Tempura Hajime lives!

Tempura Hajime
60 Park Street, South Melbourne (map)
9696 0051


To mangle a perfectly good Mark Twain quote: rumours of Tempura Hajime's closure have been somewhat exaggerated, despite what you may have heard on twitter or other avenues of industry gossip. I can however confirm that your final opportunity to sample owner/chef Daisuke Miyamoto's tempura wizardry at Tempura Hajime is 13 March 2010. The restaurant will then reopen on 15 March 2010 with its new owner (who, I am assured, is also an excellent chef) at the helm. But if you want to say goodbye to Daisuke and Noriko before they move back to Japan, get in quick and make a booking for one night over the next seven weeks!


Even when you've got your eyes peeled because you know the nondescript entrance is easily missed, you'll still walk past the door to Tempura Hajime the first time. Upon arrival you are ushered into the shadowy little waiting room where you can sit back on a sofa and order a drink.

The reason you need to wait? Because there are only 12 seats in the restaurant - it's a one man show with Daisuke doing all the preparation and cooking before your eyes, serving six diners at a time and just 12 diners per night. The sittings are staggered accordingly.


The menu is fixed, $72 per person. As the name suggests, Tempura Hajime is a tempura counter restaurant and so a degustation of battered, fried morsels awaits. But first, an appetiser of cucumber and minced chicken in a miso-sesame dressing, and sashimi.


Not only was the ocean trout and kingfish sashimi ridiculously fresh, it was served with fresh wasabi. Love.


Daisuke uses three oils to make his tempura: soy bean oil, tea oil and sesame oil. Despite the fact that the majority of the menu is deep fried, it tastes wonderfully light and fresh and pure, and not at all greasy - the proof being in how little oil stains the paper on the serving plate. You can take it from me that all of the following dishes were SUBLIME.


And now for the food porn tempura photos! I think they speak for themselves. Prawn.


Asparagus. Sweet potato.


Tuna and avocado wrapped in nori, served with Japanese mayonnaise and teriyaki sauce.


Corn. John Dory.


Sea urchin wrapped in nori and scallop.


One of my dining companions, that Jess Ho, photographing the tempura oyster for her blog.


Minced prawn stuffed into a mushroom. Minced chicken stuffed in eggplant.


After the tempura, the meal is bulked out with a serve of donburi - on the night we went, we had a delicious kakiagedon.


My other dining companions were knocking back the sake but I decided to grab some chilled umeshu plum wine, which was served by Noriko, Daisuke's lovely wife who runs the front of house. When she indulged and praised my attempts to speak Japanese, I knew I was smitten.


Dessert was a beautifully simple yoghurt panna cotta drizzled with Cointreau and served with a few grapes.


In short, I adored the Tempura Hajime experience and thoroughly recommend it. Get down there!

dine out... help out - StreetSmart Australia

You may already have read about it on Ed's blog, but I wanted to draw your attention to the StreetSmart campaign running from 9 November - 24 December 2009. StreetSmart is a charity that supports and strengthens smaller, grassroots community organisations helping the homeless.

A bit more about the campaign, quoting from the StreetSmart Australia website:

For the six weeks in the lead-up to Christmas, StreetSmart partners with restaurants to ask diners to make a small donation to StreetSmart on their bill. Every table is asked to add $2 or more to their bill, not even the price of a coffee or mineral water. It’s a simple idea that adds up to a big impact on the lives of people who are homeless.

So when you are planning a night out think about taking a simple action and book at a StreetSmart participating restaurant. While you are there encourage your fellow diners to dig deep and leave your donation on your bill. Be it meeting up with friends, family or an office or business function we need you to get involved.

Tipping:
Please remember that your donation should not replace any tip you would usually leave, we want you to consider any donation over and above your tip and support the staff and restaurants who are supporting us.

100% of your donation goes to work:
StreetSmart operational expenses are funded through sponsorship partners allowing us to guarantee to the community that 100% of your donations are distributed directly to charity recipients.


