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Andrew Christie

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Quest

Mimosa Winery – Voucher system part 1: The Vouchsafe

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Back last year when we announced that we were decamping to the far south coast, a couple of things happened. Some people burst into laughter, others into tears – but some gave us vouchers. Gift vouchers to be exact, for restaurants in our new neighborhood. I suppose they thought that otherwise we would never get a decent meal again, or that we, and this blog, would fade away, with nothing to sustain us but the gorgeous Sapphire Coast scenery.

We received three vouchers: one given to me by the Stropette and the Stropolina, and two others given to Strop by her bookish mates. As the vouchers were received into our hot little hands well before we were actually due to depart, it was obviously important to keep them safe. I naturally found a cunningly secure place to store mine. I put it in my spare wallet – the black one that I keep in the top drawer. And I backed up this repository with an internet-wide reminder system that would beep and flash, reminding me to look in said spare black wallet, once we were safely relocated, and in a position to enjoy the fruits of the voucher. Foolproof. Obviously.

Strop stuck her two vouchers to the fridge door with magnets. Very strong magnets admittedly, but still, its a system that is basically lacking in any type of cunning. And where is the back up?

It wasn’t until I began to pack up my office that the fatal flaw in my cunning plan became apparent. I was going to have to pack up my top drawer, which meant moving the spare black wallet from it’s safe place to another safe place. Easy. Except when we arrived at our beautiful new abode, and started opening all the boxes, the spare wallet wasn’t where I thought it would be. The opening of each box from then on, was greeted by a rapidly inflating bubble of hope and desperation, which then burst as my scrabbling fingers reached the bottom. There was no sign of the wallet. The wallet had gone into the void, over the event horizon that forever separates lost from found.

Meanwhile of course, Strop’s two vouchers were back on the fridge, waving gently every time the door was opened. Hello, they seemed to say, here we are. Let’s eat.

In the end it didn’t matter because everything is on the internet and the Stropette just emailed a new copy and Strop printed it out. Surprisingly she made something of a point of putting it on the fridge with the others.

Anyway, the vouchers were a very generous set of gifts, and they have given us a running start at the local eateries.

Our first voucher-fueled outing was to the Mimosa Winery restaurant, which is down the road a bit. About 15 minutes drive. (We now live in a spread-out world where distance is measured in driving times rather than in walking times.)

We dragged our friends Zena and Peter along for this outing. They are locals now, refugees from Canberra, and have been our guides to living on the south coast. We stayed with them when we first started looking for somewhere to park our escape pod, and we fell in love with their local area.

Our visit to Mimosa Winery was on a perfect Sunday. The way you always imagine autumn weather: blue skies, warm, and no wind.

The restaurant is perched on a hill overlooking vineyards and surrounded by artfully backlit coastal forest. You enter the restaurant from a courtyard on the high side (excellent accessibility), and proceed through to a large deck over looking the vineyards.

Now Peter is a man of strong opinions and an Irish complexion, so he was initially wary of the table we were offered on the deck. However, after a bit of umbrella heaving we settled ourselves down at the newly shaded table and began the nattering. This largely consisted of valuable advice on how to survive life on the Far South Coast.

Where did you get your firewood from? Oh him, he’s all right, but there’s this bloke in Quaama that will do you a truckload for the same price. Fresh fish? There’s this place down a back street in Narooma. Doesn’t look like much, but it’s bloody good value. Jam? If you’re not making it yourselves, the 777 supermarket in Bermi have all those Eastern European brands. (These are what our family has lovingly referred to as Chernobyl Jam since that unfortunate incident with the radioactive cloud.)

It took the arrival of the waitress to bring our attention back to matters of immediate consumption. That was when the irresistible force of Strop’s desire for a glass of Rosé met the immovable object of Peter’s disdain for pink wine.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

His objection seemed to be based on the fact that Rosé is an abomination, neither red nor white, and definitely not complex enough. Zena I and felt compelled to maintain our respective party loyalties, so a demarcation was established down the middle of the table with Shiraz on one side and Rosé on the other.

For entrée we split down the middle again. Szechuan squid vs Porkbelly, but this time Zena and I had our money on the squid. Unfortunately porkbelly was the clear winner, even though the squid held its end up gamely.

