Enter the Quaniverse

Sydney Food Diary: Kepos Street Kitchen, Redfern

Posted on 16 April 2017 by andyq

Oh my god: this breakfast. The middle eastern ‘cigars’ filled with lamb mince, with two poached eggs, pine nuts, greenery and some sauce.

Absolutely delicious and my dining companion thought his Kepos Eggs Benedict (with a milk brioche) was pretty good.

We moved from the main dining area to the pretty sunroom. Man, the acoustics in that place are terrible; it’s so noisy.

And I was pleased we managed to get in on a Saturday morning just after 10am. I remember when there were lines outside every Saturday and Sunday.

Nice waiter too. This experience makes me want to go back soon, and also give their other branch a whirl, which is not so far away.

Posted in Cafe, Food n' Grog, Middle Eastern, Modern Australian, Sydney | Leave a comment

Sydney Food Diary: OhBar Thai Cuisine 1982, Darlinghurst

Posted on 15 April 2017 by andyq

Hidden under the Connaught Building on the corner of Oxford Street and Liverpool Street, across from Hyde Park, is the new OHBAR Thai Cuisine. We had a casual meal here on a rainy Monday night.

An interesting menu, with lots of choice. It does seem to have a bit of an extra twist to the menu, with spicy salads, spicy sausages from the North, and other curries and stir fries which don’t seem to be typical. Ah, and you can get sticky rice here, served in the small woven straw containers: a favourite of mine, that you can’t get at all Thai restaurants.

The three of us did three appetizers: calamari, Isaan sausage and a crab shrimp roll; and then three mains: a spicy prawn curry, a stewed beef (I ordered stewed pork belly so don’t know what happened here) and a salmon in a rich coconut sauce.

So, it’s tasty with some unusual flavours. Not as good as the fantastic Muum Maam, Chat Thai or Home Thai, but better than the average Sydney Thai restaurant.

Great decor, and a fun vibe, with young Thai people, which we thought was a good sign. The sign is pretty much the same as at Holy Duck! But it’s a good look for now. Fun. They do BYO which is a plus, and are currently in the Entertainment coupon book. It was $135 for the three of us, though since we then got $35 off with the coupon, I thought a $20 tip was fair… $40 each. If I was in the area, and hankering for Thai, I’d go again.

Posted in Asian, Food n' Grog, Sydney | Leave a comment

Sydney Food Diary: Platia, Top Ryde

Posted on 13 April 2017 by andyq

So, it was great to be invited along one Friday evening by Around the Clock Foodie, or at least half of ATCF, and be able to hang out with the stupendous company of Weekend Food Escapes, plus one, and meet the colourful and infamous (because he’s the top Zomato food reviewer in Sydney) Random DinDins.

Our destination: Platia. Located in the Top Ryde City Shopping Centre, it’s a bit of a strange contrast in that it’s got such a nice, homey feel to it, and a family-run operation, that it feels like it should be your neighbourhood Greek place, or in a Greek area of the city, or in Greece! On the other hand, it’s lovely to sit in the open courtyard and the mall makes the place feel appropriately modern and contemporary.

We were fed and watered extremely well, with a wonderful array of starters and mains. This souvlaki above was a favourite. A basic dish but everything was so tasty. As was this incredible prawn dish.

It was a great evening and Platia were very generous to us. Nicer people you could not meet. Greek cheese is a bit marvelous too.

And this slightly unusual rendition of feta.

My favourite, I’d have to say, was the octopus, which at times, in other restaurants I have found too, er, visceral an experience, but the grilled flavour was just so good.

All the standards are on offer here too… Slow-cooked lamb.

Moussaka, a particular favourite of mine, but I think it gets lost a bit when there are so many other dishes.

Dips.

Stuffed mushrooms…

A few new menu items were on offer such as this chicken dish.

Then the dancing broke out. My goodness (and the two musicians who played throughout the evening were great!)

The plates were rather interesting: made of plaster and made me to be broken.

You’d have thought that the ouzo shots were the reason for the dancing but in fact were offered kindly as a farewell gesture.

Though before this we also polished off this amazing dessert plate.

Thanks to Platia and my fellow diners for a memorable meal. If you’re in Ryde, or up for a Ryde (heh, heh), ride on up there. OK. I’ll stop now.