One of the great things about the StreetSmart campaign is that it helps smaller organisations that rarely receive extra funding and often lack the resources to fundraise or access the networks for grants and funding. You can learn more about the initiatives that the funding helped since its Australian inception in 2003 here.

A full list of restaurants participating in 2009 is here.

Of the participating restaurants, these are the ones I've reviewed (with links to my reviews):
Anada, 197 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
Birdman Eating, 238 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
**newly participating** Cumulus Inc, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Cutler and Co, 55-57 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
ezard, 187 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Gingerboy, 27-29 Crossley Street, Melbourne
Ladro, 224 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
Laksa Me, 1/16 Liverpool Street, Melbourne
Longrain, 44 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne
Paladarr Thai Issan, 7 Rowe Street, Alphington
Panama Dining Room, 3/231 Smith Street, Fitzroy
Portello Rosso, 15 Warburton Lane, Melbourne
Provenance, 288 Smith Street, Collingwood
Red Spice Road, 27 McKillop St, Melbourne
St Ali 12-18 Yarra Place, South Melbourne
St Jude's Cellars, 389-391 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
And in Noosa:
River House, 301 Weyba Road, Noosaville
Wasabi, 2 Quamby Place, Noosa Sound

If you're planning a meal out in the next six weeks, I urge you to consider choosing one of these (or one of the other participating restaurants) and donating to the campaign. I'm planning on visiting a few of the ones I haven't been to yet (at this stage I'm most interested in checking out Libertine and The Deanery, but am open to suggestions - feel free to leave a comment nominating your favourite restaurant on the list), and will write them up on the blog.

If you work in a restaurant that would like to participate in the campaign (and don't worry, it's not too late to join), find more info here. Let me know if you join the campaign, and I'll edit this post to include your details. I'm also happy to promote the details of any other restaurants already participating in the campaign that I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet.

If you're a food blogger and would like to help promote the campaign, Ed has plenty of great ideas on his related post.

You can also donate directly to the campaign here.

To stay updated on StreetSmart news and events, follow @StreetSmartAust on Twitter or join its Facebook group.

* * * * *
Oh, and speaking of Facebook: there's now a Facebook page for Melbourne Gastronome. If you're a fan, why not Become a Fan? As well as sending a notification when the blog is updated, I'll also be writing the occasional silly note on the Facebook page wall - and only on the Facebook page wall - about blog-related trivia (such as the one I wrote this week entitled "PR: how to irritate a food blogger while trying to score free advertising on their blog for the product you're flogging").

St Ali: specialty coffee cupping with Slightly Intense Thirty-Something Metrosexuals

St Ali
12-18 Yarra Place, South Melbourne (map)
9686 2900


A few weeks ago I decided to give South Melbourne Market a visit, and found myself wandering around the suburb wondering where I should grab a quick bite of lunch. A flick of the Twitter (I'm here, if you're into that sort of thing) and within moments Jack had suggested St Ali. Of course! I'd been meaning to go there for ages.


Of course you all know that St Ali is famous for its coffee. I'd heard mixed reports on the food but let me tell you that the salad ($14.50) I had of roast eggplant, caramelised walnuts and goats cheese, served with a pomegranate dressing and warmed flat bread, was bloody wonderful (so much so that it inspired me to make my own warm salad the following night with pieces of cumin/sumac coated lamb, spinach leaves, marinated strips of capsicum, goats cheese and pine nuts - I'd hunted all around the market for caramelised walnuts, but to no avail). Damn tasty!


St Ali has a casually bright 'n breezy, open workshop sort of feel to it, which is unsurprising given all the coffee gadgetry, roasters and sacks of beans on display.

In the latest Cheap Eats guide "coffeehouses" has been added as a category in the index, along with "creperies", "chinese" etc. The listed coffeehouses are Auction Rooms, Dibella Coffee Roasting Warehouse, Liar Liar and St Ali. Given the growing interest in good coffee, I'll be interested to see if there are any more listed in next year's edition.


