Archives for November 2014

Left Luggage gets launched

November 23, 2014 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

We had the book launch for Left Luggage on Saturday and it was a blast. I hope everyone who came enjoyed it as much as Strop and I did.

For those of you who couldn’t make here is a video of the official part of proceedings including a book reading where I am upstaged by my nephews.

Left Luggage is now available for Kindle. A proper paperback is also available through Amazon, The Book Depository, Barnes and Noble – they’ll print you one or three “on demand” – really it is a proper thing. If you are in the Inner West you may be able to persuade your local book store to get some in if you ask them nicely and persistently.

403 – 2042 Okay so it’s the postcode, but we already know we’re in Newtown

November 20, 2014 by Andrew Christie 4 Comments

2042 is an odd one – part cafe, part restaurant, part bar – and it calls itself a deli. The name is strange, not giving any clues as to what sort of experience to expect. It keeps unusual hours, and has more room than it really knows what to do with, especially compared to most of its cramped competition. Whenever we’ve walked past it has been fairly empty or closed. This is because it does most of its business in cafe mode during the day when we are not about, it is only open for dinner on Friday and Saturday nights. The generous open-to-the-street, double-wide room gives plenty of seating options but it does leave it looking sparsely populated even when there are quite a few punters enjoying themselves inside.

Our visit was at the end of a hot day, with the promise of a relieving southerly buster on the horizon. I was running late because I had to take home a large box of books that had been delivered to work.

Did I mention that I had written a book? You can get it on Amazon and lots of other places.

Getting off a crowded bus without bashing someone with a box of books while you wield your opal card is quite a feat let me tell you. By the time I had dropped the books at home and walked the dog, I had to hustle up the hill to Newtown. The frontline of Painting the Bridge is getting further and further away and the journey each week is getting a little bit longer. Of course being a Friday night near the end of the year, and at the end of a hot day, the streets were full of party-mode pedestrians, who didn’t seem to understand that letting me through was more important than their discussion about Darren’s new piercing or Louise’s new tatt. So I was just about ready for a beer when I arrived.

Strop was already there deep in conversation with the Stropolina. This was a pleasant surprise, I’d thought it was just the two of us tonight. But unfortunately the Stropolina was only making a brief stop, taking mercy on her aged parents, and was soon on her way to re-join the party-mode pedestrian throng.

Strop had chosen a table near the front with an excellent view of the street and of the supermarket opposite. 2042 has a much nicer vibe from the inside, especially when you have a beer in front of you. There were a few other people also enjoying the vibe but the room was far from full. During the evening we watched a lot of people walking back and forth on King Street, often stopping to check out the menu on display at the front, and mostly keeping on meandering. I felt like shouting “Come on in, you’ll like it.” But of course I didn’t.

It wasn’t until the Stropolina had departed and Strop had done her Facebook checking-in thing that we were able to seriously consider the menu. My first glimpse immediately set off my quinoa and kale alarms but I was soon placated by the presence of pork belly – there were at least two dishes featuring the underside of a pig, and one of them was cooked twice. Unfortunately due to the heat neither of us felt like a heavy meal, which was a pity because there were a lot of nice, but substantial-sounding things on offer.

To start we chose a cold meat platter, and because I couldn’t make up my mind between the Jamon Iberico (32 months), and the Jamon Serano (18 months), let alone the Shulz Smoked Wagyu, we decided to have All the Meats. And a bottle of your finest rose please. Yummo. The smoked beef won the battle of the meats, but the Jamons were very nice too, each in their own subtle hammy way. The board included very nice fat Sicilian olives and some pickles. The bread was pre-drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with a bit too much salt.

All the Meats turned out be Quite a Lot, so we decided to take it easy on the next round because we were in the mood for dessert.

We decided to share a salad and some polenta chips, which was probably an error as the salad included polenta too. Oh well. The blue cheese dipping sauce that came with the chips was very good, better than Bloodwood’s version I thought. More delicate. The salad was good too, but the dressing seemed a bit sweet.

For dessert I couldn’t go past the affogato with Frangelico, Strop had a disappointing creme brûlée that she thought was a bit rubbery, and came with an enormous pile of super crunchy praline. That she left some of the praline on her plate says that the pile was too large.

We left the restaurant just as the southerly buster finally hit, bringing a stinging blast of grit to pepper the backs of our legs as we walked home.

Having given the day time menu a bit of a glancing at, I am keen to go back and check out 2042’s breakfast offerings sometime, but it’s a long way to walk that early in the day.

399 Spencer Guthrie – Worth the wait

November 8, 2014 by Andrew Christie 2 Comments

Spencer Guthrie, you will remember of course, is the place we tried to get into on the infamous Tuesday night outing with Uncle Carl when we ended up at Bloodwood instead. And got a bit cheerful.

