November 2006

Food and Drink News

by John Newton

Island dreams no more

I noted the other day that Café Mutiara on the corner of Campbell and Castlereagh Street had closed, which saddened me – some of you may remember it was originally the city branch of the wonderful Island Dreams run by the equally wonderful Anna Alima, whose ayam panggang I still dream of. I rang Anna at Lakemba to find out what had happened and she appears to have closed too. If anyone has any news of what happened – White Pages doesn’t list them - please get in touch.

Another shock closure was Shun Tak Seafood at Parramatta, a local favourite which always seemed to be doing well – who knows?

More bad news for Parramatta-ites is the disappearance of the local branch of Woodlands, the Liverpool-based South Indian Dosai house. He’s opened a new place at Moorebank, Tandoori Gardens, which doesn’t sound all that vegetarian.

Mondo and Mano

So what’s the owner of the finest DVD store in town (Mondo Movies, 89 Booth Street, Annandale) doing opening a café in Glebe? According to Jim Papadakis, it was all his father John’s fault. John started drinking coffee at Campos in Newtown (193 Missenden Road) and became a little obsessed with the murky liquid. So now there’s Mano Espresso, where they serve – guess what – beautifully made Campos coffee. It’s off Glebe Point Road – brave move – in St Johns Road, just before the police station, in a building owned by Galuzzo the greengrocer out front.

But do good things and good things come to you. Mano Espresso seems to be prospering. Jim and his father John have turned what was going to be “just an espresso bar” into a really good “European-style” café with seriously good light meals and cakes - like the spanokopita (made by John’s wife and Jim’s mum Sue) and waiter Louisa’s appallingly good pecan slice, Nutella brioche – and a lot more.
I guess I should have realised that food was a big part of Jim and John’s life when I learnt about the Iron Chef competition at Mondo: if you can guess the theme ingredient on a Saturday –before the show natch – you get free movies for a week.

My money’s on artichokes.
Espresso Mano, 73 St John’s Road Glebe, 9566 4499

Culinary capital of country NSW

If there’s a better place to eat and drink outside of Sydney in NSW than Orange – tell me about it. I recently spent a weekend there as a guest of Orange wine week, and had a ball. Colleague Helen Greenwood and I ran a program called “If It Follows Me Home Can I Eat It?” We took a small group on a quick bus tour of some of the fine local producers including Max Davidson’s Hillside Orchards, where we found the most beautiful strawberries, a variety called Seascape – so soft they won’t travel so you had to be there to taste them – how strawberries used to be before they were bred for the road rather than the palate (Max Davidson’s Hillside Orchard, The Escort Way, Borenore 6365 2247). But the highlight for this snail eater was Sonia Begg’s beautiful snail farm at Ross Hill – if you were going to be a snail, you’d want to be one of Sonia’s! They eat better than most vegetarians (Sonia Begg’s cool Climate Snails are at Ross Hill Vineyard, Griffin Road, contact Sonia on 0408 659 730)

We took all this lovely stuff – including venison tenderloins from Tim Hansen - back to the Pavilion on the Showground and cooked it up with help from the people on the bus, one of whom said to me before we visited the snail farm, “You won’t get me eating snails!” She managed about three ramekins - we fried them in local olive oil and chives and plopped a dollop of allioli (garlic mayo) on top.

There was a Cabernet tasting while we were there - one of Stephen and Rhonda Doyle’s Bloodwoods - a ’98 (which you could have bought for $15 a bottle before it ran out) beat all comers, including some highly fancied French Bordeaux and a Cyril Henschke. There are now over 30 local wineries, some seriously good stuff.

If you want to eat out in Orange, you’re spoiled for choice. The top four places in my opinion - not in order - are Michael Manners’ Selkirks; Simonn Hawke’s Lolli Redini, Tony Worland’s Tonic and The School House on the beautiful Mayfield wine estate just out of town.

Tapas time

OK, we don’t always get everywhere immediately. Kika Tapas Bar has been open for some time and I only noticed it last week. Named after an early Pedro Almodóvar movie about a kooky hairdresser – Kika - called to make up a corpse (it’s confession time - haven’t seen the movie either, but plan to change that) and decorated like an early Almodóvar interior – all clashing pop art wall paper – Kika offers the usual suspects – ensaladilla rusa, tortilla et cetera – and does it all with great gusto (247 Victoria Street, Darlinghurst 9360 7865). We’ll check it out properly for the book soon. Let’s hope it eats as good as it looks.

