Fortnightly round-up (28 September)

It's been a while since the last installment of these Fortnightly(-in-name-only) Round-up posts, so I'm going to ease my way back into it by posting some happy snaps of food highlights that I've had about town since my return from Singapore and Hong Kong (related posts coming soon, honest).

On my morning coffee run about a month ago, I noticed that the Japanese restaurant at 17 Liverpool Street formerly known as Aka Tombo had re-opened as Shimbashi Soba & Sake Bar, and the chef was standing in the front window making soba by hand - kneading, rolling and chopping. Chef Taka-san makes their soba fresh from organic ingredients every morning, and again in the afternoon if supplies are running low. Read Lauren's blog post on Footscray Food Blog for a more detailed description of the process.

My favourite way to eat Shimbashi's soba is as soba seiro, served chilled on a mat alongside spring onions, wasabi and a dipping sauce known as tsuyu. At the end of the meal be sure to ask for the soba-yu (the liquid the soba have been cooked in): add it to the leftover tsuyu and drink it like a soup.




While we're talking Japanese food: I've written before about my love of the tsuke sashimi salad at Purple Peanuts on Collins Street. What I discovered recently is that I like it even better with brown rice ($1 surcharge) instead of white. Their house-made matcha chocolate is also very very good, the green tea tannins nicely balancing out the white chocolate sweetness.


A sensational salad of burrata, broad beans, olives and mint that I was lucky enough to enjoy at my aunt Paola's house a few weeks ago (recipe on her blog Italy on my Mind).


One of the new dishes on the Dainty Sichuan menu is the cumin chilli rabbit, a variant on the cumin lamb slices (my favourite Dainty dish, narrowly beating the fish flavoured eggplant). As delicious as the rabbit was, the fiddliness with bunny bones means I'll be back on the lamb slices next time. We also braved the dish entitled "boiling fish in golden basin" for the first time: while it arrived looking completely TERRIFYING, bubbling like magma from Mount Doom, the slices of fish that were sieved out turned out to have a surprisingly mild and delicate - well, relatively speaking - flavour. Recommended!


Walk, don't run, to Chin Chin to try their newest dessert: coconut sago with sweetcorn ice cream, praline and puffed wild rice.


The menu at Neapoli, Con Christopoulos' latest venture, is a mash-up that veers wildly from continent to continent: brown rice nori rolls sit alongside spanakopita, curries, chilli con carne, ceviche, tempura and rabbit stifado. I can however vouch for their epic Reuben, and am glad to see it featured in Epicure's recent list of Melbourne venues serving the increasingly popular sandwich.


The dumplings at I Love Dumplings on Bridge Road are good. Really good. Their Urbanspoon entry has the predictable whinges about vague waitresses and long waits for orders so I went there on Sunday night expecting lousy service, but was pleasantly surprised. Thanks to our American visitors Dan and Claire for finding this place and telling me about it!


And thanks also to Dan and Claire for sharing with me their favourite way to cook Brussels sprouts: think bacon, lime and sriracha. Here's a recipe on The Paupered Chef for this method, which is in turn based on a David Chang recipe in GQ. I made the sprouts pictured below last night, and while they may not be pretty let me assure you that they're ridiculously tasty.


Links of Note:

- "Reviewing restaurants is a bit like being put out to stud: the basic activity involved may be pleasurable, but when you have to do it, and with whom you're told, it loses a lot of its appeal." Andrew Colman on whether restaurant critics are an endangered species.

- Two cute cakes: a Tetris cake with macarons on Raspberri Cupcakes (love the animated gif), and a polka dot cake on Once Upon a Pedestal.

- Essjay sends depressing dispatches from the Royal Melbourne Show Baking Competition, where judges advocate using custard powder and a past winner advises others to use supermarket eggs instead of free range eggs, because "some judges don't like yellow sponges".

- Stickifingers on supermarket vs free range eggs.

- "It’s like a miniaturization of all my favorite cities: Tokyo and Seoul and New York and Los Angeles, all in one." Roy Choi on why he loves Melbourne.

- Craft beer gaining traction in Paris: love the look of this beautiful shop in Montmartre.

- My favourite Sydney food blog The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry now has its own podcasts! Check them out, people...

