Cocktails

Luyu & Yum Yum – Babetown vs the King of Newtown

September 26, 2015 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

Okay its been a while. So long in fact that the few notes I took on the night are mostly meaningless now. I mean, New York shoes, what could that refer to? Anyone? Now that I’m showing visible signs of ageing, I must take more meaningful notes – the old memory is not what it used to be. Either that or write things up sooner.

Anyway, what I do remember about this particular outing was that it was a lot of fun. Strop organised it as an excuse for us to go back to Luyu & Yum Yum for their dumplings which are both yummy and spectacularly presented. However, from my point of view the main draw for returning was actually their whisky sours variants. These are called King of Newtown on the cocktail list, come with a culturally appropriate sprinkling of tea leaves on top, and are delicious.

Strop decided that as Luyu & Yum Yum could accommodate their various dietary pecadillos, she would invite the Stropolina and her housemates, collectively known as Babetown along on this outing. As it turned out, the Eleanor part of Babetown was unable to attend due to breaking her wrist playing netball. So while she was stuck at home with only a handful of serious painkillers for company, the rest of the team kept Strop and me company in Newtown.

The Babetown-lite faction was made up of Katherine, Jess and the Stropolina. They were joined by Maddy, one of their mates, who helped maintain the symmetry of our table. Strop and I had carefully positioned our aging and wrinkled forms facing each other in the middle of the table, so that we would haved gorgeous young things on either side, ready to give us a polite and caring poke if we happened to exhibit any embarrassing symptoms of ageing. Such as falling asleep or dribbling.

Luyu &Yum Yum is a relative newcomer to King St. It moved in to the upstairs space that used to be occupied by Paju BBQ, and transformed what was a bit of a barn of a space into something much darker and sexier. At one end there is a glassed in kitchen full of sizzling woks and bamboo steamers, at the other end is a screened off space with tables for large parties. In between there is a bar and lots of tables which mostly seem to be occupied.

There are plenty of staff out on the floor and in the kitchen. All very friendly and efficient. First order of business was drinks, and I successfully managed to convince everyone to try a King of Newtown to start with. Everyone said they enjoyed them, but I did notice that a couple of Babetowners switched to other cocktails for the next round. Oh well, more sour whisky for me I suppose.

Luyu & Yum Yum is a high concept dumpling joint. The little steamy or crispy parcels are like the Faberge of dumplings. Artful and yummy, and likely to dump a burst of hot tasty soup in your mouth when you bite into them. Some are shaped like hedgehogs or white rabbits (complete with red eyes), some just look like dumplings. All are yummy.

Despite my wish to go off the reservation and try things that weren’t actually dumplings, Strop and Babetown were adamant that they were happy just to have lots of dumplings. And cocktails.

The room was quite noisy, so even the young people were cupping their hands around their ears in order to hear what was being said on the other side of the table. It was Friday night and I have a theory that people are louder on Friday nights after they have been let out of work for the weekend. The pent up pressure of a week’s worth of quiet desperation leads to a quick and noisy release. And there was music too, which appealed to Babetown and resulted in a little bit of seat dancing when they thought no one was looking. They decided the music selection sounded like the So Fresh 2001 compilation (back when they were ~13 year olds!).

I just remembered what the New York shoes note referred to. The Stropolina was telling a long and involved story about trying to buy some special designer shoes for her cousin’s eighteenth birthday when she was in New York recently – the point of which still escapes me. Oh well I suppose it’s some progress. What about Who’s Hannah? Anyone have any ideas what that might mean?

It’s great to see places like Luyu & Yum Yum opening up in King Street. Smart, fun and yummy, Asian with style and attitude. More of that please. Next time I go I want to try some of their teas, and the non-dumpling offerings.

