Archives for May 2014

341 – Linda’s on King – The end of the doldrums

May 31, 2014 by Andrew Christie 3 Comments

At last a ‘proper’ restaurant! And a good one! I am all aquiver.

It has only taken 70 something outings to find a place that aspires to high standards and also achieves them. I knew it had to happen eventually, simply based on the law of averages if nothing else. There have been times when I have doubted King Street’s ability to cough up anything other than lashings of ethno-identified cuisines, but not any more. No sirree-bob. This here is aspirational-Australian cuisine, served by staff who know what they are about.

We are gathered tonight to celebrate the passing of the doldrums, and are joined by the Stropolina and her good mate Jess. I arrived a bit early as I had sworn off beer (very) temporarily due to some goutiness, and I lack the imagination required to waste time in an urban environment, without going to a pub. I must find out what people who don’t drink do instead. Anyway, having decided that any more window shopping would only result in me being booked for loitering, I entered the sparsely populated calm of Linda’s. The understated decor is a pleasant relief compared to the glitz and macrame of some of the new joints, but it annoyed the Stropolina who thought it looked a bit cheap.

The menu was enticing and plenty of specials were on offer, so many, that the waitress had to be recalled to remind us of all our options. Fear Of Missing Out was prevalent. Everything sounded good, so there was quite a lot of delay before we ordered. As is often the case with our family, tactical ordering and negotiation was the go. “If I order the fish pie will you give me some of your mushrooms? Are you really going to order the soufflé, because I was going to have that, and we both can’t. Can we?” To make matters more confusing the menu does not distinguish between starters and mains, the dishes are simply sorted by increasing price. You just have to make a judgement call. In the end we made some hard choices and the waitress duly took note. Then we get on with the Catching Up.

The spider-phobic Stropolina told the tale of her funnel web-wrangling exploits and consequent nervous breakdown after the beast had been safely jam-jarred. Jess told us all about her new dream job and her recent Gibb River Road holiday-of-a-lifetime adventures in the outback. Strop countered by rolling out one of our family’s standbys, the search for the Holy Relics of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, at Watarrka (Kings Canyon). For years afterwards we had little bits of tinsel, and feather-boa feathers, smudged with red-centre dust, that we kept in a little glass vial and showed off to guests, who were either amazed or bemused. It was often hard to tell.

Then the food arrived. My seafood chowder was excellent, but Strop thought the prawn special a bit underwhelming and the accompanying chutney a bit too sweet, although Stropolina and Jess seemed to enjoy theirs. Then it was on to the mains. I had ordered the steak, partly because the menu told me which district it came from, a pleasant reminder of my primary school geography lessons, when we had to be able to name all the agricultural districts in the state, and partly because it would be my first King Street steak (I know, how weird is that?). The steak was good, a real credit to the mighty Riverina District. Strop’s double cooked, goat cheese soufflé was double hot as well as doubly yummy, and the Stropolina’s fish pie was excellent as well. Jess had sautéed mushrooms on brioche, which she enjoyed, but I found a bit too garlicky. By the time that lot had disappeared we were quite full and had to call time out before we considered the dessert menu.

This time channel-billed cuckoos made an appearance in the wildlife discussion, and the Stropolina’s imminent departure for the New World dominated the travel topics. All this chit-chat was making me hungry again. That and a nagging, irrational fear that if we waited too long, the kitchen would run out of desserts. The menu did not disappoint. As Strop pointed out, all the fave flavours were there, quince, rhubarb, mandarin, passionfruit and pomegranate. Jess wimped out, but the rest of us got stuck in. I went for the lemon pudding with quince, Strop had the poached rhubarb and mandarin granita and the Stropolina had the ginger cake. All the yumms, in fact probably a few to many, Strop thought the rhubarb dish had a bit too much going on, and some of the flavours were masking each other. But then better to have too much flavour than too little.

Linda’s has been operating in Newtown for a long time and it is easy to see why.