This time we are staying within the Spencer Guthrie comfort zone. It is Friday night and King Street is buzzing as usual, but the only other people in the restaurant when I arrive (right on time, I’d like to point out), are the four blokes in the up-the-front kitchen. As I was led down the back to our table I realised how small Spencer Guthrie is. You don’t really get a sense of it from the street but there is just a row of two seater tables lining the corridor past the kitchen and a small room out the back with tables for a few larger groups. I was offered a drink while I waited for Strop and Wendy, our self-invited guest for the evening. I decided on a glass of Riesling, as I had already downed a few beers in my slow journey from the station to the restaurant.

I had run out of amusing things to tweet, and was wondering if I should ask for some bread or olives, when I got a text message from Wendy: What number is it? Good question. I had no idea and all the staff were up the front deep in conversation, so I decided to take a walk and stick my head out the door. I’d either see the number or perhaps spot a perplexed looking Wendy and be able to guide her in. Or maybe the staff would ask me if I needed help.

Nope.

No sign of Wendy, but there was the number 399, up high on the window. By the time I got back to the table to send off the coordinates, Wendy appeared at the door. And by the time she had sat herself down, Strop appeared. Then it was time for the drink indecision.

“Cocktails? Wine?”

“What are we eating?”

“Where’s the menu?”

“No, that’s the drinks list.”

“It’s dark in here isn’t it – pass that candle over.”

“I’ve got a torch in the car.”

“Umm…”

“Beer?”

“IPA? What’s that?”

“Do you even drink beer, Wendy?”

“Why yes I do.”

“What’s a Negroni?”

“No idea.”

“What’s that your drinking?”

“The Riesling, it’s good.”

Somewhere in amongst all these questions I ordered some bread and olives, and the menus appeared. The restaurant was filling rapidly by this time and the noise levels were building.

Eventually Strop and Wendy settled on cocktails (Negroni and Champagne) and we got stuck into the bread and olives while we nattered about travels and family and friends. The bread was excellent (baked on site with fennel), but there was something a bit frugal about the three thin slices and the little dish of olives – especially for an appetiser we were paying for.

It wasn’t until the waiter hovered expectantly nearby that we stopped Catching Up and started to seriously consider the menu.

It’s a fixed price arrangement, for either two or three courses: $55 or $65. Within each of the of the courses (a bit cutely named: To Start-To Follow-To Finish) there are four choices. Intriguingly, the menu doesn’t discuss how the dishes are cooked, it just lists the ingredients. In order of quantity presumably. Strop and Wendy weren’t going to put up with this level of blatant ambiguousness though, and immediately began extracting a detailed description of each dish from the waiter. There were a couple of heavily French-accented pauses along the way but he got through the menu in the end, with Strop and Wendy helpfully filling in the gaps where necessary. “He’s nice, isn’t he?” Wendy said when the waiter was safely out of earshot.

Once we knew the choices, we were able to proceed straight to the food indecision phase.

“What are you going to have?” Wendy started.

But I was onto their little game now. “The ocean trout and the beef.”

“Really? That was quick,” Wendy said, disappointed that I had short circuited the game. Eventually she chose the asparagus and the kangaroo, while Strop went for the mussels and the mulloway.

The food was excellent and it looked fantastic served on big white plates with lots of carefully arranged splodges and scatters of the more obscure ingredients from the far end of the descriptions. They’re not big servings but that is not what this place is about. It’s about flavour, and ingredients, and interesting combinations. By the end of the mains I still had plenty of room for dessert, especially as the first one combined chocolate, mandarin and fennel. My choice was made, but Wendy and Strop still had to work their way through the dessert/sharing indecision. Our bottle of Riesling had failed to last the distance so we enquired about a dessert wine. The only one available was a Muscat, “We had a botrytis, but that ran out on Wednesday,” the waiter explained, not exactly apologetically. Luckily the Muscat did the job very nicely.

My dessert didn’t disappoint with a cigar of chocolate mousse and splodges of surprising mandarin and fennel (I think) puree. Wendy and Strop’s dessert came with caramel ice-cream and champagne granita on a bed of what seemed to be coffee muesli. “Mmmm,” said Strop, “Could be a bit more caramelly.”

The place was still crowded as we were leaving at 10pm, and more people were coming in. Spencer Guthrie deserves to be thriving even if it isn’t open on a Tuesday.

Off the map ramblings

November 2, 2014 by Andrew Christie 6 Comments

We’re back. Back to the sound of koels at midnight, and hot, jasmine-scented winds blowing through fake Halloween cobwebs. It’s good to be home.

