Archives for February 2015

503 Oldtown in Newtown – Mapping the unknown world

February 22, 2015 by Andrew Christie 10 Comments

At the end of the last post I suggested that Europe Bar and Grill was up next. Well I got that wrong didn’t I. This whole out of sync numbering system is causing a lot of grief at Quest Planning HQ. Strongly worded memos are being circulated, press conferences called, only to be cancelled at the last minute. Chaos really.

I am pleased to be able to announce with almost 100% confidence that this week we are visiting, the somewhat oddly named, Oldtown in Newtown. Which turns out to be quite serendipitous because they have a Kids Menu and our guests of honour for the outing are none other than Will and Charlie of Mad Mex and the Great Onesie Encounter fame. It has taken more than a year’s worth of cajoling and pleading with the pair’s agents and managers to find a slot in their packed program for a headline night back at Painting the Bridge, but this week all that effort has paid off and everything has fallen into place. All we have to do is get them there.

“Walking?” says Will dubiously. Obviously the Painting the Bridge transport budget doesn’t stretch all the way to his limousine expectations.

“Yes, it’ll be fun,” says Strop, “An adventure. We’ll go through the park.”

Will and Charlie look at each other, weighing up the possibilities and communicating silently using Jedi mind powers that us old people can only imagine. “What park?” Charlie is sceptical; he knows that the devil is in the detail.

Strop assures him that it is a proper park with a proper playground, and I seal the deal by offering to bring along an old orange ping-pong ball that has been sitting on my desk for three weeks.

At last we set off, holding hands to cross roads, stopping to play in the park, checking out the Fire Station and the Police Station, examining the light pole adorned with shoes, until at last the “Is this the restaurant?” question is answered with a relieved “Yes.”

Oldtown is an Italian family restaurant, although you would never guess it from the décor, which has a bit of a retro boho theme – Strop assures me that this is the correct term – in pale tones of orange and green, with a few old soft drink crates stacked up around the place for character.

I have made a booking, not wanting to risk embarrassing our guests of honour by stuffing up the evening. Our table is marked out with a tiny easel and tiny blackboard, with my name written in chalk. Will thinks this is very cute but reckons they don’t know how to spell Andy. Strop has obviously done this kind of thing before, and gets him going writing out Andrew with the textas she just happens to have in her handbag. Unfortunately she only brought one piece of paper, which quickly gets torn in half.

While I am checking out the menu, Strop encourages the boys to drink a glass of water, hoping to fill them up before the fizzy lemonade hits the table. The kids menu has three courses: arancini, pasta Bolognese and gelato. Perfect. We’ll have two of those.

And for the grown-ups? The specials are, zucchini flowers, duck prosciutto salad and seafood soup. The grown-ups will have all of those, to share please. And some chilli chips.

The boys are drinking Limonata, which Will finds a bit exotic for his tastes but which Charlie is having no trouble making disappear. Strop and I are drinking beer: an IPA for her and a stout for him. While we are waiting for the food to arrive Will gets on with more writing and Charlie takes on the task of drawing the World of the Map.

The kid meals arrive first, an arancini in a little pot of sauce and a bowl of farfalle with Bolognese sauce and plenty of parmesan. The boys have no complaints. Our zucchini flowers arrive soon after, fried, brown and crispy, with a capsicum based sauce. Yum. Strop is amazed when Will and Charlie both finish off all their food with great gusto. Apparently this never happens.

The restaurant is filling rapidly now. Our next dish, the duck, takes a little while to arrive but luckily the boys have gone back to mapping the known, and in Charlie’s case, several unknown, worlds. The duck salad is excellent with slices of duck prosciutto, quarters of nectarine, cress, walnuts, white cheese and a drizzle of toffee. I really enjoyed this dish although I think Strop thought some of the duck fat was too fatty. We both found the lumps of toffee stuck to the plate very frustrating. There was no way to get it off without the risk of breaking the plate.

