Super tasty kingfish sashimi at Chin Chin.
I just scrolled through my oldest blog entries, here on my website, to trace a little history of my food blogging adventures.
While I started my website, way back in January 2005, it was a static website, used to promote my writing (and a bit of my music). I kept a separate blog, on blogger.com, but I didn’t make any posts about restaurants. It was as much an experiment as anything else, with occasional musings on life, travels and writing.
Cucina Povera (Peasant Food) in Puglia, Italy.
I made a first posting about restaurants in Mexico City in August 2008, and after that there were occasional restaurant reviews and mentions from my travels. The food blogging really started in earnest in March 2011, on a trip to Paris, where I thought, having hit my 40s and in a loving and stable relationship, that my overseas travels should have a different focus than hitting the bars and nightclubs (which, ahem, was a theme for a decade or more). The focus of my trip was on eating at some really good restaurants, and I thought it would be fun to record the visits in photos and words. It was a way of sharing information with others, and also the type of information that I wanted to read when trying to find great restaurants.
A tasty appetizer at Mekong restaurant in Chippendale
That kicked things off and I started writing about meals in Sydney, as well as while on holidays. Two other things amped up the reviews. I changed my website to WordPress, which not only integrated the blog with my website, but it made the blog the main feature. I learned if anyone was to visit the website, I needed to do some regular writing. And why not about food?
I also discovered the website, eatability.com.au., which ran from 2003 until it was bought out in July 2012. While there were restaurant reviews on Tripadvisor.com and Yelp (which never had as big a presence in Australia as the USA), I liked this website, that focused soley on restaurants and cafes. I found it fun to read other people’s reviews and share my own opinions. I posted up many reviews there.
After Eatability got bought out, and went downhill, and I switched to Urban Spoon, which had the revelatory feature where I could add a widget to my blog reviews, and everything connected up nicely. Folks could find my reviews on their website and click through to my blog.
This corn at Kid Kyoto: divine!
Urban Spoon was bought out by Zomato in January 2015, and for a few years, I found this loads of fun. They gamefied reviews, where you earned points for the more you posted, to work your way up the rankings of top reviewers. I knew it was silly, but it gave me a mostly harmless dopamine hit to post regularly, and it encouraged me to get out and try more of Sydney’s amazing restaurants. I do admit that I got a little too caught up in it, sometimes just posting lame reviews (of say, just having a coffee) to count as a review.
It was also an interesting time to be a food blogger. I discovered that there were many food bloggers in Sydney. Zomato and Yelp hired ‘community liaison people’ and I got invited to some fun events and met other bloggers. I also started getting invited to restaurants for complimentary meals, in the hopes of a good review. And while I wasn’t blogging to get free food, I like free food.
But now, in 2020, especially after a three-month lockdown period from COVID where restaurants and cafes were shut down, the world of food blogging has become much quieter. The yearly Christmas parties organised for food bloggers went down in numbers from over a hundred to just a handful. Food instagrammers have arisen on mass, and most people find images of food more appealing than words. I have mixed feelings about this, as I’ve seen instagrammers who are much more interested in how food looks than how it tastes and their IG accounts seem to be a way to get followers rather than based on a real passion for food.
Monkfish medallions wrapped in bacon, New Year’s Day lunch at the Pavillon Henri IV, just outside Paris.
The free offers have dried up, which I think is a good thing: while I did try to repay the kindness (by going to the restaurants again, by posting positive reviews on different sites), I think there are probably only a handful of bloggers and instagrammers who would actually have some influence in terms of getting folks to go a restaurant or cafe.
And worst of all, Zomato, which made it so easy and appealing for me to be a food blogger, has updated their application, and it’s just not easy to use. Most of my reviews are not automatically linked and I have to go through a tedious process to get them posted. The rankings and points system don’t update properly. There are other problems too. It makes food blogging seem like a chore instead of a pleasure.
