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Andrew Christie

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Hipsters

365 – 3 Olives – You’ll need to book. Do it now.

June 28, 2014 by Andrew Christie 3 Comments

365 3 olives

Pre-dinner drinks. The prospect of a pre-dinner drink with Strop, has lured me out of the comfortable anonymity of a pub, into the irony-plagued awkwardness of a hipster cocktail bar. Unfortunately Strop can’t make it, she is stuck at Parramatta Station due to Transport Turmoil (and it’s not even raining), so I am alone except for the new Miles Franklin winner to read on my phone, and an excellent whisky sour to sip. Actually it’s not a bad trade. Except for the bill shock – oh well, I guess that is the price you pay for having a maitre de with a waxed moustache, and a 1980s soundtrack designed to make you feel old.

Tonight we are eating at a Greek restaurant called 3 Olives, we’re being joined by Matt and Jim, who last appeared in these pixels back at The Animal which, strangely, is also a Greekish joint. Matt and I are first to arrive at the rapidly filling restaurant. After a quick discussion about increased hangover propensity with age (there’s definitely a thesis in that) we get things under way with a bottle of wine and some dips. Matt is momentarily confused about whether the three dips are free dips, but luckily the waiter and I are clear about what is going on. We are soon joined by Strop and Jim, who help us finish the first bottle and the free dips. Then it is time to get serious about food.

Our enthusiastic and overblown first draft of the food order elicits a little shake of the head, and a quiet “That’s a lot of food,” from the excellent waiter. With his editorial guidance we pare it back to three shared entrees and three mains. The entrees are haloumi, white bait and octopus, and the mains are lamb cutlets, meatballs and quail. Because we don’t want to risk malnutrition we request that an emergency beetroot salad be held in reserve.

Now that we have got the decision making out of the way, Jim takes the opportunity to admonish me for not writing enough about the other punters. So here goes. There are a lot of them – the place is full by about 7:30, and is still full when we leave at 10:00. They are happy. They don’t look particularly Greek, but they are loud. There are a lot of family groups with young children. They are well dressed. They are mostly not teenagers, and they are definitely not hipsters. Although our waiter might be, sometimes it’s a fine line. And they know something that we are only just discovering: 3 Olives is a great place for a night out. It is a family affair, which is as it should be in a Greek restaurant, overseen by Olga, the matriarch who puts the hospitality back into Hospitality Industry. Throughout the night she befriends each table, smiles, makes jokes, and makes you feel like a friend. You will want to come back.

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The food is all good. It is not stunt food, just really good, well-cooked simple food. And plenty of it. The octopus is excellent, the meatballs are delicious, but then so are the lamb cutlets and the quail. The accompanying salads are fresh and generous and the chips are crisp on the outside and soft and mushy inside. We didn’t need the beetroot salad.

Meanwhile the conversation was bouncing all over the place. Book writing, Matt’s near miss at being a Famous Author; who is the most passive passive-aggressive person we know; the glamorous new upgrade of Newtown station; drug dogs; young people en-masse; young people singing, and the end-of-an-era deaths of Sue Townsend and Rik Mayall. We probably talked about a bunch of other stuff too, but by that time I had drunk quite a lot and had stopped taking notes. We were having too much fun.

After a short hiatus we turned our stomachs to the subject of dessert. And sweet sticky wine. Jim was keen on the baklava, and Strop wanted galaktoboureko because “It’s the best dessert in the world.” After they had both received lessons in Greek pronunciation from Olga, we decided to share again and have some port as well. The galaktoboureko was good, but I thought it was surpassed by the baklava, which was the best I have ever had.

So get along to 3 Olives, you won’t regret it.

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3 Olives on Urbanspoon

Filed Under: Quest Tagged With: baklava, galaktoboureko, Greek, Hipsters, hospitality, lamb cutlets, octopus, quail

256 Black Sheep – Oops, not really back in the swing of this yet

January 18, 2014 by Andrew Christie 5 Comments

256 blacksheep

Happy New Year? Well, not bad so far but give it time.

On Friday night Strop and I hit King Street again, reinvigorated by our sojourn up the coast and by three weeks forced proximity with young people. Unfortunately we still had our holiday heads on and failed to do even the most basic research before downing a welcome-back Dogbolter and waddling towards Black Sheep. In our enthusiasm to get started again we assumed that Black Sheep was  the next place we should be visiting (a quick check of our own blog would have told us that it is not) and nor is Black Sheep even really a qualifying eatery. It is more of a drinkery. A bar that flogs a few tasty tapas-style stomach-liners. By the time we had established all of this, the enticing idea of a nice cocktail had lodged itself in our holiday heads, and a charming tall hipster barman had seated us and taken our order.

Oh well, go with the flow. Live in the moment. Listen to the rather nice music.

Strop admiring the Big Banana
Strop admiring the Big Banana

While we waited Strop started sorting the postcards she forgot to send when we were on holidays, into geographically based themes, and I tried to remember how to switch off the thing in my new camera that makes it take fifteen of photos of my lap whenever I press the shutter.

The cocktails arrived quickly – an orangey-red rum and amaretto one called the Black Sheep (presumably just because they needed a signature cocktail) for Strop (she liked it a lot) and a very lemony one for me in one of those stupid pretend jam jars. The lemony one was called Atomic Tom and came with a warning. “That one is very sour, let me know if you want me to put some girly sugar in it for you,” said the barman, as he placed it in front of me. Okay, on reflection he may not have actually said girly, but that was what I heard. Any way it was definitely a challenge so there was no way that I was going to admit that his lemony drink was too strong for me, and ask for some girly sugar. Hell no. Luckily after the initial mouth-puckering, it turned out to be very infreshing.

“Food’s taking a while,” Strop said, looking up from her postcards. She was up to the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour by this stage. As is usually the case, as soon as you ask how long your food will be, it suddenly arrives, making you wonder if they have just been hanging on to it to see how long it will take to get a rise out of you. Or maybe it only seems that way if you’re a bit paranoid.

Another, shorter, hairier hipster brought out the food. Grilled chorizo first. “Do you want cutlery for that?” he muttered as he started to disappear. We looked at the sizzling slices of sausage, the big dollop of aioli, and the finely sliced cabbage salad, then we looked at him. Was this a test? Some of the much vaunted hipster irony? Or was he just taking the piss? Or was he a moron? Yes, of course we want fucking cutlery.

Knives, forks, plates and napkins duly arrived, followed soon after by our croquettes. The food was very good, especially the chorizo and the salad, and disappeared very quickly. Which was just as well, because we still had to find somewhere that served actual meals to review.

So apart from the hipster unfamiliar with the function of cutlery, Black Sheep was a pretty good place for a drink and a nibble. But I might just have a beer next time.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: aioli, Cocktails, Food, Hipsters, King Street, Newtown, restaurants

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