burger wars

The Warren View kicks off the Enmore Road Encore

January 23, 2016 by Andrew Christie 4 Comments

Well, it’s official, we are back in the saddle for what I have decided to label The Enmore Road Encore. And Strop is extremely excited about it. So excited that she feels the need to keep reminding me by saying “I’m really excited,” in a voice that is not quite a squeal, but which probably went to the same school.

We’re starting at the far end of the Enmore Road strip, and rather perversely our first stop is a pub that is not actually officially on Enmore Road, but The Warren View is a bit of a landmark and it has been on our radar for quite a while. Whenever we drive past on the way to the airport we remind ourselves that we should check it out some time. And it has an intriguing name, which is all the excuse I need. I’m hoping that it is named after a long forgotten race of warrior rabbits who loped along the banks of the Cooks River in the old days. That would be cool. I did a bit of research, but all I found out was that the Warren View likes to boast about the quality of its beer garden.

We decided to meet at the Bank Hotel for a drink first. Unfortunately it was pissing down, and a lot of young people had turned up with the exact same idea. So the pub was fuller than usual, with half the outdoor areas unusable due to a lack of effective roofing. I arrived first and managed to find a partially dry table out the back under an umbrella, but I then had to spend half an hour fighting off groups of desperate young smokers looking for somewhere dry to light up. By the time Strop arrived I was sharing the table with a group of Irishmen who had promised not to smoke and who were busy chatting about Harley-Davidsons. We had a beer while the rain continued to bucket down and chatted about how busy work was, and it not even being Straya Day yet.

Our glasses became empty just in time for an unscheduled break in the rain, so we left the young people to get on with blackening their lungs and headed off along Enmore Road to check out what we were letting ourselves in for. The Enmore Road strip has some interesting looking places, some worrying places, and quite a lot of massage joints along the way. It will be an interesting ride.

As the rain started up again we stood outside the Warren View and had a brief discussion about the colour scheme. Strop is inexplicably fond of the icky olive green paint job, and would like to paint our house the same colour. This cannot be allowed because she is wrong. It is an awful colour, suitable only for wattle trees. Luckily, the weather forced us to scuttle inside before things became too heated.

There is something endearing about the front bar of the Warren View. I’m not sure what it is exactly. It could be the odd way you enter, stepping down from street level, or the complete lack of decor, or even the nicely proportioned rectangular bar. Whatever it is, the Warren View is very welcoming in a completely unprepossessing way. By this time we were getting quite hungry so we headed straight out the back to the “famous” beer garden, wondering if there would be anywhere dry enough to sit. No worries. Most of the outdoor area (it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a garden) is covered by a variety of roofs, and as a bonus there were plenty of free tables. A pleasant change after the damp and crowded outdoor areas at the Bank.

Before we sat down, Strop reminded me once again how very excited she was to be back on the Quest. She even danced a little jig, and was grinning so much that it was starting to worry the people at nearby tables. It turns out that she has been deeply unsatisfied by our recent habit of making unpredictable forays to random restaurants. Strop is a woman that likes a list, likes to check it twice, and thinks it’s nice to tick off those suckers one by one

The Warren View menu is standard pub fare with a few blackboard specials on the side. I felt the need to continue the Burger Wars, but Strop decided to try one of the specials and ordered the eggplant parmigiana. When I was at the counter ordering, the woman serving me asked “you do know it’s vegetarian don’t you?” That sort of caring attitude is part of the charm of the Warren View.

Our food arrived quickly, somewhat limiting our social media engagement, and prompting us to put our phones away, so we could engage with the food instead. My burger was very nice. It had a good bun – firm but undemanding – good quality pickles and a tasty beef patty. The meat was on the well done side, but it was still very enjoyable. And the chips were excellent – fat crisp and crunchy. Strop’s parmigiana looked the goods, with lots of cheese and tomatoey stuff between layers of eggplant. It came with a couple of slices of garlic bread and a better than average salad. Needless to say we cleaned our plates.