The seafood soup has a tomato-ey base and is piled high with octopus, muscles and crab and comes with lovely pieces of crispy oil soaked bread. Unfortunately we have to ask for spoons. The flavours are great although I am still of the opinion that crab is not worth the effort involved in getting at the meat.

By this stage the restaurant is very busy and the floor staff are looking a bit harried. Will and Charlie have given up on mapping the world and moved on to making weapons out of the clip-together pens. Strop and I intervened before they started shooting the other patrons. Will re-imagined his pens into a guitar – Heavy Metal! – before commandeering Charlie’s pens in an attempt to make a pen-tower tall enough to reach the roof. He didn’t quite make the roof but he did give the light fitting a good poke.

Eventually we have to ask the whereabouts of the chips and the boy’s gelato. The staff are apologetic about the delay – and I wonder if they are more busy than usual as a few family members seem to have been roped in to help out.

When the chips arrive they are worth the wait. Hand cut slices of potato, fried golden brown and sprinkled with chilli and parmesan. Charlie thinks he is in little boy heaven as I spend the rest of the night picking off bits of chilli and feeding them to him.

The gelato is vanilla and comes with strawberry coulis and a big strawberry garnish. Charlie polishes his off but Will only manages the strawberry and seems to be starting to find the whole evening a bit outside his comfort zone.

Charlie prepares to attempt a double somersault dismount while Will impersonates a zombie angel

The trip home is a lot faster than the outward journey. Powered by sugar hits from their soft drinks, the boys dance and cavort their way through the Saturday night King Street crowd. Not looking at all out of place amongst the pre Mardi Gras revellers.

The food at Oldtown in Newtown was very good, let down a bit by the delays. I would give them the benefit of the doubt, hoping that this was just an unexpectedly busy night. I would certainly like to go back some time and try out more of their menu.

501 African Feeling – with an Ash Street Cellar prologue

February 14, 2015 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

This was a strange day – Friday the 13^th and all that, Valentines Day eve, and also the eve of our wedding anniversary. Yes, that’s right, we got married on Valentines Day, although in those far off days, less fuss was made about it and I don’t even think that long stemmed roses had been invented yet. If we had thought it through a bit more carefully we might have changed the day of the wedding but you know, people were coming long distances etc. I was so out of touch back then that I didn’t even know it was Valentines Day. The problem with having your wedding anniversary on Valentines Day is that you can never get into the restaurant you really want, and if you do, then the place is full of young couples looking dreamily into each others eyes, and roving bands of flower and tat merchants are looking to make a buck by guilting you into forking out for an overpriced rose or any number of heart-shaped bits of shite.

Sorry. Getting a bit agitated here. So anyway, long ago Strop and I decided we would just do our celebrating either the day before or the day after our anniversary, when restaurants were in a more normal mode of operation.

Now, why was I telling you all of this?

So Friday, I was just expecting the normal thing, hit King Street after work, have a meal, make up something vaguely amusing to say about it and then get back to worrying about second book syndrome. But no, Strop is in town this Friday, “learning about stormwater”.

“Let’s have lunch,” she says, “Oh and by the way, I need a new phone.”

We went to Ash Street Cellars, which was busy but had a few vacant tables. I had heard good things about this place but had never been before (one of the draw backs of always eating on King St) so I was looking forward to trying it out, but was a bit worried that it might be an unfair comparison with African Feeling later on. Not to mention the threat to my waistline presented by two meals out in quick succession. Plus the odd beer – and they were quite odd, but more of that later.

We ordered empanadas, sardines, and an iceberg lettuce salad, plus a glass of wine. Quite abstemious by our standards really, but I had an afternoon of ignoring emails to get through before we took on African Feeling. The wine was great – cold and dry and pink. The food was good too, but we had to ask where the salad was (forgotten by the kitchen apparently) then we had to ask again after watching our waiter walk past the plate of pale green lettuce wedges sitting all alone at the pass. In the end they comped the salad, but still… Friday the 13^th? Maybe.