337 – Newtown Thai II Express – Another sequel. They just keep coming

May 31, 2014 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

I am a bit disappointed that Newtown Thai II ‘express’ isn’t just called Newtown Thai 2½. It would be easier to say and would convey something of the diminuitive scale, because it is a small place. Just four tables, a big counter, then the kitchen behind, producing lots of good cooking smells amid lots of clanking of woks. It does a lot of takeaway trade, but when we visited most of the other tables were occupied as well, so we didn’t feel totally out of place. The main decorative elements in the restaurant are the bright green walls and the bright pink menus. There are also gorgeous upholstered tissue dispensers allocated to each table, it is worth going just to check them out.

The upholstered tissue dispensers are not to be sneezed at

It is not clear to me if all of these Newtown Thai variations are related in any way other than by the first two words in their names and the shape of their signs. I suppose the only way to find out would be to ask questions, but that would constitute research, and I’m afraid that is something I am not prepared to do. If you want research you are better off watching Four Corners.

Our third excursion to the Newtown Thai variants, was on a midweek night in order to meet up with an old friend from Canberra who was in town to get all intellectualled-up at the Writers Festival, with some of her book group mates.

I arrived a bit late due to a CityRail enforced scenic detour via Summer Hill. The packed train steamed straight past platform 1 at Newtown – no explanation was offered. I was waiting ready to get off, but instead watched the crowded platform speed past the windows, as I assumed that I must have miscounted and that it had been Macdonaldtown (an unusually popular Macdonaldtown, it has to be said). Then the guard’s voice came over the speakers, sounding as confused as his passengers. “Aah, well it seems that we have failed to stop at Newtown… umm… next scheduled stop is… Strathfield so… hang on a sec. Click.” We all waited, breath baited, and imaginations whirring. Was the guard rushing to the front of the train to drag the unconscious driver off the go button (or what ever makes the train go), or was the guard posting something on the drivers Facebook timeline, asking him to drag himself away from watching cat vs robot-vacuum-cleaner videos. Then the speaker crackled into life, “Aah… as you’ve noticed we, ah… missed the Newtown Station… but we think we can make a special stop at Summer Hill though…”

By the time I got back to Newtown. Strop and our guests Judy and Allison were settled in and chattering away, catching up on things Canberran. Being experienced public servants they were concerned at our recent lax attitude to the rules of the quest, and offered to inspect and certify our ongoing adherence thereto. We concurred (it just seems easier as we weren’t entirely sure what they had said).

As Judy is a kind of vego (seafood-tolerant clique) we order plenty of vegetable and fishy things, and some duck salad that she is not allowed to have. Conveniently number 37 turns out to be in the seafood section: Pad Snowpeas (?). Our waiter is a very cute and attentive young boy, who immediately brings out the nurturing instincts in the womenfolk. “Make sure you note how good he is,” they say. So I will. He was very good, right up to the point when he returned with the bad news that number 37 was not available. “What about 73?” Strop immediately asked. The boy looked confused, and not just because there is no 73 (the menu runs out at 71). So we opt for 38 instead, which as luck would have it, is also seafood.

Soon the table is being occupied by plates full of spring rolls and fish cakes, which are good. Then the mains start to arrive. The duck salad is nice, although the flavours seem a bit too intense to me. There is a satay dish which is a bit disappointing but the seafood is good.

The conversation frolicked around the writers festival, books in general, literature in particular, and the imminent decimation of the public service. We then got onto what-the-children-are-doing. It turns out that one of Judy’s boys is very good at the football thing, and she is looking forward to the day when he will be making enough squillions to cover the cost of all the lasagne he eats. At least I think that is what she said.

Newtown Thai 2½ (see how well that rolls off the tongue) is a cheap and cheerful local Thai option. It’s not the best, but it’s certainly not the worst either.

329 – Cafe Newtown – The heart of the matter

May 17, 2014 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

Cafe Newtown, you’ve all seen it, sitting out there in the middle of the enormous intersection that is the throbbing but hollow heart of Newtown. Cafe Newtown is the nominatively-determined, defining point of Newtown cafe society, the Google Maps pin, pointing at the very definition of saturday morning bacon and eggs, the still eye of the Newtown traffic hurricane, the hipster crossroads… Worryingly, I feel as if I could keep coming up with this shit all day.