When we set out on our big adventure six weeks ago I had high hopes of keeping the blog – if not actually relevant – at least occasionally updated. But there was far too much fun to be had to bother doing anything as boring as writing. At one point, as we mucked about in London and then Devon, I had some pretentious thoughts about saying something significant about The State Of The British Burger, but that was overtaken by the shock of finding ourselves lost in the souks of Marrakesh. Any spare energy that I might have had for writing was instead needed for bargaining the price of my fetching new red leather slippers down from stratospheric levels, to merely extortionate.

So this instalment is not a review of anything in particular, just a collection of rambling commentaries and notebook jottings.

The State Of The British Burger

British burgers have always been different from Australian burgers. The poms seem to think that the salad is not part of the burger – just something to be had on the side. This was true back in the 1970s when burgers were a strange and exotic thing in England. My first experience of this salad phobia was at a Wimpy Bar in Hampstead – the burger consisted of just a bun and a rissole, and the most memorable part was the bright red tomato-shaped ketchup bottle. Things are still a bit like that, the emphasis is very much on meat (or at least protein) in a bun. The meat also still tends to the rissole-like and is often a bit on the dry side. There are small improvements in some of the trendier pubs, where the salad is creeping stealthily from the side plate and insinuating itself between the bun and the meat. However, this raises the wider question of whether the appearance of burgers in English pubs is a good thing or not. On this subject, I am in two minds as usual. It has to be noted though, that the low proportion of salad, and the three-dimensional quality of the meat patty in most British burgers does tend to make them more structurally stable. So there is that. The best burger, and thus the most Australian-like (obviously), was at a hipster-run pub in Richmond-on-Thames. It had a good balance of meat to salad, and it stayed together long enough to be eaten. The White Cross was a nice pub actually. It had all the essentials: good ales, burgers, and wifi. So thank god for hipsters really.

In fact it is fair to say that English food generally is on the improve. We really started to notice this at the Orangerie at Kew Gardens. We were on our way to North Devon with a wet but compulsory stop at the historic gardens. When our orientation “train” trip ended, and it was still raining, we headed for the shelter of the Orangerie for some lunch. And amazingly the food was terrific: simple, wholesome and tasty. Soups, roast vegie salads, and good bread. We even got a decent coffee there. We didn’t expect that. We really didn’t. There had been an air of autumnal harvest feasting through the first week or so of our stay in London. The friends we stayed with have allotments and were keen to show them off in all their glory – especially the crunchy juicy apples straight off the tree. But what we didn’t expect was that the food concession places in tourist spots such as Kew and Lincolns Inn Fields would be so much improved.

Random Thoughts on Morocco

If you fly Royal Air Maroc don’t be concerned if your 737-800 only has 45 passengers out of a possible 180. No good can come of wondering what the other 135 passengers know that you don’t. Nor can any good come of noting that if there were more passengers, the crew wouldn’t have so much time to smoke up the back of the plane.

When arriving in Marrakesh it is wise to have the correct address for your riad. The correct phone number is also useful.

When Marrakesh locals offer to show you the way, sometimes they are actually just being helpful.

Stay in riads rather than hotels – they were universally comfortable and interesting even if the plumbing was a bit idiosyncratic.

There are a lot of courtyards in Morocco, and there are a lot of French people smoking in them at 8am.

Learning to say bonjour convincingly is more productive than huffing about the smell of cigarettes.

When you are lost in the souks, remember the old navigation trick: satellite dishes generally point south.

There is excellent orange juice to be had in Morocco. It comes from having excellent oranges.

Some of the best meals we had were on the road – travelling to and from the desert. Wonderful country-cooked tagines.

Fez v Marrkesh? Both. Marrakesh is crazed and edgy, Fez is smarter and more relaxed. You need a bit of both.

Go to the desert, like Australia it’s an essential part of the country.

Buy a stupid head scarf, you know you want to.

Take some Imodium.

On Being Home

Our arrival back in Sydney was marked by a queuing crisis in customs and a shouting match between taxi drivers. I blame the heat.

By Friday night we had mostly recovered from the jet lag, and headed for King Street. Out of habit really, and to remind ourselves of where we were up to. There was a lot of Halloween silliness going on, but as always King Street does things differently. You can never be sure whether the naughty-nurse-zombie outfit is regular Friday night gear or special for Halloween. On the way home we came across a heavy metal band blasting out frenzied riffs to the delight of the crowd beneath the I Have a Dream mural. They were the real thing: the bass player had a nazi helmet, eyeliner and a chain for a guitar strap.

It’s good to be home.

Back in the harness next week – we’ll be visiting Spencer Guthrie.