Zena and I again teamed up for the mains, opting for the fish of the day – Blue-eyed cod – while Peter went for confit duck breast, and Strop went for local mussels. Zena thought her cod was a bit overdone so the event ended up a tie between the duck and the mussels. Both of which were excellent.

There were only three competitors in the dessert round, Strop having decided to rest on her laurels. Zena and Peter with their chocolate mousses in martini glasses vs my plucky little passionfruit semifreddo. Luckily for me the semifreddo kicked it out of the park. It was strong and clear and very passionfruity. A real zinger.

The afternoon, and Mimosa Winery, proved to be worthy of the generosity of our friends and family. It was also heartening to see the restaurant relatively busy. It wasn’t full by any means, but there were plenty of punters willing to make the drive and enjoy a terrific lunch.

So thanks be to the voucher givers. You know who you are.

The transition from Inner West to Far South

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Hello there.

It’s been a while I know, but a lot has happened. Let me tell you all about it.

Some of you will have gathered that we have moved our base of operations. Having been close to everything for a long time, we thought we would have a try at being far from things. Far, far away from things in fact.

As all places are defined by their proximity to the birthplace of our nation, we have moved from the warm and noisy embrace of the Inner West, all the way to the startlingly beautiful Far South Coast. Here, under the ever-changing gaze of Mother Gulaga (look it up) we will embrace small town life, get to know the sea mammals, and constantly re-fill the bird baths. (Wattle birds obviously know nothing about water conservation.)

It has been a big change for us, but an exciting one.

We have been pondering what this move will mean for the Quest. The Far South Coast is definitely not King Street. Indeed, in our hometown of Bermagui, the real challenge for the Quest would not be to dine at every eatery, but to do them all in one day. Perhaps that can be a challenge we will put to visitors.

Another option we considered was a survey of the bacon-and-egg rolls of the region, but suspect this might not be as interesting for everyone else as it would be for me. (However, if you are down this way and fancy a lovely breakfast roll, check out the Blue Heron Cafe in Moruya. Highly recommended.)

So without having any fancy scaffolding to prop up a new Quest, I suspect that we will just check out the local offerings, as and when the opportunity arises.

So here we go, starting with a classy Italian restaurant called Il Passagio, which I gather means passage but can also mean passing, crossing or transition. All of which are particularly appropriate to our current condition.

We dined at Il Passagio at the end of Easter, on the last official night of our extended house-warming event, which saw us accommodating 15 wayfarers. Friends and family from near and far joined us for a chaotic, but fun-filled few days. By the last Friday of the holiday everyone had gone home except for the Stropolina, so we took the opportunity for a night out. The good thing about living in town is that, like Camperdown, it is easy to walk anywhere you might want to go. In this case it was across town to the Fisherman’s Wharf, where we stopped first at the Horse and Camel Wine Bar to get ourselves in the mood. After a momentary confusion during which we found ourselves perusing the ‘expensive wines list’ we were directed to the row of bottles on the bar, which were better suited to our modest whistle-wetting needs. We enjoyed their Rosé and Shiraz, but the Stropolina seems to have taken against Temperanillo, claiming it tastes like compost. Sometimes I despair of the young people.

It is interesting in getting to know a new town, to see who drinks where. We noted that the demographic supporting the wine bar seemed distinct from the one at the pub. Even though the wine bar is located at the Fisherman’s Wharf, most of the clientele didn’t look like they had much to do with fish until it was lined up beside a pile of chips.

Our fun evening was somewhat tempered by a sobering phone call from my father’s doctor. Another round of drinks was required to buffer this reminder that even cutting edge therapies have their limits. So we drank to Dad. And Mum, and all the others who have reached their limits over recent years.

Then we moved next door and proceeded to test the limits of our belts. Italian food will do that.

Wapengo oysters to start. These creamy little puddles of seaside essence were hastily slurped out of their shells. Next was an excellent potato, rosemary and anchovy pizza. It was simple and crisp, with clean strong flavours. After the pizza we decided to take a run at all the pastas. The purity of our ambition was somewhat tempered at the last minute when Strop decided we needed to tick the vegetable box too. So she threw a salad into the mix.

My gnocchi was a knock out, and the prawn linguini and spaghetti hardly got a chance to cool down. The salad featured apple, pancetta and a soft cheese I had never heard of called burrata, and it didn’t last long either.