On the way home we stopped off for Turkish ice cream. Those cunning Turks at Hakiki, not want to do things the same way as everyone else, have their own take on what ice cream should be. They mix it with some gummy stuff that makes the whole thing slightly sticky and more substantial. (Note from Strop, straying off on a bit of a research jag: they add salep, a flour made from the tubers of orchids from the genus Orchis. Okay? Got that?) And the flavours are exotic too. We had orange blossom, melon and feta, baklava, and a little bit of wild cherry. Yum.

I’m not sure what’s up next for the Encore, I forgot to pay attention, but I’m sure Strop will have worked it out. She is adamant that we are going by street numbers again, but this time in reverse numerical order. We will however reserve the right to avoid anything that looks too scary, and to go off-piste if we see something tucked away that looks interesting. It should be fun – see you next week.

Here is some more research from Strop who obviously finds my level of interest in actual facts a bit wanting:

Thomas Holt (1811–1888) was a Sydney business tycoon who built a castellated Victorian Gothic mansion named ‘The Warren’ in 1857 in Marrickville South. It was designed by architect George Mansfield, and contained an impressive art gallery filled with paintings and sculptures from Europe. It had elaborate stables built into imposing stone walls, and large landscaped gardens filled with urns overlooking the Cooks River. Holt gave it that name because he bred rabbits on the estate for hunting, as well as the grounds being stocked with alpacas and other exotics. The Warren was a landmark in the district for some decades; the still-operating Warren View Hotel in Enmore is evidence of this.

Jacks Newtown – A new year and a new front opens up in the Burger Wars

January 10, 2016 by Andrew Christie 4 Comments

Happy New Year. We’re back. I’ve been on a bit of a break over the last month, occupying myself with a fishing trip down to the Snowy Mountains, some eventful family Christmas celebrations, and a lot of work on my new novel.

But now we’re back to take 2016 seriously, noses to the grindstone, applying our stomachs to the eateries of Newtown.

While I was on holidays, I received a Christmas present from my employers – two tickets to a Sydney Festival event at Carriageworks. A German play called Woyzeck – a klassic, according to the interwebs.

It has to be said that Strop and I were a bit dubious, having already dismissed it back in October when we were in the process of choosing what Festival events we would attempt this year. The prospect of a play that was both in German, and very old, started alarm bells clanging away, but then, free tickets…

So on Saturday night we toddled up the hill. One of the benefits of living where we do is that we can walk to Carriageworks and home again easily, which is fine as long as it’s not raining. And Saturday night was dry and balmy, almost as if it was summer.

The plan was to get something to eat on King Street on the way to the theatre. Strop suggested a run at Rowda Ya Habibi because she never passes up an opportunity to have some of their cauliflower. I objected however, as we’d had barbecued cauliflower the night before. As a compromise, I suggested that we walk towards Rowda Ya Habibi and if nothing on the way took our fancy, there was the cauliflower as a fall-back. As it turned out we didn’t even get to King Street. The first new place we came to was Jacks Newtown, and Strop said “Ooh, let’s go there. I really fancy a burger.” Unlike the previous times we had walked past, there was no queue and it didn’t look as if they had already sold out.

Jacks is very minimalist with a spare, almost industrial set up. Lots of stainless steel and no clutter. It is very clean and efficient looking. There aren’t even any cash registers, just iPads.

The menu is minimalist too. You can have a plain burger, a cheeseburger, or a cheeseburger with bacon. And you can have any of those double. You can have fries, soda and Jack’s sauce (a kind of mustardy aioli). No chicken, and no fish but there is a vegetarian option. It is Newtown after all.

The burgers are modestly sized and reasonably priced, which is refreshing after years of bloated aspirational Gourmet Burgers. They come with lettuce, tomato, some kind of pickle and a mustardy sauce. The meat in our burgers was medium rare-ish, tender and tasty. The only thing I didn’t like about the burger was the bun. Which was soft, pappy and sweet. In other words it was American. Which I suppose is fair enough as Jacks is nothing if not a purveyor of American-style burgers. Anyway the buns are really just there to keep your fingers clean.

The soda comes out of a mixer machine in big paper cups. Strop has a set against all things Coca-Cola so she got tap water, also in a big paper cup, with ice delivered with a smile. Everything came in paper; the burgers and fries were on little paper trays as well. The fries are crinkle cut and come with lots of crunch.

