Hipster

Bauhaus West and Kafenes via a hipster parallel universe

May 28, 2016 by Andrew Christie Leave a Comment

Last night someone served me a beer in a jar. It even had a picture of a hipster on the side, just in case you missed the joke. This cannot be allowed to stand. This is just taking irony too far. I’m looking at you Batch Brewing.

However, this assault on my drinking standards may have been just the impetus I needed to get me blogging. I have been bogged down last few weeks, working hard on the new book. Working with my editor and the beta readers, trying to get past fourth draft and into the fifth. It’s coming along now, I hope, having lost a few thousand words from what turned out to be a fairly flabby middle. (I could do with a bit of that myself, just have to find my own personal metabolic delete button). I’m currently editing in hardcopy which makes it all seem more substantial and as if I’m actually getting somewhere. It also makes it easier to get a sense of the thing as a whole, not just a series of scenes. The book will be called Tunnel Vision, and it will probably be finished sometime in September. Fingers crossed. It even has a cover ready to go which I’ll be flashing around like a mad thing at some point in the future.

So anyway, last night Strop and I hit Enmore Road without much hope or inspiration, as we are discovering that Enmore Road is mostly doldrums with a few islands of brilliance. We were meeting up for a drink after work and I’d suggested Bauhaus West, mainly because I had heard good things about it and I didn’t feel like another noisy Friday-night pub. We went to Bauhaus for a drink but ended up staying for a meal once we had a look at the menu. It looked a lot better than a lot of the other offerings nearby. Bauhaus W is somewhere between a bar and a restaurant. It has high stools like a bar, but with restaurant sensibilities.

We started out with a pair of excellent whiskey sours, followed by a Pinot Noir and a very nice beer, spoiled only by its container, which was straight out of some hipster marketing parallel universe.

Deep breath. Move on.

Anyway the menu sounded good, so we ordered a duck confit, some Chinese-y beef ribs, a side salad (not on the menu but happily provided), and chips. The food was very good, but very salty. Especially the ribs. On a Deb rating they would have been off the scale. When we mentioned this to the waiter, he came back with a message from the chef saying that he hoped it hadn’t spoiled our meal, but that we had managed to order the two saltiest dishes on the menu.

The atmosphere at Bauhaus was refreshing, good music, not too loud for us old people, and tables with views out to the street. Not much wrong there. It wasn’t cheap (3 Wendys) but I’d go back for the whiskey sours and the duck confit.

In terms of accessibility at Bauhaus W – okay as long as you don’t want to go to the loo. 1 Susan.

Our progress along Enmore Road has been fairly haphazard, and it will probably continue to be as we have given ourselves a couple of new rules. We will not eat at an empty restaurant, and, we reserve the right to avoid places we don’t like the look of. Which basically means we have no structure at all. Just like everyone else. It also means that our quest has lost any heroic pretence, which was basically all it had going for it.

Oh well.

A couple of weeks ago we had a lovely night out at Kafenes, which is a bit of an institution on Enmore Road. We had been there a long time ago to celebrate a birthday with Wendy, but I couldn’t remember much about it other than the generally warm vibe of a good night out. This is what Kafenes is excels at.

On our recent visit, we dined with Roy, Jill, John and Pauline, not to celebrate anything in particular other than just that we have known each other for a very long time. And that we were all available.

Jill had just had a procedure on her eyes and was successfully carrying off the nighttime sunglass look. It is a look usually favoured by rock stars, but Jill was managing to draw a few glances from people obviously wondering if she was part of the late show at the Enmore Theatre.

It is easy to see why Kafenes is is always full. The food is great, the service is warm and the whole place is completely free of irony. The menu features plenty of grilled protein and lots of hearty oven dishes. It is welcoming and homey in the most excellent of ways. We started out with all the dips and lots of bread. And quite a few wines. I seemed to have been left in charge of the pouring, not a role I am comfortable with, and I may have overcompensated. There was quite a bit of chat too. Then the mains arrived. When Kafenes says main they mean it, the serves are generous. There is still a little Greek doggy bag in our freezer, waiting to be thawed one night when cooking inspiration fails to strike.

I didn’t notice any salt, so I guess that’s 5 Debs. Money seemed okay so I’m going to say 4 Wendys. And I didn’t go to the loo so I can’t comment on that aspect of accessibility so let’s say 3 Susans.