Posted in European, Food n' Grog, Sydney | Leave a comment

Sydney Food Diary: Inca’s, Stanley Street

Posted on 13 April 2017 by andyq

I remember eating at this Peruvian restaurant, about a million years ago, when it was in Newtown. Moved to Darlinghurst, it’s in a brightly lit space that reminded me a bit of a living room or function hall, but with a family feel to it, and not without charm

One of my dining companions was Chilean and she provided us with guidance for the menu, which is relatively short. A few appetizers. Two choices of ceviche. Four mains and two specials, and some sides.

We started out with causa, a strange sort of potato mixture inside a soft crepe with some sauce and inside some prawns and vegetables, served cold. It was delicious. We liked it, though it was somewhat mysterious.

The ceviche was beautifully done. Very tasty. Bright flavours. Loved the dried corn with it.

We split three more mains, some lamb, perfectly nice; a generous paella sort of dish with prawns, and a quite delicious chicken curry.

Ah, and we had yucca chips. My favourite.

Peruvian cuisine is humble, I think, and the restaurant does a good job of retaining the feel of a homemade meal but presented in a restaurant format. It’s a fun experience, and tasty too.

Ah, and we all started the meal with Pisco Sours (yum, a most excellent contribution to the world from Peru and Chile) and finished with a dessert called Trés Leches, some sort of soaked cake with whipped cream and ice cream. Tasty! It cost us about $75 each and we were nicely filled and hydrated…

Posted in Food n' Grog, Latin American, Sydney | Leave a comment

Sydney Food Diary: Ouroboros Organic Wholefoods

Posted on 11 April 2017 by andyq

As I’ve said before, Sydney’s a tough place to open a restaurant or cafe. It’s not enough to have good food, or a good idea. It has to be the right vibe for the right place as well. So, it’s great to see that the corner of Devonshire and Holt Street is hopping busy at the Ouroboros Organic Wholefoods Cafe.

Rather than the usual Surry Hills chic, this has a really casual cafe feel to it, as you can see. But on the rainy Thursday morning that I stopped in for coffee, there was a sizeable line waiting to order, and when I did order, I got a really, cheery and warm welcome, so sincere that I was jolted out of the rain!

I can’t really judge the cafe as a whole since all I’ve had both times I’ve been there is coffee (delicious) and one of the rather delicious sweet treats (this time a pistachio, coconut, cranberry bar: gluten-free!). But it’s easy to guess this cafe is doing just fine, and is a good option if you’re in the area.

Posted in Cafe, Coffee, Food n' Grog, Sydney | Leave a comment

Sydney Food Diary: Pieno, Surry Hills

Posted on 10 April 2017 by andyq

So, I live pretty close to Pieno, as do friends of mine in Surry Hills. And it’s a funny thing. Pieno is on the CBD side of Crown Street, and Kawa is on the other side, and most friends prefer Kawa. At least my friend Davy says he LOVES the meatball sandwich there, and we discuss the pros and cons of each (I told him I wanted to eat at Pieno because I haven’t blogged about it yet).

Kawa is charming, and yet sometimes the charm is rickety, like those seats that are cute but almost seem to fall over. The service can seem spaced out, and the charming outdoor seating sometimes feels crowded.

Pieno has a much nicer feel to it, with lots of greenery and comfortable seats. I’ve been here when it’s packed, and I actually don’t like it: it feels too crowded. But it’s a pretty relaxed place to be.

I opted for the meatballs pasta (above) and I have to say it was absolutely delicious for $16. Davy has the grilled chicken salad, of which I had a bite. The chicken was tender and perfectly grilled and the couscous salad is… you have to admit… beautiful (I think the salad was $20).

Service was friendly. Lunch on Monday it was blissfully quiet. So, really: this is a solid choice to hang out, eat, have a coffee… And it’s been around for a long time, which in Surry Hills is a sign of a solidly good business.

Posted in Cafe, Food n' Grog, Sydney | Leave a comment

Buenos Aires Food Adventures: El Baqueano

Posted on 9 April 2017 by andyq

This selection of quinoa is a signature dish, I think. Marvelously pretty.

El Baqueano describes itself as contemporary indigenous food both in terms of the produce and the cooking techniques.

Located in San Telmo, the corner restaurant has a cool and modern feel to it, and from the moment we stepped in the door, it felt like it would be a special meal.

OK. This is actually across the street from the restaurant. But I had to include it. San Telmo is so pretty and atmospheric!

They offer a degustation menu, that changes with the season, and with matching wines. Last year, it clocked in at #13 of the top 50 restaurants in Latin America.

Among the dishes that we were served: Duck bacon and butter

An upmarket interpretation of a humble sandwich.