There’s nothing fancy about the décor, a big black and white mural at one end, a big neon logo on the wall, and some tables and stools. That’s pretty much it.

All in all I’d be very happy to go back again.

So with our tummies full, but not too full, we set off to walk the rest of the way to Carriageworks.

Unfortunately, Woyzeck lived up to our fears. A Minimalist stage mostly occupied by a huge suspended net, German dialogue, and a cast who were so busy navigating their way around the constantly moving net that they barely had time to relate to each other let alone the audience. The music was good, but it was unclear why most of the cast we’re trying to sing like Tom Waits, other than because he wrote the music. The surtitles were positioned so far above the stage that you couldn’t read them and watch the action at the same time. It was drama without drama – or any emotional connection to the audience. Some of the audience must have enjoyed it though, judging by the whistling and stomping that accompanied the applause at the end. Strop and I looked at each other. Maybe it was just us, or maybe the others, who hadn’t drunk the koolaid had already walked out. There had been a few of those.

On the bright side though, our Festival experience can only improve from here.

576 Union Hotel – More connections than Telstra

June 6, 2015 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

Tuesday nights. There is something about them and the renewal of old connections. Last time it was Uncle Carl, this time it’s Lisa from Carwoola, and Greg from Kioloa (this is starting to sound like ABC talkback radio). In the dark distant past when the Stropette was still a poppet, and the Stropolina still far in the future, Strop and I rented an historic (run down) cottage on a farm outside Canberra. There were other cottages and other young couples and a few children, as well as chooks and lambs and tiger snakes. That was the year the drought broke, and Hawkey came to power. I remember watching the election results on the television in the living room of one of our new neighbours. When it became clear that labour had won someone shouted out, “Fantastic, I’m applying for an arts grant on Monday.” Aah, those were the days. Lisa and Andrew, her partner at the time, lived in the cottage near the shearing shed, we had the cottage in the front paddock, Jane and Jim were almost next door and Bill and Janette were in the next paddock. The owners of the property lived in the Big House and didn’t mix with the tenants much. We all drifted away eventually, moving into town or down the coast, lost touch, as you do. Heard sporadic news, as you do. And then some nerd became extremely rich by inventing Facebook. And people started finding each other again.

We haven’t seen Lisa since about 1984. She’s been living down the south coast, while we’ve moved to the smoke. Her current bloke, Greg, grew up at Kioloa, which is by way of being one of our favourite little coastal villages. He works for National Parks. Strop and I used to do consulting work for National Parks. Do you know so and so? Really? How is she/he? What are they up to? I worked with them on Biamanga. Or was it Gulaga? Did you know that thingy had moved to Byron? All that. So many connections. Specific ones as well as the general stage of life ones, involving things children do, grandchildren arrivals, and parental departures. We are now the generation that bonds over the shared experience of spreading our parents ashes upon the waters. “They’ve got these recycled cardboard containers now. You put the ashes in them and float them away. Eventually they sink and the cardboard dissolves.” I want one shaped like a viking long boat.

There was a lot to talk about, but we needed food. And drinks. The Union is one of those trendy pubs (I’m looking at you too, Forest Lodge) that has an awful lot of beer taps for beers you’ve never heard of. All with silly names that aren’t really that funny. Strop likes this sort of thing because she is Open To New Experiences, I don’t because I Can’t Stand The Tension, and all I really want is a nice sessional beer. They have a lot of whiskys too, all with names I’ve heard of, and all of which deserve my attention, but that will have wait for another time.

When the front bar was taken over by the Trivia hooligans, juiced up on the excitement of showing off how smart they are, like a bunch of five-year olds who’ve had too much food colouring, we toddled out the back to The Eatery. Unfortunately the heating system didn’t accompany us, so we had to wear our jackets as we squinted our aged eyes to read the big blackboard menu.