So, on to King St. We met up again at the Union Hotel, where Strop was waiting for me with three phones and a beer lined up on the table in front of her.

“They’re only serving beers from two makers, but there is lots of different types, and you can taste as many as you want,” she said, a bit excited. “There’s one called Lamborghini. You should have that one.”

The Union has gone completely hipster on the beer front. There are sixteen varieties that you have never heard of, all with stupid names that you will never remember because the beer is so strong that by the time you’ve tasted enough to work out which ones you like, you’re completely off your face. Sure they taste nice, but this amount of choice is what’s ruining the nation. And whoever said we should like our beer? Tasteless beer was good enough for our fathers and our father’s fathers, it should be good enough for us too. What this country needs is a strong leader to whip it into shape – someone like Peta Credlin.

So anyway, we were quite cheerful by the time we toddled up the street, having waited out a tropical downpour that filled the gutters and got Strop thinking wistfully about stormwater.

African Feeling is in a big newish building right next door to Arabella. We decided to sit outside as the rain had stopped but it was still quite muggy. As we perused the menu we had plenty of time to give detailed attention to the fashion crimes passing by on the narrow footpath. There was lots of busy hipster action – tight Warwick-Cappa shorts, ponytail and beard – and plenty of mullet dresses on offer. These popular atrocities are just wrong. They turn the description of the hair style – business up the front, party out the back – on its head, promising instead a party up front, and business out the back.

Obviously, by this stage we needed more beers. Strop had to peer in through the window to get the waiter’s attention as we were masked from his view by a wall – that was what he said anyway. A couple of Tuskers hit the table soon afterwards. There was no mention of a glass, so we drank out of the bottle in what I assume is a culturally appropriate way. It is certainly appropriate for King St.

Knowing nothing at all about African food, we probably should have asked the waiter for advice. He was a very cheerful young bloke with fading blue hair. As Strop put it, “He looks like he knows what he’s doing… well he looks jolly anyway.”

For entrée we ordered a dumpling dish simply on the basis of its silly name (again). The kpoff kpoff turned out not to be ‘light fluffy and golden’ as described in the menu but rather dark brown and stodgy. Still they were rather pleasant and, with their spicy dipping sauce, they went down very well with our new, elephant endowed beers. The kitchen forgot our other entrée dish, plantain, which we had chosen on the basis that it seemed very African. Friday the 13^th again? I am not a superstitious man, but it would be silly to ignore such an obvious pattern.

The waiter apologised and said the plantain would come out with the mains if that was okay. We said it was.

The mains were a fish and coconut curry, a goat stew and some chapattis.

The fish curry was very nice, with large fillets of fish and some vegetables in a very tasty and quite thick sauce. The goat stew was dark and strongly flavoured, and extremely spicy. It seemed to have been cooked for a long time as the goat was extremely tender but it was so hot that we immediately called for some yoghurt and mint to soothe our taste buds. At this point, I remembered that the waiter had asked how spicy we wanted the goat and fish dishes. Strop, never one to stick to standard units of measurement, jumped in with “a bit hotter than medium”. So what does that mean? Hot?

Well the goat was hot, and the fish was medium, so I guess on average they were a bit hotter than medium. The plantain didn’t have much flavour but it was nice with the curries. The chapattis were excellent.

On the way home there was another tropical downpour. The long walk home is even further when the gutters are overflowing. Next up is Europe Bar and Grill. I have been waiting for this since forever – anyone want to join us?

490 Pashas – The near-miss euphoria

February 7, 2015 by Andrew Christie 1 Comment

It turns out that Pashas has been around for a long time. Matt (of Jim and Matt fame) can vaguely remember going there when he lived in Newtown as a student. That was in the olden days when Newtown was really Newtown – what I think of as its dog shit and broken glass period. But I digress, Pasha’s is an institution and to have lasted so long in Newtown’s constantly changing restaurant landscape, it definitely must be doing something right. Certainly the use of tiles in the façade speaks of permanence and a disdain for fashion – as well as making it a bit of a landmark. Which is just as well because I am running late again – Newtown Social Club and Summer Ale late – and I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the road.