Luyu & Yum Yum – Level 1, 196 King St, Newtown

528 Matee Turkish Grill – Can you be finished in an hour?

April 12, 2015 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

We hadn’t been to the movies in ages. The last one we went to was the one about Bletchley Park and the gay genius guy, which we quite enjoyed until everyone spoilt it by telling us how it wasn’t exactly history. Outrage! Who would have thought that Hollywood would mess about with the facts in order to tidy up the narrative? But as anyone who has dabbled around in this blog will know, I’m not all that fond of facts myself. So we were off to another Hollywood movie, having chosen the comfort food option of a romantic comedy, rather than the paleo-diet new Russian cinema classic. Sometimes you have to pass over the kale and go straight for the popcorn. The plan was to have dinner after the movie at Matee Turkish Grill, which I think is probably the last restaurant in the Middle Eastern enclave we have been eating our way through. We got out of the movie a bit early, so I suggested a quick beer at The Bank to while away half an hour until it was a decent time to eat. Little did I know, but more of that later. Strop tends to be a bit of an admirer of your craft beers so I bought her one with a witty, and immediately forgettable, hipster name, while I had a Cooper’s Pale. Despite it’s name, her beer won the taste stakes. My beer just tasted like beer. We whiled away the time sitting in the window, looking out on the passing King St parade, commenting on the length of people’s legs as well as their life choices. Eventually, our wit and our beer exhausted, we continued our journey along King St. I was starting to wish that we had caught the bus when we spotted Matee’s sign in the distance, but before we got there, Strop pointed out the new Pakistani place that has opened up next to Europe Grill. It was only then that we noticed that in what should have been Smash Sausage Kitchen was a new cocktail bar! Apparently soon after our visit, the sausage vendors had packed up and moved out, and over Easter the place got a blue and black paint job, emerging from its drop-cloth chrysalis as Mixology – although the sign for the street hadn’t arrived yet. We had a quick chat with the manager, sporting a thematically appropriate splash of blue in her hair (or it may just have been a bit of paint courtesy of the Easter makeover). She explained that as well as high-tech cocktails, incorporating something called ‘alcoholic bubbles’, they are also doing food, for the moment at least, something to do with the license transfer process. We were gobsmacked as we continued on our way down the road to Matee. Talk about churn. Where will I go for curry mash now? Matee Turkish Grill occupies two shopfronts. One half is the kitchen and takeaway, and the other is the restaurant. Unfortunately due to our procrastination at the pub and the cocktail bar, by the time we got to Matee the place was largely booked out. There was a bit of head shaking, and looking around at the occupied tables by the waiting staff. Then the young woman who seemed to be in charge said “Can you be finished in an hour?” Strop and I looked at each other. Could we? I was thinking that it rather depended on how fast they could put the food in front of us, but before I could think of a polite way to put this Strop had said “Yes.” We were shown to a table at the back of the restaurant, next to a pretty looking courtyard, that opens onto Angel Street. In the end we had plenty of time for two rounds of drinks, a shared platter of dips and salads, and a plate of grilled lamb. I stuck with beer, opting for the culturally appropriate Efes, while Strop moved on to the house red. The Matee Plate came with all the usual dips, tabouli, a kind of salsa, and probably the best falafel I have ever eaten. They were crisp and soft and tasty – triple yum. There was more than enough Turkish bread for the dips but the way they were presented on the plate in rows beside each other, meant that they soon turned into a bit of a muddle in which it was difficult to tell the baba from the hummus. Oh well, it all tasted good. The pieces of lamb in the Yoghurt Kebab were tender and tasty and drizzled with yoghurt. Their juices had flowed out onto a layer of croutons underneath. By the time our hour was up we were stuffed. On the way back up the hill we decided to stop off at the sign-less Mixology for a couple of quick dessert cocktails. We went for what we thought were culturally appropriate cocktails: pomegranate for me, and apple for Strop. They were tasty but were both very sweet. Unfortunately, due to the licensing conditions we had to order some food too. Garlic bread, from somewhere up the road (Europe Bar and Grill maybe?) was soon delivered to our table. After that lot we could hardly move. We had another quick stop off on the way home to watch a jazz band busking in front of the ‘I had a dream’ mural – it’s not every day you hear a euphonium solo on King Street. It felt very Treme and was a lovely foot-tapping reminder of last week at the BluesFest.