It is an injustice that I didn’t keep track of the dishes that we ate. Sorry to the restaurant and to you, dear reader. But perhaps the photos are enjoyable in some way? The dish at the top of the page, by the way, had a llama tartare underneath that pretty quinoa and I’m slightly horrified now that I ate llama because I rather fell for the adorable guanacos in Patagonia. I felt their big sweet eyes staring at me contempuously after I ate some of them or their kin.

This one was Eggplant Escabeche

Two of the other dishes we had included Yacare Caiman, a small crocodile and Patagonian hare but I can’t match the ingredients up to the photos!

As you can see, there is some techniques of various blobs of delicious sauces, and dustings of different powders of food. This was a fish in a squid-inked batter, something spongey, and a few tempura leaves.

And the presentation is beautiful. This was an empanada, filled with something no doubt slightly rare. It was an interesting proposal, to take some dishes common to their cuisine… and then do something special with them.

The wines were great, as expected. I don’t meet many wines served at restaurants that I don’t like (though I occasionally buy something that is inexpensive and turns out to be not very nice). The pours were not as generous as at PuraTierra.

We also loved that there was a mother and daughter couple next to us, who spent some time sketching. What a lovely thing to do, we thought, to be creative and quiet and happy in their own spaces.

I was also quite charmed that the waiter sometimes asked us to identify the flavours, and engaged with us on what we thought the dish was. It was fun and I found myself really trying to think about the flavours that were put into the dishes.

One of the desserts was edible wood, lemon soup and cinnamon ice cream. Edible wood! Who would have thought of that?

Tripadvisor reminds me that it was about USD85 for the tasting menu. I’m glad that many reviewers had such a positive experience, with some of them feeling it was one of their best meals EVAH. I think the food is interesting and inventive, and I like the philosophy. It didn’t wow me though; even when the ingredients were obviously exotic (to me), they still felt slightly familiar. So there wasn’t a Wow Dish, or a few wow dishes. For my taste buds, a very nice evening but not as exciting on the tongue as it was intellectually.

Posted in Food n' Grog, Latin American, Travel | Leave a comment

Sydney Food Diary: Stanbuli, Enmore

Posted on 8 April 2017 by andyq

Enmore Road is chock-a-block with new bars and cool restaurants these days. I will be back to try some of the new ones I spotted, but was very glad to catch up with my excellent friend Mary to go to Stanbuli, which perhaps was one of the heralds of the new, hip Enmore.

Brought to us by the folks behind Porteño, I knew this was going to be good, and we weren’t disappointed. Turkish street food. What fun. Sat downstairs (walking in at 6:30pm on a Friday night, didn’t have any problems getting seated) and had an expensive but tasty bottle of a pinot-like Turkish wine and… ah, the food…

So good. We did order too much. Seven dishes from the left-hand side of the menu (mezze) and one from the right-hand side (grill). For the two of us, we really should have ordered one or two less dishes… We thought that the smaller dishes would have been smaller than they were!

The bread was so tasty, and apparently necessarily with some of our dishes. Olives lovely. The smoked eggplant with parsley and pomegranate seeds was a highlight.

Cuttlefish over some sort of potato salad. Lovely.

Stuffed mussels: wow. The taste of cloves was unusual. Just the right amount of rice stuffing. And I’ve never had stuffed mussels before.

I had one of the best kofte ever (though Mary found her fish sandwich a bit… fishy). The stuffed zucchini flowers were perfect.

We only had one of the main, grilled dishes. Perfect swordfish pieces, a cutlet served up in smaller bites, on top of an interesting grain in a tomato sauce.

Ah, and a favourite of the night: watermelon, feta and macerated dried apricots (in sherry). Sounds simple and I will try to make it, but the proportions, the combo, the flavours were just right.

Not sure about the long counter seating system. The woman next to me couldn’t seem to figure out how to eat without knocking into me so we shifted down. But the service was perfect, the sort of knowledgeable and efficient service by friendly young folks that Sydney seems to be specialising in these days. And I love that they kept the original store frontage of Mary Louise’s Hair Salon.

Posted in Food n' Grog, Sydney | Tagged Turkish | Leave a comment

Book Review: Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

Posted on 7 April 2017 by andyq

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t know whether being mixed race, of white and Asian descent, is having a moment, but with little design, the last three novels I’ve read have all featured mixed race protagonists. I don’t even know if mixed race is the right term anymore. Mom, from Hawaii, would use the Hawaiian word, Hapa, which meant ‘half’. I certainly remember a period of time, after university (in the early 90s), when there was an academic flirtation with ‘hybridity’ and ‘cyborgs’, combining man and machine, or man and science, or any two large concepts.