We decided to go at night. I know, I know. You’re going to say, “What about the rules? You can’t… blah blah, keep changing them blah… just make it up as you go along…” Totally agree. We do, totally. But they’re our rules, and we’ll do what we want with them. And anyway it’s Friday night and I desperately need a drink and something to eat. There was special Turkish food at the work’s friday night drinks, but it was all eaten by the students while I was busy trying to transfer lots of lines on lots of bits of electronic paper, from one computer to another computer, to keep a third computer happy. As I say, by the time I emerged from Newtown station in the middle of a horde of invading shiny young friday night stormtroopers, I needed a drink.

Strop had nabbed a splendid table, outside but up against the building, so we didn’t need to worry about coming into direct contact with any of the pedestrians squeezed between the traffic and the cafe. The surprising thing about sitting outside at Cafe Newtown on a friday night, is that the traffic doesn’t impinge on the experience. There is enough noise from the chattering punters and the pedestrians, and the little bit of overhead canned music, to keep the traffic noise at bay. Except for the occasional dick-head who has been getting off by fiddling with his own exhaust pipe.

We quickly order drinks and dips from the waitress (who has such a strong Spanish accent that I never actually work out exactly which beer I am drinking – luckily by that stage it didn’t really matter) and settle back to watch the Newtown floorshow. This place has an unsurpassed view of the passing tattoo-and-hair-do parade. There were a lot of them. Standouts included a pair of middle-aged women dressed as geishas and the bloke wearing as many fluro tones as possible, with matching headphones. The old bloke with the mobility scooter that he has converted into a mobile PA system (complete with Elvis statuette) kept going past, doing laps of Newtown, and occasionally having to lean forward and tap people on the arm to get them to make way for his one-man mission to bring the King to King Street’s crowded pavements. I commented that I hadn’t seen the Elvis-mobile for a while and Strop wondered whether his appearance tonight might coincide with the full moon. Now there is study worth funding.

The dips came in three pots, and with three types of bread, lightly toasted and drizzled (lovely word) with olive oil. Yummmm. We were most of the way through hoovering this lot up when I glanced up, with a crispy wedge of pita bread jammed in my gob, and noticed an attractive young woman leaving her table and giving me a big smile. I was surprised, because, despite my devastating good looks, this kind of thing doesn’t happen very… well, ever really. As I chewed my pita bread and checked my memory circuits, the smiley blonde moved inside towards the cash register, and I realised that I did know her. “Is that Peta?” I asked Strop – and she answered in the affirmative, for indeed it was. Peta was an inseparable childhood friend of the Stropette when we lived in Canberra. I think the last time I saw Peta was a lot of years ago. While I dithered about whether to interrupt her evening out with her friends, Strop decided to take things into her own hands nearly tackling Peta as she was about to cross the road. Well not really, and just as well because Peta is pregnant. Congratulations! We gave her a thorough grilling, delighting in her news, and downloading lots of family goss, before releasing her back into the wilds of King Street.

Then we ordered more drinks, and after a somewhat heated debate, decided on quesadillas rather than sliders, mainly because I fancied trying to pronounce quesadilla to the Spanish speaking waitress more than I fancied eating a little hamburger. It wasn’t my best decision. The most exciting parts of the quesadilla were the extremely hot, sauce laden beans, that kept escaping and falling down the sleeve of my shirt. Still, the whole point of Cafe Newtown is watching the world go by, and it is an excellent place to do that.

We finished the night by making a quick tour of the exciting batch of new eateries that we will be visiting soon. There are some interesting looking places coming up. I can’t wait to get stuck in.

326 – The Townie – It’s definitely a pub

May 10, 2014 by Andrew Christie 2 Comments

It is good to have finally made it to the wrong side of the tracks. I feel that the eateries over here in South Newtown will be more interesting and exotic than the ones we have been visiting lately. I am optimistic – which is a bit of a strange experience for me.

The Townie is a pub’s pub, and it’s not trying to be anything else. It’s not trying to be fashionable, or hip, or Irish. In fact it is barely trying to be a pub. It’s a bit grungy and down at heel, and it attracts a crowd that is less shiny and monied than those across the tracks at the Bank. The Townie is the student-group-house-living-room of pubs. You suspect that most of the patrons at the Townie have a bit of a soft spot for heavy metal bands and playstations.

