There seems to be a moment happening in Sydney cuisine with some fresh, modern takes on Indian cuisine. Bring it on, I say.
Nestled into a strip of restaurants on Stanley Street, Brick Lane has a cosy atmosphere. We ordered a selection between the two of us of ‘snacks’, ‘lighter bites’ and a ‘bigger eats’ and it’s one of those restaurants, and one of those tables, that my iPhone just couldn’t get good photos of the food.
I remembered a review that said to try the King Prawn Curry Leaf. Yup. If you come here, you should do the same. You take out the grilled prawn piece yourself, and wrap it up in spiced basmati rice and coconut curry in a betel leaf. Really, really delicious. And I love interactive food.
The 12-Hour Beef Short Rib was a great combo of an Indian curry and the slow-cooked meats popular in a lot of restaurants these days. Calamari Bhaji was also a highlight. 
I really was impressed. Interesting, tasty food. Some familiar flavours but with innovative presentation. Great service. We split a nice bottle of wine. We even got to use an entertainment book coupon… and I left my scarf there by accident and they nicely kept it for me until I could pick it up again. I’ll be back.
And the burger: something so common, but how do a few stick out? Because this one does. It’s salty, it’s meaty, the chargrill bits and perfectly crisp bacon contrast with the super soft milk bun. The lettuce, the sauces: perfect alchemy.
I’m curious how long this burger craze will last in Sydney. Is it the beginning? Or we in the midst? It feels like sliders are starting to slide off the menu, but the many prominent burger places – Chur Burger, Mary’s, Bare Grill and others – seem to be going strong. I guess Shake Shack and Five Guys aren’t disappearing from American cities… so perhaps this is the new burger landscape in Oz.
So, jackfruit. Also known as breadfruit. I have seen these, in Chinatown, and during travels. How can you miss them? It looks like a huge spiky dried up watermelon (or perhaps my descriptive powers are failing me). In any case, apparently, if you cook it long enough, it 
So, why talk about jackfruit? Well, the East Sydney Hotel, a regular sort of classic Aussie pub, hidden away on a corner in Woolloomooloo, is specialising in vegan food. This confuses me, as it doesn’t necessarily seem like the place that would do this. I’d stick this on the corner next to Suzie Q’s vegetarian butcher in Newtown, or possibly stretching into Marrickville. But here it is, and I hope it’s doing well. It was a Saturday night that we went and was neither quiet nor heaving. We sat in the bar area and didn’t peek around the corner into the restaurant.
It’s pub food so we didn’t have our expectations high… yet the jackfruit curry was really very delicious. It’s also hard to go wrong with tempura onion and though my pal thought the snake beans were tough (they are tough!), I liked the presentation (check how visual that is, the long beans wrapped around the edge of the dish), and the almond tomato sauce that it came with. It was better-than-average pub fare to me, and it was vegan. Good for them (and good for the planet).
Service was friendly enough in a very laidback sort of way. Give it a try some time, especially if you’ve got a vegan or vegetarian friend in tow.
I had my pal David over for lunch the other day and he said I should put it up on my blog. I mean, I can’t really say that assembling is home cooking: toast, ricotta, avocado and a sprinkling of fried onions (that you can buy in Asian groceries; I use these on everything).
In the meantime, I can extol the virtues of ricotta. This was not something I grew up with (though I did eat a lot of cottage cheese). Fresh ricotta, widely available in Australia in supermarkets, is an amazing thing. I’ve discovered its use in pastas and on salads (and not baked into a cheesecake where I’m not sure it makes much difference how it tastes in the first place). It’s pretty easy to make it yourself (for example, instructions from 
In any case, husband tried a spoonful of BUFFALO ricotta at the Everleigh Markets and we bought a small tub from 
So, I spent May in New York City, and Mom came and visited so I could show her around NYC. She was obsessed with trying a New York City bagel to see if it was much different than Montreal bagels (she’s from Vancouver).
It seems strange to me that in Australia they’re a bit rare, and rare enough that Brooklyn Boy Bagels seems to be one of the few places that specialise in bagels. I stumbled across this pop-up shop on Victoria Street, on the site of where Cellini’s Cafe and Pasta Bar used to be (I believe they still have a location in the QVB). It’s only around for a month or so, maybe a little longer; it’s apparently been popular. I stayed clear of the scary looking rainbow bagels and had me an ‘everything’ with a very generous serve of bourbon and bacon-flavoured cream cheese.
It was good. Maybe I’m too used to bagels to find it a novelty, but not a big enough bagel fanatic to note how much better these are supposed to be than other bagels in Australia. And for $12, for a large latte, and a bagel with cream cheese: man, is the Eastern Suburbs and Sydney ever an expensive place to hang out.
So, a lunch with some folks on our building’s body corporate; this is one of the favourite restaurants of one of them. At lunch, in the city, it has the feel of a business lunch; you’d want to have a bit of time here, rather than catch a quick bite, and it has a formal feel about it.
Two of us had a salad with chicken, and two of us (including me) had a salad with haloumi. As you can see at the top of the post, it’s a pretty dish, with quinoa and radish, beets, pumpkin seeds and some greens. It was lacking something though; the dressing was really light and something to tie all this together was missing for me (and I tried putting more salt on it too). The haloumi was perfectly grilled and tasty, but overall, it tasted… healthy.
When Paul suggested that we try this restaurant, I looked at my list of restaurants to try, and saw that it was on the list… for the last three years. Hmm, I can be a bit tardy. Also, lucky for me that he and Johny invited along two more friends since with Asian food, the more the merrier.
I would rate the taste of these dishes as between ‘great’ and ‘effing fantastic’. OK, it’s a humble little place with quirky decor, and the service, though sincere, seemed a bit confused. And all the food came out at once, quickly, and with the entrees coming somewhere in the middle.
But oh my god, the flavours. We loved the tamarind fish curry and the belachan water spinach. A famous chicken dish that people travel for miles for… was covered in a yellow sauce and was tender and tasty. I particularly liked the prawns in salted egg yolk… and my favourite of the night was the eggplant in salted egg yolk, though splitting this rich dish between five people was about right; it’s too rich to eat any more. But god, it was good, the creamy eggplant inside a very crisp and unusual tasting batter. A bit similar to the eggplant chips I had at the Eate the other day, but these were better.
We had a roti each, perhaps a little greasy and not the greatest roti. A small complaint. Ah, we also had otak otak, sort of a fish mousse wrapped in banana leaves. I liked it and had never had the dish before. Apparently this place opened in December 2010 (and is overseen by Chef Tan, who celebrated 20 years in Australia by opening his first restaurant here). Don’t make the same mistake as I did and take your time discovering this place.
During the summer, it’s not a bad thing to have a cool or room temperature sip of tea after the treatment, but during the Sydney winter, when it’s chilly, I’d rather have it be a bit warm.
In any case, it’s all worked out. My pal Darryl suggested ye olde tea light system and I found that Bodum, a Danish company who I’ve always had an affection for, makes a rather lovely product called Chambord. Do all Scandinavian companies name their products in mysterious ways?