For dessert I went with the specials board: orange and thyme ice cream. And yes, it was as good as it sounds. Stropolina opted for the old favourite, Tiramisu while Strop went for something with meringue and marscaponi – washed down with a glass of Limincello. By this time I was worried about the tightness of my belt, and conscious that the walk home was up hill, so I abstained.

It was a lovely evening and a fitting first outing on the Bermie leg of this blog.

In doing what we laughingly call research here, I discovered on the Il Passagio website, that they are advertising the restaurant for sale. It seems such a pity, but it is a very familiar situation given our experience with the restaurant churn on King Street. We will just have to use it as an excuse to go back again as soon as possible.

If any of you are wondering where the next John Lawrence book is up to, never fear, I haven’t left him in a shallow grave beside the Princes Highway. The manuscript for book 3 is here in a pile beside me, waiting for a decision on whether it requires the merciful attentions of a scalpel or an axe. Or possibly a garden fork.

So as the wood smoke mingles with the salt spray, and the cat yowls to be fed, it is time to say farewell from the far, far south coast. Until next time.

Lady Hampshire – welcome back to the local

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After a lengthy closure, our local pub, The Hampshire, has reopened with a gender re-assignment, as the Lady Hampshire. The closure was long and unexplained, although there were mutterings about fire regulations whenever the locals gathered to gossip. On a couple of occasions I did a bit of lazy googling to see if there was any mention of what was in store for the pub, but never found anything. Over the years we have had a bit of a rocky relationship with our local. When we first arrived, in the ‘hood, the Hampy was a venerably run down but functional local institution. It was good for a quiet beer, but the dining room was always plagued by the sickly sweet smell of urinal cakes wafting out of the Mens every time the door opened. It was enough to put you off your parmy.

Then someone got the idea of putting someone with a bit of nous and vision in charge of the kitchen. For one shining year we had a local pub that was still run down and smelly, but which served wonderful food. Proper food too, not just schnittys and burgers. The chef, Tony, was the real deal. The main menu changed according to the markets and the seasons, but there were regular favourites. A standout was a dessert whose name escapes me, but which lay hidden within a cloud of spun sugar. And Camperdown Fries: crisp roasted smashed spuds. Served with everything, they were Tony’s version of chips.

But it didn’t last. Tony left. We never found out where he went to, presumably somewhere he didn’t have to work seven days a week. Then the pub was sold. New owners took over and in the kitchen, the faces changed regularly. With each change the menu slumped further into mediocrity. Saggy and uncomfortable lounges started to creep in from the back lane, as the new managers tried for a grunge vibe. A lone pinball machine appeared. Never a good sign. We still went along occasionally. Tuesday night trivia was fun for a while, till the quizmaster had a falling out with the management.

Then we stopped going altogether, so it was a while before we noticed that the Hampy had stopped opening. For nearly two years the only sign of life was the growth of an increasingly dusty pile of unopened mail just inside the door of the main bar.

Then last month, signs of activity. Open doors giving glimpses of ladders propped against walls, and extension cords snaking across carpets. Oh ho, I thought. Someone is going to give the Hampy the renovation it needs.

Not quite. More of a spit and polish, with a spray of graffiti on the side.

Within a week there was a some new Lady Hampshire signage up and the doors were open. There wasn’t any fanfare, just a chalkboard scrawled with “Yes We Are Open”. And of course a few lights on.

I dropped in for a quick one on what might have been the first afternoon, using the flimsy excuse that I needed somewhere quiet to read the last piece of work from my writing group before our meeting.

After such a long closure I had been hoping for some change, but the main changes were new carpets and a bunch of murals. The only structural change is the closure of one of the doors to the men’s toilet, which at least means that there is less of the urinal cake smell.

One of the major pluses of the new Lady is having Wayward Brewing’s excellently drinkable Camperdown Ale on tap. But this has to be balance by a front bar that is dominated by enormous screens, all showing competing sports channels. On that first visit, in the middle of the afternoon, the front bar was empty, probably because of the loud and unnecessary commentary accompanying a US college basketball game.

The dining room has been spruced up a bit with murals everywhere, and all the fashionably uncomfortable lounge furniture has gone. It was probably an requirement for OHS complience. Out the back nothing relieves the domestic landscape tragedy that has always been the courtyard / smoking area.