Afterwards we stepped up the road to Cow and Moon for a gelato hit. These days we seem to be spoiled for choice, sharing our after-dinner gelato business between Cow and Moon, Gelato Blue, and Hakiki. And I don’t really have a favourite amongst that lot.

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?

153A Corridor – Not entirely an irony-free zone.

July 20, 2013 by Andrew Christie 4 Comments

We have been looking forward to Corridor for a while, having been denied the chance to review our first cocktail bar by the untimely demise of the much lamented Jester Seeds. Corridor is an extremely trendy young persons bar. It may not be Newtown’s Hipster Central (there are lots of claimants for that title), but you can certainly see it from here.

Downstairs, Corridor lives up to its name and the implications of its subdivided address. It is long and narrow with the bar right at the front which means that it doesn’t take many punters to make it look busy. There are rooms upstairs as well but I have a recently buggered knee so I am sitting downstairs while I wait for Strop who has been working in Parramatta even though it is Sunday. Sydney’s public transport is not weather-proof, reliably failing if there is a heavy dew. You can rely on it to fail on weekends as well – the excuse of “Trackwork” would make some sense if it didn’t happen every weekend, and if there was even the slightest sign of things improving.

I have taken up a position behind a schooner of Young Henry’s Real Ale, at a tiny table and perched on a knee-unfriendly stool, as I wait for Strop to be delivered unto Newtown.

The music is good. This is significant as I am an old fart whose musical origins go waaaay back. But luckily everything old is new again, even if it is served up with a heavy dressing of hipster irony. The bar is resounding with retro blues-rock that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1970, and the barman is grooving along in a sailor’s hat, like the Skipper sported in Gilligan’s Island. My irony antennae are going off big time.

My irony related musings are interrupted by the arrival of Strop. While she is laying out her reasoned critique of Sydney Transport, in detail and with vigour, I observe over her shoulder that the poll-position street-front table is being vacated. Hating myself for short-circuiting her withering flow, I nevertheless point out the appealing nature of the newly vacant table. Strop is a big fan of sitting up the front and we are soon settled down with room to stretch our legs, and a passing parade of Newtown’s finest to observe and comment on.

Strop goes for a daiquiri while I decide to stay loyal to Young Henry – the evening seems a bit cool for cocktails to me, especially after Feej, which is now only a distant, but fond, memory.

The Po Boys on the menu catch our attention at first (I mean, what actually is a Po Boy?) but then everything else looks good as well. As we can’t decide what we’d prefer, we order a Tasting Plate reluctantly turning our backs on the Po Boys. This turns out to be the right thing to do. The Tasting Plate (actually two plates) is generous both in quantity and variety, and we are soon happily filling our faces and drinking, while commenting on the aesthetic and lifestyle choices of passers-by. Who could ask for more?

Po Boys entirely forgotten by this stage

The food has a soul food/Louisiana theme going on and features onion rings, candied yams, spicy fried prawns and fish, cornbread, collard greens, sweet corn, a kind of cassoulet and a sweet potato puree. Lots of yums.

The splendid blues-rock soundtrack is soon supplemented with enthusiastic live vocal accompaniment, by the the barman, and one of his very good mates. They sing along heroicly, in authentic 1970s stadium-rock voices, belting out the timeless, and apparently universally adaptable, lyric “Happy Fa-ather’s Day Dan” to every song. Corridor, it turns out, is not entirely an irony-free zone.

When a man from the bar with a creative haircut, steps onto the pavement for a smoke we pay no never-mind – funny haircuts are a dime a dozen in Newtown. But when he pulls out a bright blue e-cigarette and starts sucking on it, suddenly we’re in Blade Runner territory and start to pay attention. This bloke turns out to be the head chef (why do so many cooks smoke?) so Strop gets busy asking him to interpret all the dishes spread before us. Pretty soon it’s turned into a cooking lesson as he explains how to make the collard greens using cabbage and prosciutto. That’s one we will have to try if we ever eat at home again.

For desert we stick with cocktails, a culturally-themed Mint Julep for me, and a banana rum thing for Strop. We drink these peering out across King Street, to our next target, Mad Mex. I have been thinking of developing a new rule which would cross this place and Guzman y Gomez out: Must Have Proper Plates – No Paper – What Do You Think This Is A Picnic? but Strop informs me that we are already booked in there next weekend with her sister and family. So there is no escape – we will have to do the whole Mexican stand-off gag thing.

As we are preparing to leave Corridor, the kitchen hand leaves for the night, wheeling a fixie through the still crowded bar. Maybe we are closer to Hipster Central than I thought.