- Has Tasmania reached a [culinary] tipping point? Steve Cumper offers a chef's perspective.

- Cook Republic on 10 social and community websites to drive traffic to your food blog. I've never used any of them, apart from tinkering with Pinterest for personal, non-Melbourne Gastronome purposes, but they may be of interest for other food bloggers (especially those with recipe blogs).

- Baristas vs customers: how we can all get along.

'The Changing Menu' panel and visiting 'Gusto! A Culinary History of Victoria'

Hihou. *swoon*
A quick bit of self-promotion: next Thursday I'm speaking on a panel that Hilary McNevin has convened and will be chairing, entitled The Changing Menu, discussing Victoria's diverse dining scene. The other panellists will be The Age senior food writer Richard Cornish and restaurateurs Simon Denton (Izakaya Den, Nama Nama and my new favourite bar in Melbourne, Hihou) and Dan Wilson (Huxtable, Huxtaburger - and Huxtaburger II opening soon in the CBD!).

The Changing Menu panel is on Thursday 27 September, 6:00-7:15pm at the State Library of Victoria (see SLV page for full details). The panel is FREE, but booking is strongly advised, as seats are filling fast.

Alain Chapel, Jacques Reymond, Mietta O'Donnell (Rennie Ellis, gelatin silver photograph, 1987)
The panel has been organised as a side event by the State Library of Victoria in honour of their exhibition Gusto! A Culinary History of Victoria. Exhibition blurb:
Savour the rich culinary history of Victoria in this free exhibition, featuring gastronomic treasures from our collections – from the first Australian cookbook, published in 1864, to an actual World War I army biscuit.
Gusto! explores Victoria's historic and contemporary culinary landscape, covering subjects such as the history of viticulture, Indigenous foods, sustainable food practices, fine dining and food rationing, and also features the fascinating stories of significant Victorian culinary figures including Jacques Reymond, Rita Erlich, Guy Grossi and Stephanie Alexander.

I went on a tour of the exhibition last week with curator Tracey Judd Iva and Melbourne food legend Rita Erlich, and absolutely loved it (yes it includes an actual army biscuit from 1914!). I particularly loved seeing the 70s and 80s menus of Melbourne fine dining restaurants, donated from Rita Erlich's own collection - the version of the Florentino menu without prices (ie, the menu "for ladies") was a particular eye-opener. I also loved that the exhibition includes both the Peter Wegner portrait of Jacques Reymond (a finalist in the 2004 Archibald Prize) and the knife bag that belonged to Jacques' grandfather and which features prominently in the portrait.

The exhibition is also FREE and on until April 2013, so go see it!

Booze: the shadow over our land (Melbourne, Victorian Prohibition League, c 1930)
Inspired by the exhibition, I went to the Hill of Content and bought a copy of Rita's new book Melbourne by Menu: A memoir of Melbourne's restaurant revolution through the 1980s, which I am currently working my way through. Loving it so far.

Victoria Market, Melbourne (Ruth Maddison, gelatin silver photograph, 1984)

The Brix, revisited

The Brix
Rear 412 Brunswick Street (cnr Westgarth St), Fitzroy (map)
9417 6114 (phone bookings taken)
Open lunch Friday & Saturday, dinner Tuesday to Saturday
website


I'm moving house on Monday, so since my trip to Hong Kong and an intense week of movie-going at MIFF (11 films in 8 days!) my life is a blur of packing boxes, utilities disconnections and mail redirection.

But I'm coming up for air to publish a post about The Brix, the Fitzroy restaurant modelled loosely on Le Chateaubriand in Paris. I wrote about The Brix shortly after it first opened a year ago, and I was saddened to read in this week's Espresso column in Epicure that the restaurant is now on the market. It's been a difficult journey for co-owners Emma O'Mara and Keir Vaughan: they lost their head chef, sous chef and pastry chef in February and were forced to close for a week or two, but then reopened with new head chef Ashly Hicks (who came down from Brisbane's Buffalo Club). I dined at The Brix last month with a friend and had a sublime meal - I'm afraid I've only got time to post the photos with brief descriptions, but I urge you to get down there while you've still got the chance and enjoy the set menu.


