish of the stuff. It might have been to shut me up (my French is schoolgirl level these days and my accent horrid) but I like to think that he just knows another mash potato fiend when he sees one. So I just sat there, spooning this glossy, creamy, unctuous puree into my mouth and thinking of a variety of uses for it. None of them publishable here.

What would Patti do?

2006-09-13T13:52:00.000-06:00

Since I saw Patti Smith's "The Coral Sea" at Meltdown last year, I'd re-evaluated my rules governing cool. I find myself wondering "what would Patti do?" especially when faced with the opportunity to join in, especially when asked to sing along at gigs. I generally keep my mouth shut. So imagine my surprise when my hero asks us to sing along with the chorus to her new song about Guantanamo Bay.

A crisis. "What would Patti do?" I kept my mouth shut, and my chance to claim backing vocals on a Patti Smith track passes me by.

Being the kind of girl who hyperventilates at the mention of My Bloody Valentine, I wasn't going to miss the reprise of Smith's collaboration with the reclusive Kevin Shields. "The Coral Sea" is an elegy to Smith's lover/collaborator Robert Maplethorpe, who would have been 60 this year. Last year's performance moved me to tears and got a standing ovation.

But first a chance to hear some of Smith's less well known songs and a couple of new ones. Most impressive was "Qana", a mother's response to the children killed in the Lebanon, made all the more personal by her introduction and stories about her own children. Supported by the incredible Giovanni Solima on cello, Tony Shanaban on piano and bass and (yes!) Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, Smith showed off her incredible voice and proved that, despite being unfashionable, the protest song is alive and well.

But onto the main course and what we all came for. Shield's shuffled on stage, turned his guitar to 11 and, recalling his MBV days, wrapped the Queen Elizabeth Hall in a wall of feedback. Smith stood, arms spread, screaming "It's meant to be loud, it's meant to be uncomfortable" as Shields added layer up layer of noise and effects to the squirling sound. One minute it was like cats skittering down glass, next like the brewing of a terrible storm. Then there's "that sound", that almost bankrupted Creation records, that shimmers and simmers and screws with your solar plexus.

I was left feeling like a wet rag, wrung out and left to dry as Smith lay down and Shields turned off his guitar. This was an amazing night.

L'Enclume (December 2004)

2006-09-11T03:34:00.000-06:00

We got to chatting about L'Enclume over lunch at Arpege. Which reminded me I ought to go back there...

The view over the bay as you travel towards Grange Over Sands, the closest station to L’Enclume, is breathtaking as only nature can be. I’d forgotten we had scenery in England. From my seat the train track seemed to rise from the water, curving away from land on both sides with an almost supernatural aspect. Even if you have a car, leave it at home, because the journey, for me, was a huge part of my L’Enclume experience. Chef Simon Rogan later talked to me about how he’s glad that he didn’t originally open in Brighton as “this is food from nature” and that he would be “uncomfortable” cooking his food in an “urban environment”. The scenery around the restaurant, the green, the bay and the misty hills all adds to create a feeling that you’re leaving the man made world behind and stepping into a completely different realm.

The feeling of otherworldliness was a broken on my cab journey to Cartmel. All isn’t well as it could be in the village. Relations between L’Enclume and Rogan are tense with the villagers feeling that the restaurant isn’t good value for money and Rogan feeling that he’s not supported locally. It makes a strange dynamic for visitors; I received nothing but the warmest welcome from everyone I met, but I did get the feeling that most people thought I was completely insane to travel from London just to eat in a restaurant. What’s strange, to me at least, is that L’Enclume is exceptionally good value and the food, although innovative and sometimes sublime, is very accessible and cooked & served with such passion that even someone who’s happiest with steak and chips could be delighted.