The Burger Wars were then reconvened. It has been a while – the last pub on the Quest was the Newtown Social Club, and I can’t remember a thing about that experience. Lisa and Greg decided that they would go the burger as well. However, when Lisa chose the the chickpea fritter burger I had my doubts about whether she was really entering into the spirit of the Burger Wars. I suppose her claim that the last time she had eaten a burger was in 1973, should have been a clue. Greg and I went the meat route. Beef burger with bacon for me, Chinese style BBQ pork for him. Strop turned her back on the Wars altogether and had the salmon. A very disappointing effort.

My burger came with more bacon than the bun could cope with, and the bits that were sticking out beyond their bready blanket were quite cold by the time my gnashers trimmed them off (just a quick tidying-up skirmish before the main confrontation). Generally, the burger was excellent but there were some structural issues with the bun. Greg found his pork burger “Very tasty.” And Lisa really liked the eggplant (I think there is a hipster gag there somewhere but I just can’t get hold of it). She really liked the chips too, “They’re up there with the ones those two Italian blokes make down on the flat there at Narooma.” I don’t think there can be any higher chip praise.

Did I mention that Strop ordered the salmon?

Afterwards we left Lisa and Greg with icecream cones clasped in their icy hands as they headed for the station, while we toddled down the hill towards home. Strop decided that she had met Greg before, in one of the many, many meetings with stakeholders, that working for a Government agency involves.

387 Newtown Social Club – Evacuation imperatives

August 17, 2014 by Andrew Christie 2 Comments

I feel like a bit of a fraud writing about the Newtown Social Club without having been to a gig there. A quick glance at their website will tell you that this place is first and foremost a music venue, which is lovely, except that most bands don’t start hauling their amps up the stairs before my bedtime. So this is going to be a review of the drinkey and eatey bits of NSC rather than the venuey bits.
This is the first time we have eaten at the Social Club, but I have had a few quiet settling ales there before plunging on to various quest destinations. One of the things I have noticed is that the front bar seems to have been mainly designed with evacuation in mind. There are very wide front doors and a distinct lack of furniture except around the walls. No doubt this is part of the requirement to get large numbers of sweaty music fans off the premises quickly, but it does limit the opportunities for sitting down with a quiet beer in the front bar.
Out the back though, there are plenty of tables and chairs – and a kitchen. The menu is refreshingly concise. As this venue used to be a pub, I have decided to conscript it for the Burger Wars. In contrast to Deans Diner, there are only two types of burger on offer. You’ve got your meat burger, or your vegie burger. And the pulled pork roll does not pretend to be a burger, which is a refreshing change (I’m looking at you Bank Hotel).

The lighting is so dim that I have to go and stand in front of the blackboard menu before I can actually work out what the fine print says. A pleasant surprise is the prices: $13 for a burger, $9.50 for a pork roll. We try the salt and pepper squid for entree and a beef burger for him and a pulled pork roll for her.
The crowd is mixed. The younger folk are in the front bar where the main feature is the pool table. In the dining area the demographic seems a bit older. Tonight there is a surprising amount of turquoise coloured hair, even for Newtown. There is a large group of women with quite a few attendant children, making me wonder if the Wiggles were playing upstairs, but Strop decided it was just a birthday celebration. The dining room is a good spot for groups, with tables that can easily be dragged into a variety of configurations.
The food doesn’t take too long and is generally good. The squid is tender and spicy with a nice bit of wasabi in the aioli. Always a plus. The insides of the pork roll and the burger are good too, but both are let down by the quality of the buns. My burger suffers near catastrophic failure when all the juices combine with the pressure of my fingers to turn the bun into very tasty, finger-licking mush. Luckily we have plenty of napkins on hand for just such an emergency. The pulled pork and the chili salsa are excellent, and the chips are some of the best we have encountered on the quest. As Strop put it “They were crispy even when they should have been soggy.”
There is a nice noisy relaxed vibe to the Social Club. Good music playing and it’s not too crowded. If they had a few more comfortable places to sit I might become a regular.

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 Bank Hotel – Anything with pulled pork

April 12, 2014 by Andrew Christie 6 Comments

I wasn’t sure if I was in the mood for going out, as I had been feeling crook on and off during the day. But I needed cheering up, and beer and chips are the best way to do that. So we set off up the hill to the Bank Hotel.