Strop and Jim are ensconced at a window table when I arrive, tucking into baba ganouj, and bread and washed down with Efes beer. I have no choice but to join in. Matt is running even later than me, but I think he had a better excuse – something work related. Having broken the banquet barrier last week at Arabellas we decide to give it another go. It also makes ordering much easier and leaves more time for nattering.

For some reason I end up doing the ordering again. “Four of your best banquets please squire,” I quip to the waiter, “and another round of Efes, while you’re about it.”

“And a bottle of pinot grigio,” Strop adds.

Matt arrives just after the beer but before the dips, which turns out to be a fairly narrow window. The dips are served on a big platter, and they are generous and varied. There is more baba, hummus of course, chilli and walnut, cucumber and yoghurt, spinach, and carrot. Along with the dips, are eggplants, grilled zucchini and a salad with pomegranate. As usual the bread runs out quickly, but it is rapidly replenished. With our food cravings being quelled, we get back to the chatter. This includes, in no particular order: anthem singing antics at Jim’s school, Matt’s chaos over colonial barrack design, Strop’s acting-up anguish, and my gateway feature fiasco. For some reason we then drifted into an erudite discussion of the best place to buy soy-burgers in the 1990s, and also something about ‘Dixie spoons’. At least that’s what my notes say. No, I have no idea either – thankyou Mr, or Ms auto-spell.

As the waitress tries to clear enough room on the table for the next round of the banquet, Jim quickly wipes up the last of the dips with the last of the bread. The next round is The Meat. In this case, chicken kebabs, lamb kebabs and spicy rissoles. Very nice.

Pasha’s has a good atmosphere with plenty of décor-ey bits and pieces including low hanging coloured glass lanterns (below head height as it turns out), and travel posters. It is a double-wide, occupying two shop fronts, separated by brick arches. There are low tables for those with ambitious knees, and some high tables for the rest of us. Tonight it is buzzing with plenty of punters and lots of Friday night conversations.

When the sound of happy dining is suddenly shattered by blaring music, I assume that it is a mistake and that the volume will soon be adjusted. But my optimism is misplaced. The music heralds the arrival of that scourge of middle aged white men, The Belly Dancer. An apparition in blue arrives between the tables, with a smile set in red concrete, and belly rolls that won’t stop rolling. A discernible tremor of terror spreads from table to table, as each man realises what this means. Yes, audience participation. Our table is backed into a corner with no means of escape, but luckily it is also the furthest from the threat. Perhaps the music, or the will to embarrass, will run out before she gets to us. But no, conversation is suspended as she gradually gets closer, leaving behind her a trail of bewildered and embarrassed men, and a couple of women who really got into it. When she gets to our table she quickly works out that Strop is the only one there who might have the courage to take up the challenge, the terms of which are being laid out in great detail, by the mesmeric undulations of the her navel. Not tonight though, Strop isn’t in the mood.

As she lifts her gaze to the rest of the table, I take a sudden interest in making sure that I am getting down complete and accurate notes. I don’t know what Jim and Matt do, but it works. The dancer turns away, vibrating imperiously, and obviously disgusted that none of us is man enough for her.

Matt and Jim definitely not looking at the dancing

When the music ends, normal transmission of conversation gradually resumes as a rush of near-miss euphoria takes over the room.

Dessert is baklava and Turkish delight, accompanied by apple tea, Turkish tea, or Turkish coffee.

So what’s the verdict? We have been having a bit of a middle-eastern sojourn lately. I think that Pasha’s has easily the best atmosphere of all the Turkish and Lebanese restaurants we have been to on the quest – a very pleasant buzz. On the food front it is a near run thing, but Arabellas clarity and complexity of flavour, probably wins.

Next week we’re going African! I have no idea what to expect.