Much has been made of who influences Rogan. But he was keen to set the record straight that when it comes to Chefs; Veyrat has his heart. I have a sense of a Saul of the road to Damascus type conversion for Rogan after eating here and certainly this evangelical zeal came through when we spoke. He’s a driven man, irked by the UK’s need to compartmentalise what he cooks, the lack of support from locals and being ignored by Michelin in 2004. But I didn’t eat a meal created in anger. I ate a meal that’s all about harmony and balance, a meal that is probably the most finely balanced degustation menu I’ve ever eaten. Rogan conjures with his ingredients and was able, over the 20 courses I ate, to take a multitude of preparations and flavours and tie them together into a cohesive whole. He pulls flavours that you would expect in desert forward into the meal by serving a perfect piece of John Dory alongside bergamot aromas and swirls of sticky caramel that had been taken to the very edge of caramelisation. Coming after a less successful dish of brill cooked in clay that smelled like my school’s artlab and before two perfect slices of loin of lamb with cumin bouillion and grains of paradise that offered up flavours of citrus, cardamom and pepper and wafted Moorish scents into the dining room, the John Dory was a sensory reminder of what was to come, as well as an outstanding dish in its own right.

There’s something primal about L’Enclume. This isn’t intellectual, show-off food that appeals to the head. It’s about nourishment and awakening; my meal sated my hunger, but also stimulated my eyes, nose and tongue. I tried flavours I had never or rarely eaten before; coltsfoot, myrhh, eucalyptus, perilla, but that shared a strange aspect to their flavour profile, all of them are haunting, resonant flavours. My favourite dish of the night was cubes from land and sea with eucalyptus hollandaise, a trinity of lobster, sweetbreads and girolles, napped with a verdantly green sauce. The three major ingredients all had a meaty textural similarity that heightened the incredible sweet/herbal flavour of the dish that remained long on the palate. It was unlike anything I’d eaten before, a texture dish that relied on all textures being similar to express flavour.

The innovation at L’Enclume comes from techniques and presentation. The unusual ingredients are generally from nature so it’s technically incorrect to describe them as innovations. They’re revivals. There were a few foams, most successful of which was a strawberry mousse foam that sat rigid in a perfect cube of the plate. A proper foam, if you like, not one of these wannabee foams that squirls all over the plate. This was an upright, stiff upper lip English military foam that literally stood to attention. “Virtual tomato” was a scoop of snow-like tomato, the texture of which just vanished when I closed my lips leaving behind the ghost of a tomato flavour. It didn’t absorb, it didn’t melt, there was no osmosis. It’s the Harry Houdini of the tomato world. Imagine the nitro and green tea mousse from the Fat Duck, but take away the texture. Dishes felt more three dimensional than at any other restaurant I’ve eaten at. A beautiful pyramid of foie gras, a cube of foie gras with black truffles, coated and deep fried, a perfect quenelle of foie gras ice cream go together to make up “Cubism in Foie Gras, two cold, one hot, cantaloupe, fragrant myrhh, almond cake” a dish that literally rises up out of plate, almost too beautifully composed to eat. Rogan can’t just cook food, he’s amazingly artistic, using contrasting colour and flavour to animate his food.

So what’s wrong with L’Enclume? The service needs work and the wine pairings were pretty poor. I know almost nothing about wine so I like to leave the choices in the hands of the sommelier. There were no pairings available the night I ate there, but a new restaurant manager is joining soon so I would guess this would change. It will be hard for Rogan to get all the stars he wants if the wine service isn’t as inspiring as the food. As it was I drank a fairly mediocre glass of champagne (there was no choice on offer) a half bottle of Sancerre that killed the “Half soft and scrambled eggs, soy, wasabi, smoked cod froth” and was killed by at least two other dishes. A glass of Chilean Pinot Noir worked well with my lamb and carried me through nicely to the cheeseboard that’s nurtured and loved by Mary, one of the most experienced servers there and someone with such an obvious passion for L’Enclume and cheese it almost brought a tear to my eye. The rest of the service was technically adequate, no more so, but always sweet and charming. I’ll forgive a lot of things if they’re done with passion and care.

L’Enclume has been a sleeping giant of the English restaurant scene for too long and he’ll be recognised by Michelin this year. This is, at the very least, two star food. Most appealing to me though was that this is a really English restaurant, despite the fact they have an all French cheeseboard, with a spirit unlike anywhere else I’ve eaten in the UK. L’Enclume isn’t part of a movement. And I loved it all the more for that.