There's an à la carte bistrot menu, but the best option is definitely the five course set menu ($90, or $70 for vegetarian if you give them notice). The five course set menu comes with an amuse and a cleanser, and there's also an optional additional cheese course (when my friend and I dined there, the cheese course was comped). The dishes were certainly intricate as you can see below, but they never felt fussy or overworked.


The amuse-bouche was a miniature sandwich of pain d’épices (similar to gingerbread) filled with duck parfait and topped with dabs of rhubarb juice gel and espresso gel and a few mache and baby coriander leaves.


The first course was a riot of purple, featuring venison that had been cured for 24 hours, dried for seven days and then dehydrated. There was also a thin slice of raw venison, beetroots cooked in juniper salt, oven roasted and raw, juiced red cabbage foam, candied chilli, Ossau-Iratty, chickpeas and red cabbage leaf.


The second course consisted of South Australian squid shaved and confit in hazelnut oil, together with fried squid tentacles, variations of cauliflower (juice, a charcoaled floret, slow roasted, dehydrated then thinly sliced), lardo, pig's ears, roasted squid powder and parsley oil.


The third course was Bundarra Berkshires pork shoulder with celeriac cooked in a salt crush and coated in ash (from a vine branch), thin sheets of roasted celeriac, pickled celeriac, a celeriac ribbon boiled in chicken stock, burnt onion juice, slow roasted onion petals, caramelised onion paper and onion flowers.


The fourth course was Aylesbury duck breast (cooked sous vide at 58 degrees for 45 minutes) with rendered fat, roasted parsnip, a parsnip and vanilla puree, a celery juice gel, buttered celery, crisped chestnuts and duck sauce.


Then out came a "cucumber ice" palate cleanser: a gin and tonic foam made from Tanqueray and tonic water. The garnish was compressed cucumber dusted with dill pollen and juniper salt.


The cheese course that was comped: Langres rolled in dried mushroom powder, fresh walnuts, fried and raw enoki mushrooms, raw pine mushrooms and crisped leek roots. It came with a mushroom consommé, which was poured at the table.


The dessert course was a chocolate mousse made from 66% Valrhona chocolate, served with grapefruit gel and the most beautiful candied grapefruit wheel. There was also a house-made buttermilk and vanilla purée, toasted meringues, lychee and a sprinkling of chocolate cookie crumbs.


And just when we thought it was all over red rover, out came an additional sweet snack: sensational pumpkin doughnuts in a bag! They were made from a sweet pumpkin and beurre noisette purée, rolled in candied seeds and nuts and sprinkled with cumin. Wee bottles of vanilla and malt milkshake with red and white stripey straws were an additional playful touch.

Fortnightly round-up (July 20)

Happy Friday everyone! It's been a while since I put out a round-up post (misleadingly labelled as a "fortnightly" round-up, hem-hem), so here goes.

Eat Drink Man Woman, the all day eating house that opened last year on Brunswick Street in the site that used to be Retro, traded for a bit over six months before closing. After a bit of a rethink, the EDMW team are renovating and reopening the venue as a burger bar (yep, another one Melbourne). Judging from the neon sign being installed last week, the burgerfication process is nearly complete.


It's been a few months since my first taste of the yum cha menu at Spice Temple, but I went back a few weekends ago with my family for my brother's birthday lunch. Very impressive (those braised lamb shoulder pot stickers, my God). Someone asked me online whether I thought it was better than traditional yum cha in the suburbs, and I have to say that I don't really consider the two experiences comparable - it's a completely different concept, quality of produce, price point etc. That said though it was less expensive than we'd anticipated (less than $70 a head with beers, two bottles of nice Pinot Noir and Rumpole getting carried away with ordering dishes).


My love affair with The Moor's Head continues. They now have a banquet option which is insanely good value at $25 a head. When I visited last week I particularly enjoyed the little radishes sprinkled with black salt, and the Omar Sharif pide made with three cheeses (twisted halloumi, feta and ashawan), nigella, fresh mint and soused onions.


If your friends aren't home, we recommend simply posting the Warialda Belted Galloway beef you bought them at the farmers market through their mail slot. :) Congrats by the way, Warialda, on winning a medal on Monday night at the Delicious Magazine Produce Awards!