The kitchen follows the current trend towards Americana. There are tacos, and fried chicken, and a bunch of other stuff that I haven’t tried yet. So far I have had trouble getting past the taco section of the menu. Two for ten bucks – it is too good a deal for me to overlook. My favourites so far are barramundi (fresh, clean flavours) and beef brisket (smokey, melt-in-the-mouthness). Obviously there is going to have to be a lot more research done. A lot more, just as soon as I’ve made sure about the tacos. The American food trend is marked by a proliferation of those red plastic baskets, which seem to be some kind of symbol of authenticity. Still I suppose they are step up from serving food on wonky chopping boards.

The side passage that connects Parramatta Road to the courtyard, and is potentially the Lady Hampshire’s most interesting space, has now been embellished with an extremely long mural featuring enough caricatures of Australian television personalities to populate anyone’s nightmares. It draws a lot of attention from the punters, trying to name all the personalities, which is something I suppose. The young people seem to like it.

So go and check out the Lady Hampshire. The food is good. Really good, so far. I’ll be going back, I plan to work my way through the whole menu. On our last visit Strop and I tried the dessert. It’s no spun sugar extravaganza but the deep-fried Golden Gaytime is exactly as advertised and does not disappoint.

Camperdown is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment with The Commons, Wayward Brewing, and now the Lady. And about time too.

 

Looking for the perfect Christmas present?

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Greetings from sunny but cold Cooma, on the edge of the Snowy Mountains in southern NSW. I’m down here for a week of fly-fishing and writing. Or maybe writing and fishing. I’m not sure of my priorities at the moment.

In my absence Strop has taken it upon herself to organise a Christmas sale of the John Lawrence paperbacks at Newtown Markets on Saturday the 10th and 17th of December. So if you are looking for a great present for Christmas, get along to Newtown Markets, from 10am and pick up a copy of Left Luggage or Tunnel Vision. Or get both.

The markets are at the corner of King Street and Enmore Road, just opposite the train station. Say hello to Strop for me. It’ll make her day.

Now I have to get back to figuring out what exactly all these rainbow trout are eating.

Wayward Brewing and a first look at Camperdown Commons

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The Wayward brewery is a relatively new arrival in our neck of the woods. It is hidden away, down a side street in a light industrial part of Camperdown, so it could have been here for a while. It is one of those places that you have to know about to know about. Strop and I ventured across Pyrmont Bridge Road to check it out on a cold winters night. It wasn’t our first visit to Wayward, that had been the week before, when we braved the tail end of an East Coast low to have a drink at our new local with Paul, Ashley, Ned and Mark. It was very jolly inside, with live music, a convivial crowd and quite a lot of beers were drunk. Especially by Strop.

Wayward is open four nights a week as a bar, but I assume that the brewery part is going full-time. The arrival experience a takes you down a broad ramp into a cavernous space with a bar on one side, a brewery round the corner, and a couple of smaller rooms at the back, that look a bit like Hitler’s Bunker if he had been around in the 1970s, or maybe somewhere in Falujah.

Reassuringly, the bar staff are all heavily tattooed and bearded, so at least we know we’re still in the inner west. They have a few wines for sale, but the main deal at Wayward is definitely beer. There is a row of numbered beer taps along the wall behind the bar, and above them a beer menu. There are a lot on offer, and the descriptions are pretty fruity. But in a good way – lots of pineapple, raspberry and passionfruit mentions.

The night Strop and I went on our own, the place was packed, mainly with thirty-something men. It turned out that the brewery was running tours, and most of the punters had turned up to be shown around and to try the range no doubt. Strop and I found a free table at the back, in one of the concrete bunkers. These things are so secure that no phone signals can get through, which might explain why there were some spare tables in there. The bunkers are furnished somewhat eccentrically, and feature a wide range of furniture. The chairs were very comfortable in a way that only the 1970s managed, although at the cost of aesthetics.

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My first choice beer, the Camperdown (nominative determinism rule), wasn’t available, so Strop bought me an Otis, presumably named after the lifts. She chose the appropriately named Charmer for herself, which was strong and chocolatey. My Otis on the other hand had distinct passionfruit tones, which was pleasantly weird.

In the laneway outside Wayward there was a tent set up, and a sign promising Italian food. We went the whole hog and ordered ragu in focaccia, arancini, and polenta chips. It was all good but the ragu was a standout, especially on a cold and rainy night. Very warming. El yummo.