This place is enormous, with rooms that seem to go on forever. There are lots of bars and balconies, and a sunken beer garden. Everywhere was full of bright shiny young people, a very different crowd from Zanzibar and Kelly’s. There was an air of affluence and purpose about this lot. Strop and I did a quick tour through the ground floor, trying to decide where we best fit in, settling on the front bar. Strop was quite keen on a window seat, but they were already taken, so she chose the only seats in the bar where you couldn’t see the rugby on the TV screens. Strop reckons that it was because they were the only seats with backs to them but I think it was because she wanted my undivided attention.

The bar was crowded, noisy and dark; full of young women at this early stage. Later the crowd changed, dominated by large fit-looking men with neatly trimmed beards and shaved heads. Strop demonstrated once again how well she is plugged into the social networks of the inner-west by bumping into two people she knows, in a bar she has never been to before. She does this kind of thing everywhere we go.

Once we had a couple of initial beers under our belts, we started thinking about food. Strop wanted to leave all the ordering to me but she did give me some guidelines. “Anything with pulled pork,” she said, “I’ll have one of those.” This led us into a few musings on the lack of dirty jokes featuring pulled pork. Maybe we’re all too sophisticated now, I’m sure things would have been different if pulled pork had been a thing in the 1970s.

The helpful barmaid informed me that the Things In Buns section of the menu was as close as they got to burgers. The list included a pulled pork bun, and I decided that this would satisfy the requirements of both the Burger War rule, and her Stropness’s dietary requirements. To go with this, I selected a couple of things from the Share Plate menu because there was a two-for-one deal going, and I like a bargain. I couldn’t go past the duck sausage rolls, and the sticky lamb ribs sounded pretty good too.

When I got back to the table, I innocently, but perhaps a little over-enthusiastically, commented that I had just been served by the best barmaid in the world. Strop’s reaction was to ask what was so good about her and did I want to shag her. Long years of experience has taught me that there is only one productive course of action in this situation. Immediate and conclusive denial. Do not try to reason, do not waver, just hold the line, and deny, deny, deny.

When the food arrived I realised that there wasn’t much in the way of vegetables, but Strop helpfully pointed out that chips used to be vegetables. There was a little scoop of a very tasty coleslaw that came with the lamb ribs. It had mint in it which was a welcome and unusual combination. The lamb ribs were nice and sticky and chewy, I could have done with more of those. The duck sausage rolls were enjoyable, but you couldn’t really taste the duck. We cut the pulled pork bun down the middle and strangely my half turned out to be very enjoyable, with a little bit of horseradish, which was a good thing. But Strop’s half was a bit disappointing, apparently. Oh well.

As the night wore on, the big fit men started to move on, leaving behind a bunch of much more mundane and less fit looking men and women. For a while Strop and I were the oldest people in the bar, until a bloke turned up on his own, settling down at a table near us with a walking stick, a glass, a jug of beer, and a packet of crisps. He was here to watch the Rabbitos versus the Panthers, and he knew exactly what he needed for a successful night out.

Instead of dessert, Strop and I headed upstairs to check out the cocktail bar. This was another dark area, strangely decked out with pinball machines, pool tables and black flock, skull-patterned wallpaper. We took our time perusing the cocktail list which seemed to unsettle the barman. He was trying to be helpful, assuming we were a bunch of old gits who had stumbled into his bar by mistake. He was half right. He asked us what kind of spirits we normally liked to drink, while we tried to read the cocktail list. In the end Strop chose a late night daiquiri and I went for a loose interpretation of a whiskey sour. While the barman went about his showy and shakey business, Strop and I amused ourselves by making witty comments about the ingredients. I don’t think the barman was as amused as we were. The cocktails were good though.

On leaving the pub, we passed a gelato shop and decided that an ice cream was required after all. So we walked home through the rain, while Strop complained that her vegan After Dinner Mint ice cream was a great disappointment because it just wasn’t creamy enough. There are some things that can only be learnt through experience.

That is the magic of quest. Strop and I get to spend time with each other and find out just how complicated we really are.