Gratuitous comfort food shot, home cooking edition. Cauliflower cheese made with purple cauliflower > cauliflower cheese made with white cauliflower.


Last week I was invited along as a guest to a dinner at Heirloom. They've ditched the French-Japanese fusion concept that they opened with last year (I dined there once under its former guise, and didn't think the two cuisines sat well together) in favour of being a modern izakaya, headed up by Executive Chef Ryo Kitahara (direct student of Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai) and Chef Shigeo Nonaka (Shoya). I'd enjoyed the more Japanese aspects of my meal on my previous visit, so I was curious to see the new incarnation.

While I really loved the sashimi plate (theatrically served on a big block of ice), the yakitori and the tataki, I was less taken with some of the more creative dishes, like the potato dango (cubed Japanese 'gnocchi' with Roquefort cheese and Saikyo miso cream) or the sweet, quinoa-crusted salmon. What can I say, I prefer simple izakaya fare. They also have a good range of sake, shochu and Japanese beer - I tried one from Coedo, a microbrewery in Kawagoe-shi, Saitama Prefecture.



There's been a lot of buzz in the three weeks since Silo by Joost opened in Hardware Street. The cafe, run by hospo stalwart Danny Colls (most recently, you'd know him and his wife Siany from Liaison), translates many of Joost Bakker's sustainability concepts from the Greenhouse incarnations that you've seen pop up sporadically in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, and house them in a permanent cafe that creates zero waste. Read about how they've achieved that feat here: Danny gave me a tour on Tuesday, and as well as all the nifty tweaks they've given the interior (including the modified Wega), the food waste dehydrator they've got out the back that turns 100 litres of waste into 10 litres of clean, nutrient rich dry fertiliser returned to farms is very impressive.

But what I hope doesn't get overshadowed in amongst the sustainability jazz is how deft and interesting the food is, thanks to chef Douglas McMaster who over the last two years was a stagiaire in nine of the world's top 15 restaurants (including St John and Noma). From the short, simple lunch menu I chose one of the cheffier combinations: the $12 plate of braised leek, slow-poached egg yolk and seeds (mustard seed dressing and sunflower seeds), which I mopped up with bread made onsite from flour ground onsite. My lunch date had Sian's rainfed rice, which had been cooked in stock and topped with pine mushrooms, curdy quark and wood sorrel ($14). They'll be running intimate dinners soon too - if you want in on the action, get together 10-12 friends and talk to Danny.



Last thing before we get to the links of note: the Electrolux Appetite For Excellence national finalists have been announced, and there's a good representation from Victoria in the categories of Young Chef (Kah-wai Lo from Hare & Grace, Michael Fox from Henry & The Fox, Michael Demagistris from Sorrento Golf Club), Young Waiter (Simone Spicer from Pei Modern, Pierre-Etienne Geoffroy from Jacques Reymond, Damien Byrne from Lot 7) and Young Restaurateur (Dan Wilson from Huxtable). A Whet Your Appetite dinner put together by these young chefs and yound waiters is being held on the 31st of July - click here for details.

Links of Note:

- A voice sorely-missed from Melbourne's food blogging scene over the past two years, Eating With Jack is back from hiatus and writing a food blog about her baby Z's first forays into eating solids (taleggio and eel at 18 weeks!).

- Next time you hear people complaining that the burgers at Huxtaburger or Trunk Diner are too small, bear in mind that burgers have tripled in size since the 1950s.

- Read about Gillian's misadventures making a cake from the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book (hint: a cat is involved) on My Square Frying Pan.

- Billy writes about the Footscray gentrification trap on Half Eaten.

- The Naked for Satan folks are building a gigantic rooftop garden and they're blogging the construction process on a blog called Naked in the Sky.

- My aunt Paola is currently visiting our Italian relatives in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and she's driving me crazy with jealousy as she chronicles her trip on her blog Italy on my Mind. See her beautiful posts on breakfast with zio Livio in Monfalcone and a seafood lunch in Grado.

- Do I go with the safe option? Everyone likes a chicken Caesar so it makes sense to put that on the menu. The accountant smiles contentedly. Or
I haven’t worked for x amount of years and pushed myself hard in order to put a bloody chicken Caesar on my menu. The accountant looks anxious. My point is: Is the safe choice always the best one?
Chef Steve Cumper puts his serious face on for a moment and writes on The view from my porch about the recent spate of restaurant closures.