You can also get pizza ordered in from one from of the local pizza joints. Unfortunately, it isn’t one of the local pizza joints that we favour with our custom, but I will be more than happy if the guy in the tent keeps serving up the ragu.

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Another new arrival in our area is Camperdown Commons. This is what has become of the old Camperdown Bowling Club. Nowadays it is a restaurant slash urban farm. I think I would have rather kept the bowlo but it had an unfortunate habit of going broke, and, frankly, serving crap food. The two facts may be related.

The new venture has high ideals, grows its own kale, has a chook yard, even serves Wayward ales, but we are yet to see if it walks the walk. There is a fair amount of style over substance going on. It is cleverly styled with lighting so subtle that Strop had to pull out the torch on her phone to read the menu. The furniture is very nice, slightly rustic, and wooden, and there are big tubs of firewood lying around as well. I kept looking but I couldn’t find a fireplace anywhere. Maybe they’re going to do wood-fired pizza.

During the schmoozing-of-the-neighbours stage of development, there was a lot of talk about this being a local joint for local people. A quick glance at the price list suggests that it is the sort of local you are probably going to save for the odd special occasion. Strop and I dropped in for a quick meal on its first weekend. The bar food was okay, but nothing to write home about.

Camperdown Commons (surely a name devised by a committee) promotes its locally-sourced everything, and ethical proteins etc, but there are nowhere near enough tattoos for my liking. Given it’s size, it is going to have to drag a lot of punters through the door. We shall see. I hope it is a success, especially after all the work they have done on the site. But unless they review the prices I will keep heading across Pyrmont Bridge Road for my Wayward beers and the ragu from the tent.

 

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Spoiler alert: crime stories need some crime

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It’s been a funny old day here in Sydney. Cold and mostly clear, full of deleted back story and birthday celebrations.

I have been writing in the living room because my brother is up from Canberra for our father’s birthday. 97. Not bad for an old fella, although he has taken to saying he is 79. Anyway, my brother is occupying the room I normally write in, so I am in the living room. And I am really enjoying it. It has the benefits of a cozy gas fireplace complete with fake coals, an excellent sound system that I can control from my phone, and a little table that is the perfect height for resting my legs on.

Having spent yesterday full of anxiety about what to do about the start of my new book, today I got to work. I have been cutting a swathe through the opening chapters, deleting acres of unnecessary backstory (some of which I was quite fond of), switching chapters around, combining some, and consigning others to the Spare folder. A kind of purgatory for scenes I can’t quite bring myself to cast into the flaming fires of the Trash folder.

All this carnage came about because of my writers group. Their reaction to what had been Chapter 3 was generally along the lines of  “Sure, okay, but nothing happens.” Which was true. The only action involved a guy coming home from work and talking to his aunt. There was a bunch of back story and atmosphere (buckets of it), but it wasn’t good enough for Chapter 3, when we want to be moving things along a bit.

One of my group put it this way, “This is Chapter 3, right?”

I nodded yes, thinking that’s what it says on the first page.

“And it’s crime isn’t it? The genre?”

I nodded again, starting to worry about where this was going.

“So where is the crime? It’s Chapter 3 and all we’ve had is a prank, someone visiting his daughter, and now a guy comes home from work. I’m a crime reader. I want some crime.”

It was hard to argue with. By definition, a crime novel needs crime, and it needs it up front, not buried back at Chapter 6. So now the bank robbery (ooh, spoilers) has moved up to Chapter 2 and two chapters that were mostly back story have been deleted or smeared seamlessly across two action packed chapters. With no visible joins. That’s the theory anyway. I suspect that the surviving chapters are now a bit too long for their own good. So a bit more hacking will probably ensue.

In the midst of all this carnage, we had a family outing to visit Dad for lunch. He drank Guinness, we drank hipster beers. Eventually we all ate pizza, after Strop managed to find the only pizza joint in the area that was open at lunch time. By a happy coincidence they were also some of the best pizzas in Sydney. Then for desert it was Strop’s home made coconut-lime custard tart. El Yummo!

So if your father turns 97, get him some Guinness and some Mad e Pizza from Darlinghurst. And if you can get hold of some coconut-lime custard tart, you can’t go wrong.