Things You Never Told Me is certainly the quietest of the three novels I’ve read, a family story, a family in the mid-West of the USA, where the main character is viewed more from the perspective of others than speaking for herself, the mixed-race daughter (with one brother and one sister) of a troubled couple.

The book seems to have gotten rave reviews. I liked it well-enough but perhaps my familiarity with the casual and not-so-casual racism that is one of the book’s main themes dulled the book’s overall punch. Similarly, while I should have been excited about her rendering of a family unable to communicate with each other, which reminded me so much of Asian-American families I know, I instead had a wave of sadness for all that is lost, with so much unspoken.

In any case, it’s a quiet book, well-constructed to draw you into its central mystery and with characters with a common humanity but who will likely be a bit unfamilar to most readers.

View all my reviews

Posted in Book, Review | Leave a comment

A word on food blogging

Posted on 6 April 2017 by andyq

A starter at Barzaari, Marrickville

I met up with a few food bloggers for dinner on Friday night and have been reflecting a bit about food blogging. It’s been interesting lately. After I transferred my blog posts from eatability (bought out, turned into a crappy site) to urban spoon and zomato, things sort of heated up. Both Zomato and Yelp hired community liaison folks and started hosting events. I started getting invites to them… and meeting some of the other food bloggers. I then had a number of months where I got not only invites to some great meals and restaurants but even got sent some alcoholic vodka in the post (it was delicious). I’ve found this all rather amusing.

On the other hand, the bloggers in the know tell me that they’re souring on Zomato since the community liaison position was stopped. I haven’t paid any attention to Yelp since they invited me to be part of their Elite Squad and then kicked me out before I’d attended an event because I have a listing for my reiki business on yelp (a conflict of interest, they said, though I don’t think anyone has ever come to reiki because of that listing). TrueLocal has apparently started reviewing restaurants, and doing some giveaways too.

The thing is: while I find the freebies amusing, that’s not why I blog, though I admit to having put up a lot of shorter, insubtantial blog postings in the last year to get me blogging points on Zomato (the fact that they’ve gamified it really drew me in). I like eating; I like dining out. I like sharing my discoveries with friends, and have enjoyed hearing from friends who have found my reviews, unexpectedly, when looking up a restaurant they were considering going to.

A traditional grill in Montevideo, Uruguay

This month’s newsletter from David Lebovitz coincidentally talks about blogging in the same way (I think you can find it online here). He is an amazing chef and food writer who I started following when we were spending time in Paris. Love his recipes, love his blog, and love the feel for what he does. Anyways, he wrote:

I always considered blogging to be a win-win-win proposition. For the writer/blogger, you (or I) get to write whatever you (or I) want to write about without having to clear it through a publisher. For the reader, you get information, recipes, travel tips, or whatever it is that you’re looking for in a blog. And for businesses featured on the blog, they get exposure…

I often tell people that blogging, or writing about food (and travel), is about giving. Sure, you may be doing it for a living, but you always should be thinking of the reader first: How you can help the reader? It might be helping them find a good restaurant, bakery or chocolate shop, or it may be letting them know where there is a cookware shop in that specializes in baking supplies. Or an outdoor market, where they can spend Sunday morning shopping for amazing French cheeses, charcuterie, breads, and roast chickens…

The other day I saw a promo piece on tv about fashion bloggers that were jetting around the world, showing off their gorgeous clothes and modeling them on Instagram. I’m all for people doing what they love, but it seemed like the stakes for them were to get stuff. (And to take selfies to post online.) I’m guilty of a few selfies as well (and once in a while, I do get something), but I think most of my readers would rather see croissants and baguettes, than my mug all over the place. Even if I get a loaf of bread to take away after a bakery visit, or get invited to a beer-tasting, which I did, even though I’m not a beer drinker, but I wanted to learn more about it, it’s because I think or hope it’ll be interesting for people to read about.

That rather struck a chord with me. And serves as good advice for me as I continue to share my eating and travel adventures, book reviews, and very occasionally thoughts on life, to ask myself why I blog and generally stay true to that spirit of sharing and making connections.

The latest cooking experiment was red wine risotto with peas (delicious) and pork belly roasted over garlic, white wine and milk (good crackling but the meat could have been more tender)

Posted in Blogging, Food n' Grog | Leave a comment