- Ai-Ling finds the best bánh mì in Perth on Blue Apocalypse.

- Read about how the design and branding of Melbourne newcomer Patricia Coffee Brewers was developed on Identity Designed.

- In the first Fortnightly Round-up that I wrote in November I mentioned the food policy that was being developed by the City of Melbourne. It has now been published - check it out here.

Online reviews and the race to be first

A quick plug on a related issue: I'm speaking at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year, as part of the New News conference. The panel, called Everyone's a Critic, will be discussing criticism and the effect the online world of blogs, social media and crowdsourcing is having on professional criticism. As well as me the panel will feature Ed Charles, Alison Croggon, The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, freelance travel writer Tom Neal Tacker and Herald-Sun restaurant critic Stephen Downes. The event is on Friday 24th August at 1pm at Fed Square and it's FREE but you need to make a booking (here). Hope to see some of you there!


One of the first food blog posts I clearly remember reading (a year before I started Melbourne Gastronome) was Ed Charles' September 2006 post about Lau's Family Kitchen, written ten minutes after he got home from the opening night. As a restaurant enthusiast largely unaware of the nascent food blogging scene at the time, I remember feeling really excited by the fact that I could already see photos and read descriptions of a restaurant I'd been anticipating for months, knowing that it'd most likely be some weeks (or possibly months) before I'd see a review in the newspaper. This excitement about what blogs could offer readers was a key inspiration for starting my own blog.

A desire to be seen as a pioneer with a finger on the pulse of what's new and shiny, coupled with the easy immediacy offered by the internet, means that the temptation to be the first to write online about a new venue (and to benefit from the resulting SEO perks) can be great. I'm no angel: I've been guilty of it myself a few times, when it's a place I've been particularly excited about (see, eg, my first glimpse of San Telmo post).

But the race to be first seems to be reaching new, hilarious heights in Melbourne. Take the case study of Nama Nama (the new Japanese cafe from Izakaya Den owners Simon Denton, Miyuki Nakahara and Takashi Omi): it opened its doors for lunch on Thursday 21 June. The Three Thousand review went up by about 2:30pm that same day, the Milk Bar review went up at about 9:30am on Friday, and the Broadsheet review went up around Friday lunchtime - all three within 24 hours of the venue trading. Nina Rousseau's review was published in Epicure this week, 26 days after it opened.

Or take the example of Seddon cafe Common Galaxia, which reportedly had reviewers from two websites show up at the door at 7am on opening day. Or the reviewer at another venue's recent opening day, asking only half-jokingly whether "any of those [rival website] bastards" had been spotted yet!

Some publications, particularly the old-school ones, have policies of waiting some weeks after a venue has opened before visiting to review it, even if it means getting gazumped by others: Zoe Curtis from the Herald-Sun confirmed to me that their policy is not to visit in the first month. And as Stickifingers pointed out when we were discussing this issue on Twitter, many pieces being referred to as "reviews" are more properly characterised as mere opening announcements, with fleshier stories coming later (I'd say though that all too often there *aren't* fleshier stories - after the initial flurry of fawning publicity when a place opens, most tend to drop off the radar).

The industry argument that it's unfair to rush to judge a place that's brand new and still working through its teething problems is countered by the view that if that you're open to customers and charging full prices, you're open to reviews. And in any event, reviewers tend to be overwhelmingly compliant and uncritical, only too happy to feel part of (and feed) the hype.

But c'mon, isn't this competitiveness getting just a tad ridiculous? In a recent interview, I pretentiously characterised the internet as providing a welcome democratisation of the public discourse about food in our city. The ability to widely broadcast opinion is no longer confined to a precious few, and many of the newcomers feel they don't need to play by the old conventions. But in terms of this race to be first, maybe a bit more common sense should prevail, hmmm?

MIFF 2012: films showing at the Melbourne International Film Festival that already have release dates

We interrupt the usual food-related content on this blog for a quick post about another obsession of mine: the Melbourne International Film Festival!