It has all the usual pub things: screens, bars, TAB, smokers’ terrace, 70s movie posters and a slot car track. What more could you ask for? Well, some food, but we’ll get to that in a minute. I have a bit of a soft spot for the Townie, it is the sort of pub where the stranger at the next urinal will engage you in conversation about the etiquette of talking to other blokes at the urinal. “These young blokes don’t get it,” he says as he zips up and makes his way back to the bar. “They think it’s strange. Freaks ‘em out.” I note that he hasn’t bothered to wash his hands and resolve to avoid shaking his hand if the situation should arise later in the evening.

The Stropolina and I are the first to arrive and we nab a table upstairs near the Bistro. The barmaid is very pleasant if a bit eccentric. She doesn’t talk directly to you, instead providing a real-time commentary on the transaction as it proceeds. “Oh another Coopers Pale, what a surprise. And crisps? Chicken and lime? Too exotic, ha. That’ll be twelve dollars. Weekend prices hey, what’s that about.” Most of the time I had no idea what she was talking about. I just smiled and nodded, and handed over a twenty. Later she came around collecting empties and said, “Ooh look, you’ve made bowls,” (commenting on the way our family open crisp packets by tearing a hole in the side to create a bowl shaped receptacle that allows easy and efficient access to the crisps), “My lab partner taught me how to do that, I’d never seen it before.” She was gone before any witty responses had time to bubble to the surface, so we just kind of smiled and said “Who is she?” and, “What is that accent?”

When Strop arrived the conversation moved on to holidays and the Stropolina’s experiences in Morocco when she was on her first-year-out-of-school-overseas-adventure. Strop and I heard about her encounter with a group of local lads, who invited the Stropolina and her friends back to their apartment. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t mentioned this bit to us before, and luckily they turned out not to be white-slavers, but tagine cookers. They took the girls out around the markets buying ingredients for a slap-up tagine prepared back at the apartment. She didn’t go into what happened after the tagine was eaten. Strop and I like a bit of cous-cous, so maybe we should go to Morocco too, but in the meantime all this talk of food has us hungry. Time to get on with ordering some food of our own.

We are at a pub and that means the burger wars are back on. The menu is a big wall mounted affair featuring all the usual pub offerings. There are pizzas, schnitzels, and steaks, but surprisingly, only two burgers. One is the Townhall Beef Burger, and the other is a schnitzel and bacon burger. I note that there is also a schnitzel and bacon pizza – something of a theme developing there. I choose the eponymous Townhall Burger as does the Stropolina but she is adding cheese to hers, and Strop goes for the schnitzel and bacon burger. There is also a bowl of salt and pepper squid to share.

Having ordered the food, Strop goes to get another round of drinks, returning with three schooners and the news that “She’s the best barmaid in the world, but I don’t want to sleep with her.” It takes me a moment to realise that this is a reference to my experience with the barmaid at the Bank. She then informs us that the barmaid’s hard to place accent, is Israeli. So there’s that mystery solved.

It was only when I saw a collection of burgers lined up on the counter that I noticed that we didn’t seem to have a buzzer or a table number or anything to connect us to the food that we had paid for. Apparently the young woman taking orders had forgotten to give Strop a buzzer, so it was just lucky that my stomach had been getting my eyes to pay attention. Napkins were another absence. Strop eventually ducked behind the counter and helped herself to a handful for the table.

The burgers came in the open position, which always intrigues me. Do they think we’re going to eat a burger with a knife and fork, or is it just to make the application of tomato sauce easier? Assembling the burgers required a bit of manual deftness to avoid spillage, as I soon discover. Strop came a real cropper when her first bite resulted in her burger disassembling itself, and landing in her lap. “Bacon from arsehole to breakfast,” she commented, putting the napkins to good use, scraping aioli off her clothes.

The beef burgers are the traditional burger size (i.e. not too big) which I think is a good thing, and they come with pineapple, beetroot and the now ubiquitous aioli. But they haven’t been made with love, and unfortunately the burger experience is less than the sum of its parts. The chips were disappointing too, and for the first time in living memory I did not finish mine. None of us did.

The Townie has me conflicted. I enjoy the fact that they are not trying too hard, and are happy to just be a pub, but it would be great if they tried a bit harder on the food front. You can still be quirky and laid back, while putting a bit of love into the food you are offering.