Also pumping out the tiny plates (is it the belated tapas revolution in Sydney?) is chef Danny Drinkwater at Park Hyatt’s harbourbar every Friday and Saturday night, with live jazz and soul music to boot. This one doesn’t sound so auténtico, offering things like garlic king prawns and salsa verde and roasted chilli and basil Fremantle octopus – but who cares as long as it tastes good (auténtico isn’t so hot in Spain right now). Sounds like a good way to spend a Friday night. (Park Hyatt, 7 Hickson Road, The Rocks 9256 1660).

Surprise ingredient - Vegemite!

“Due to popular demand” as the publicity saying goes, Iron Chef French (why isn’t it French Iron Chef?) Hiroyuki Sakai is coming back to Galileo at The Observatory Hotel to do a dinner with resident chef Haru Inakai – whose cuisine will reign supreme?

At $499 a head I’ll never know. But you might like to fork out – they’ll be strutting their stuff at dinner on November 27th, 28th and 29th – book on 9216 2215
Galileo, The Observatory Hotel, 89 Kent Street, Millers Point.

Macro to open two more in Sydney

The Fishing News

Hugh Wennerbom runs a home delivery fish service. At the moment, he can only deliver to Woollahra and Clovelly but he’ll be expanding next year. Alternately, you can arrange to pick up the fish from one of his two depots. You can email him on hugh.wennerbom@bigpond.com

What makes Hugh’s service so special is that he cares very much that you are buying the finest fish – he also supplies to some of the best restaurants in Sydney – and the most sustainably caught fish. A little bit of news from the fishing boats.

You may be aware that NSW fishermen are being encouraged to sell their licenses to the government in a buy back program — the idea being to decrease the number of fishermen to take pressure off fishing stocks. All well and good — most fishos are happy to cash in their fish and chips — but according to Hugh this is not facing up the real issue, which is catching methods. “Most of the local guys trawl - not environmentally a good way to fish – with a few exceptions who are line catching. The problem with trawling is you can’t target – you catch a bit of everything, throw the ones you don’t want back – and they usually die.” You’ll occasionally see a sign on a fish at a reputable fishmonger – like Christie’s at the Sydney Fish Market – saying it was line caught.
Go for it.

Hugh’s also keen on you trying the fish less eaten – unendangered species from well-stocked fisheries which are usually cheaper. At the moment he particularly likes yellowtail, local sand flounder, leatherjacket (seriously underrated fish), cuttle fish, snapper is good at the moment (fish are seasonal too) and his favourite, large black flathead.

You can buy all these fish as fillets - more expensive – or (if possible, and that means not the leatherjacket which must be sold without its head) whole, scaled and gutted.

If you want to eat good fish out, he supplies to Aria, Bentley Bar and Sean’s Panaroma – all of whom offer top-notch fish dishes.

Drop him a line (ouch)

Hanging in restaurants

The late great restaurateur and restaurant consultant Anders Ousback once told a restaurant owner whose rooms he was re-designing to “get rid of the sentimental clutter”. What he meant was, strip the walls of all the paintings you have lovingly collected for years. She did. He then arrived with a single Giorgio Morandi drawing and told her, imperiously, “You may borrow this. But that is all.” If you know Morandi, you’ll realise it wasn’t much of a concession.

That was back in the minimalist days of the ‘90s. Soon after, Ousback redesigned The Clock restaurant and covered the walls in French still-lifes. When I questioned him about it he said, “That was then.”

What hangs on the walls of restaurants is as much about fashion as what slides onto the plates in the kitchen. There’s a fascinating article on the subject in the November-March edition of Australian Art Review (available at newsagents, Borders and some art supply shops) by Anthony Huckstep — (A decorative degustation) which asks whether art can influence our perception of food. I’m sure of it. If I walked into a restaurant hanging Ken Done, I’d feel ill. Mr Huckstep has much more to say on the topic. Sydney restaurateurs cited in the piece include Tony Bilson, Lucio Galletto and Damien Pignolet. I’m with Lucio, who says, "Food and art for me is like the air that I breathe,” as long as both are delicious.