"But Claire, what about the Slightly Intense Thirty-Something Metrosexuals?" I hear you ask. Well a nice foodie PR lady invited me to attend a specialty coffee cupping evening at St Ali, hosted last week by St Ali and Melbourne Coffee Merchants and featuring a presentation by Stephen Hurst and followed by a cupping session.

Stephen Hurst is the founder of Mercanta, a London-based specialty coffee company. He explained the history of Mercanta, the coffee market over the last 30 years and the Cup of Excellence, an annual competition to find the very very best coffees in the world (click on the link and read about it, it's an interesting concept). In discussing his work and fielding questions, he spoke with unaffected ease and clearly evident passion. Stephen was also happy to chat for quite some time with three Melbourne food bloggers (Jack and Sarah were there too) about blogs and how the internet is shaping wider coffee appreciation and the coffee industry as a whole.


Apart from the three of us, the crowd appeared to be made up mostly of coffee industry types. As the preparations for the cupping began I was feeling pretty out of my depth given my minimal coffee knowledge, but luckily my friend Andrew from Auction Rooms was also there, and he kindly offered to guide me through the cupping. I observed to him that there was definitely a coffee industry type: slightly intense thirty-something metrosexuals, if the rest of the crowd was anything to go by. Not that I have anything against slightly intense thirty-something metrosexuals.


"And what is cupping?", I hear some of you ask. Matt from Perth blog Abstract Gourmet gave the following explanation (reprinted with gracious permission here):

Cupping is the traditional method for breaking down the flavour profiles of brewed coffee. You roast a bunch of coffee to a certain level (generally lighter than for espresso), grind it to a specific coarseness, and then let it steep in hot water (not boiling) for a set period of time. Then breaking through the crust of grinds on the top and inhaling deeply the aromas of the brew, and drawing out as much detail as you can about the nose, before slurping it as you would if you were tasting wine. Aerating the coffee across your palate and assessing the acidity, body, and length of finish etc.


It was a blind tasting - two cups each of ten different kinds of coffee. I think it was four minutes after the hot water was added (a timer was involved) that we were encouraged to break the crusts that had formed on top. Andy showed me how to do it, inhaling the aroma as one pushed the flotsam away with a spoon and scooped it out of the cup.

Then we all started slowly circling the table in a clockwise direction, taking a spoonful of each coffee and slurping it up violently so that the coffee became oxygenated at the moment it hit the palate (as a young winemaking student years ago I learned in Sensory Studies that this intake of oxygen opens up the flavour compounds in the liquid and lets you experience the flavour more fully). Although I tried, I couldn't slurp as loudly as the SITSMs.



I'm afraid I didn't take any tasting notes, but these are the coffees we cupped (thanks to Jack for emailing me the list):
1. Siberia (El Salvador)
2. Kalosi (Sulawesi)
3. Harrar (Ethiopia)
4. Gethumbwini (Kenya)
5. El Limoncillo (Nicaragua)
6. La Perla (Guatemala)
7. La Fany 100% Bourbon (also El Salvador)
8. Takengon (Aceh)
9. Cachoeira da Grama 100% Yellow Canario (Brazil)
10. El Bosque (also Guatemala)


I was particularly taken with the blueberry flavour of the Harrar and the "brightness" of the Kenyan (thanks to Andy for supplying me with the proper vocab). Having done so many wine tastings in my time, it was fascinating for me to attend the coffee equivalent, and to gain a little insight into the world of specialty coffees. I paid the price though - because nobody at our table was spitting I too swallowed every sip of coffee, so came home absolutely bouncing off the walls. DJ had a good laugh at my over-caffeinated expense but it was no laughing matter: I didn't get to sleep until about 4:30am!


Update (18/9/9): You can read about St Ali's new South Yarra outpost here.