Happy MIFFmas, everyone!! If you're not a MIFF member already smugly clutching an advance copy of this year's program to your bosom, there's a copy in tomorrow's Age (Friday 13th). I look forward to setting aside several hours over the weekend to curl up with my copy and go through it with a fine-tooth comb, narrowing down the list of films I want to see and coming up with a workable schedule (extra degree of difficulty for me this year as I'll be away in Hong Kong (!!!) for the first week of the festival).

Because I like to maximise my chances of catching films that can ONLY be seen at the festival, I tend to exclude from my shortlist films that I know already have an Australian cinematic release date. I do this by checking the film release date schedules on websites like AtTheCinema and atonalFILM, and cross-referencing them with the MIFF 2012 program. This year, I thought it may be helpful for other similarly-minded MIFF nerds if I presented my findings on the web.

These lists are correct to the best of my knowledge based on what I've found online (EDIT: I've now also included films that have distributors but don't yet have release dates, thanks to the excellent list on Mel's blog A Wild Young Under-Whimsy). If you know of any additional films that should be on the list, dates/distributors that have changed or any other relevant information, please let me know! Updated as at 24/7/12.

The following films screening at MIFF are scheduled to screen later in the year at either the Nova, Palace Cinemas, or both:

• Opening Night film The Sapphires (showing at Nova and Palace from August 9)
• Bully (showing at Nova and Palace from August 23)
• Holy Motors (showing at Nova from August 23)
• Vulgaria (showing at Nova from August 23)
• Moonrise Kingdom (showing at Nova and Palace from August 30)
• Damsels in Distress (showing exclusively at Nova from September 6)
• Monsieur Lazhar (showing at Palace from September 6)
• Your Sister's Sister (showing at Nova from September 6)
• Beasts of the Southern Wild (showing at Nova and Palace from September 13)
• Warriors of the Rainbow, Seediq Bale (showing at Nova from September 13)
• ParaNorman (showing at Palace from September 20)
• Liberal Arts (showing at Palace from October 11)
• Ruby Sparks (showing at Palace from September 20)
• On the Road (showing at Palace from September 27)
• First Position (showing at Nova from September 27)
• Shadow Dancer (showing at Nova from October 4)
• Wuthering Heights (showing at Nova and Palace from October 11)
• Harakiri: Death of a Samurai (showing at Nova from October 18)
• Safety Not Guaranteed (showing at Nova from October 18)
• The Intouchables (showing at Nova and Palace from October 25)
• The Sessions (showing at Nova from November 8)

The following films have been picked up by distributors in Australia, but I don't know where/if they will be screening outside of MIFF (some of them will end up straight-to-DVD):

• Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (August 23, Roadshow has distribution rights)
• Wunderkinder (August 23, Umbrella has distribution rights)
• Amour (August 30, Regency has distribution rights)
• Mental (October 4, Universal has distribution rights)
• Robot and Frank (15 November, Sony has distribution rights)
• Being Venice (TBC, Curious Film has distribution rights)
• Beyond the Hills (TBC, Madman has distribution rights)
• Caesar Must Die (TBC, Palace has distribution rights)
• God Bless America (TBC, Potential Films has distribution rights)
• Hail (TBC, Madman has distribution rights)
• The Hunt (TBC, Madman has distribution rights)
• The Imposter (TBC, Madman has distribution rights)
• Last Dance (TBC, Becker Film Group has distribution rights)
• The Loneliest Planet (TBC, Palace has distribution rights)
• Miss Bala (TBC, Transmission has distribution rights)
• No (TBC, Rialto has distribution rights)
• Rampart (TBC, Madman has distribution rights)
• Sister (TBC, Palace has distribution rights)
• Tabu (TBC, Palace has distribution rights)
• The Taste of Money (TBC, Madman has distribution rights)

So, film nerds: what films at MIFF this year do we HAVE to see? I can strongly recommend using this extremely useful FestivalSessions festival online planner - it's brilliant!

And for the foodies still reading: any dining tips for me for Hong Kong??


(Other random non-food-related research I've been doing recently that I put online in case some readers may find it useful - I'm researching options that would allow the choir I sing in to sell our music online. iTunes, digital distributors CD Baby, TuneCore and ReverbNation, and direct-to-fans sales platforms like Bandcamp: here are my findings.)