Next stop is the Cafe Newtown, which is as close to the exotic temptress that is Enmore Road as we are going to get – for the moment anyway.

324 Level 1 – Onyx Lounge – The post nuptial brain freeze

May 4, 2014 by Andrew Christie 1 Comment

We’ve been away in Melbourne for a week, wedding the Stropette to the Heathen in a flowery and chilly open air ceremony, in which the Pancetta stole the show. But now it’s back to the serious task of eating our way to St Peters before we lose interest in this project.

This week we’re still on the Newtown Station railway bridge, but upstairs this time, at the relatively new Onyx Lounge. I arrived a bit early and waited next door in the Bank Hotel till Strop made her way up the hill. The front bar of the Bank is very noisy and crowded on a Friday night, so the chilled, calm vibe at Onyx was a pleasant relief, although I bet the owners would prefer the crowds that Bank pulls in. It was still quite early as we made our way up the stairs, and I wondered if we might be the only ones there. We weren’t, but they weren’t exactly crowded either. Onyx is dark and moody, with little red lights marking out the stairs, dark brown walls, low lights, ferns and a macrame room divider. The music is cool too, bass-heavy and jazzy. It is all just so chill. Strop liked it because we could actually hear each other without having to shout. There was a sign down on the street advertising live music later, so I was hoping that we would be able to stay awake long enough to hear a bit of that.

The staff were immediately present and attentive, directing us to a window table with views up Enmore Road. The other customers seemed to mainly be young and in pairs. My generalisation generator immediately went to work and I came up with the theory that Onyx was being used as a fairly safe first-date setting out point. I have absolutely no evidence to support this theory but I don’t care, they looked clean cut and innocent, at least for Newtown. There was certainly no evidence of hipsters, even though the fake ferns and macrame can only be seen as ironic. At least by someone of my generation, who of course invented macrame.

Onyx looks a lot like a restaurant, but the food is generally limited to bar type food with a bit of a Mexican-slash-Spanish flavour. There are share plates, pizzas, sliders (little tacos in this case) and burgers. We decided to put ourselves about the menu a bit, (while avoiding the burger-wars as Onyx is not an actual pub) choosing a latin themed pizza with chorizo, prawn taco sliders, and empanadas from the share plate menu. I opted to stick with beer while Strop went looking for a nice red wine by the glass. She started with a shiraz which she found too peppery then moved on to a pinot noir, which was more to her refined tastes.

The food arrived quickly, which was just as well because I was starving. The pizza topping was good but I found the crust a bit doughy and sweet for my taste. All the food was a bit disappointing which is a pity because I quite liked the vibe of Onyx. The empanadas and tacos were okay but nothing memorable. Oh well, it’s a bar, you come for the drinks not the food.

By this stage the live musician had arrived, complete with guitar and amps. Great, we thought, let’s stick around for some of that. So we decided to try a cocktail for dessert. I feel that we only have ourselves to blame for the result of this decision, even though the helpful waiter backed up our dumb decision. Based on very limited logic, we decided to have cocktails that incorporated ice-cream, because… well, dessert. This was a bad decision. They were sickly sweet, and they gave us brain freeze, and they got us more pissed. We had a lengthy discussion trying to tell which cocktail was the one that was supposed to have the salted-caramel, neither seemed particularly salty. Meanwhile the singer had no sooner set up all her gear, than she sat down to a hearty meal. I did wonder how she would go, singing straight after a meal like that, but then what do I know about the needs of starving artists. The meal was probably part of her pay.

Strop and I ummed-and-aahed a bit about whether to wait for the music to start. I think neither of us wanted to end the night on an ice-cream-cocktail-brain-freeze note, so we tried again. This time we kept it simple, Franjelico over ice for her, and a mojito for him. And they were good. And the music started, and she could sing. It was all good. We clapped. If the crowd had been a bit bigger Strop might have given her a whoop or two too.

Later we stumbled out onto King Street to find that some wag had been liberally deploying Joe Hockey masks. Who would have thought that someone in Newtown would take umbrage at something Joe said.

Next up its burger-wars time again as we leave the bridge behind and make our way to the Townie.