503-511 Bench – Leaving red flock wallpaper far behind

March 1, 2015 by Andrew Christie 9 Comments

I feel as if I am spending far too much time thinking about street numbers. Bench’s address is 503-511 King Street, so does it come before or after Europe Bar and Grill, which is number 506? And any way who gives a flying proverbial. Well, me really, because we are saving Europe B&G for a special outing with Monica who is heading home soon. So this week we visited Bench, accompanied by young Tessa, who is currently lodging in the penthouse suite (attic).

When I arrived, having first stopped for a refresher at the Botany View Hotel, Strop had occupied a seat in the window looking out onto King Street. She was busy perusing the cocktail list to celebrate Bench’s “Attitude Adjustment Hour”. Her first choice wasn’t available because some bastard had drunk all the tea-infused vodka. Her second choice might have been called a Lemon Fizz, while I chose a Day’s Thunder, which seemed to be missing a preposition. Despite its grammatical disability, my cocktail was excellent – white rum, grapefruit juice, lime, and ginger. Very infreshing. Unfortunately Strop’s cocktail turned out to be a bit of a fizzer.

Wine Bar always seems an old-fashioned term to me, a hang over from the 1970s. Maybe they are making a bit of a comeback, like fondu. I always imagine wine bars as having oak barrel furniture and red flock wallpaper, but that might just be because in the dim and distant past I worked on a television show called Number 96, which had just such a wine bar set.

Bench is nothing like that; the décor is a kind of industrial chic with lots of burnished metal to reflect the garishly coloured lighting. Despite the industrial look, the vibe is relaxed, and it’s not trying too hard to be hip, which is a refreshing change on King Street. It is a place where grown-ups can feel comfortable and more importantly, a place where they can hear what is being said. There is music of course (Shaft!), but it is not too loud.

When Tessa arrived we had a quick little frenzy of photo taking, then got down to ordering food. Bench has a tapas menu with lots of tempting sounding treats. although Strop reckons you can’t beat the classic tapas dishes (patatas bravas, chorizo, etc). The food on offer looked all right to me though, and Strop and Tess had no trouble choosing our first round of food: lamb cutlets, Peking duck, hand cut chips, and arancini balls. A half litre carafe of rosé was ordered as well, to replace our cocktails.

While we waited for the food Tessa regaled us with snippets of gossip from her school’s awards ceremony, which had occupied most of her day. Mindful of the serendipity and not much else, I bored her and Strop by telling them about a scene in the book I’m writing where a teenage girl getting an award from a government minister, squirts him all over with pig blood as he hands over her certificate. I was shocked by how un-impressed they were.

The Peking duck pancakes were small but tasty, with a nice piece of succulent duck in each. The three cheese arancini balls were crisp on the outside and gooey inside. The chips were just regular chips, nowhere near as good as last week’s (but then they did come a lot faster). The lamb cutlets were tasty and succulent but perhaps a little large. Mine flopped around dangerously, spilling the rich capsicum and tomato sauce, as I tried to eat it using the built-in bony handle.

I was left in charge of ordering for the second round of tapas. Tess and I had a long discussion about whether the ginger beer batter on the tofu was enough to make it edible. I reckoned that in the interest of science it was worth doing the experiment. Tess was sceptical, but I figured that Strop would eat them if no one else did. I also chose the other balls: zucchini and fetta; and nachos. The nachos got a big vote of approval from Tess even though she reckoned she wouldn’t eat much as she was now quite full. But I still wanted nachos.

The zucchini and fetta balls were tasty but not as crunchily satisfying as the arancini balls, and unfortunately the tofu was still tofu, despite the crunchy outer layer. The nachos were yummy though, but then when are nachos not? These ones came with shredded chicken and guacamole.

Despite the lurid purple lights I am seriously considering making Bench my regular pre-quest drinking hole. It is airy and pleasant, and doesn’t remind me of Number 96 at all.

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.

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

May 4, 2014 by Andrew Christie 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.