I also saw a note from Does My Bomb Look Big in This? who I consider Sydney’s finest food blogger (beautifully written blogs, details about the restaurant and owners which really honour their work, a passion for and understanding of good food) that reflected on not food blogging after 14 years of it during the lockdown. She’s now moving her reviews to Instagram (and maybe Facebook too). This has made me reflect also on my food blogging.
Octopus at Atoboy, NoMad, NYC. A great dish.
I do have an Instagram account, but it doesn’t really work for me. Perhaps my interests (cats, cooking, cocktails) are too diverse, but I don’t have many followers, which blunts the pleasure in sharing a food review, since I like the idea that there are people who will find it and find it useful! Similarly, while I have many friends on Facebook, most of them are not from Sydney, so I don’t like the idea of taking up Facebook Real Estate with restaurant reviews that aren’t useful for most people.
So, I guess I’ll still write reviews for restaurants that I really, really like, and the meals that I want to capture. But I think for now I’ll let go the more regular food blogging of restaurants and cafes, good, bad and mediocre. It is quite nice actually to eat meals and not think about taking photos of them or remembering exactly what I had. It’s basically what I do for wines in restaurants, even if I like them a lot, as I figure it’s often not easy for others to find them so why try to record them and my descriptive powers for wine are not that strong.
So, yes, enjoy the food and the moment for a while and not worry about recording the enjoyment: we’ll see if something new will emerge – or not.
Homemade mozzarella. Seriously. I made this. The next two times I tried to do it, I failed! Beginner’s luck, I guess.
Chin Chin has a storied reputation: hard to get into in Melbourne, also in Sydney. As I’ve mentioned before, I find it interesting that in Australia, white Australian male chefs become experts in Asian food, and open fine-dining modern Asian restaurants. When I grew up in Vancouver, they were all Chinese chefs in the kitchen of every restaurant, whether at a hotel or ethnic food; this changed to a focus on authenticity where the chefs were from the culture of the cuisine presented, so this Australian model is interesting.
Yet there’s no denying that the flavours at Chin Chin, whether they are learned or are an authentic presentation of a particular culture, are absolutely delicious. Rather than the much-talked about umami flavour (the sort of savoury combo of other flavours), I found the flavours of most of the dishes quite distinct: a beautiful combo of spicy, sour, salty and sweet. Although tempted by one of the ‘feed me’ menus, I thought I would have more control by choosing dishes myself and that’s what I did, and was rather pleased with myself.
Our menu:
Finally, it was an interesting mixed crowd: some young women on one side of us, a larger family with young children on the other side, a few couples like us who looked like they are local to Surry Hills: I think restaurants as good as this attract a wide base of customers. I’ll make sure we return in a shorter amount of time than my last interval!
Almost four years since I’ve been to the Colonial, and I’m impressed they’ve kept it open. As I’ve said many times on this blog, the restaurant business is hard in Sydney! And getting through the COVID lockdown: these are hardworking folks who have been making sacrifices!
We also couldn’t get into another two or three restaurants. On a Saturday night, just after the COVID lockdown is opening up, it’s not easy to get in anywhere.
The food is tasty and simple. The British fish curry, tofu mango and cucumber salad were all fine. I thought the eggplant was the standout, bhaigan barta, and the naan were good: I always like getting the one with raisins and coconut in it. We also had a seafood platter to start with which was tastier than it looked.
And the wine was a reasonable price. All good. It was basically $50 a head, including grog.
Indian food like you’d get in Blighty (18 Nov 2016)
So, here’s the thing. I meant to try out Trunk Road… (which looks cool and was packed with people when we walked by)… and we ended up at the Colonial. Oops. Next time. The idea behind it is that England has its own kind of Indian food, a mixture and melding and adaptation from so many Indian migrants. And I remember this from when I lived in London: the restaurants around Kings Cross, the ones near Brick Lane. There were many different areas each with its own twist, as well as British-only dishes, like Balti curries.
In any case, we opted for two starters: a delicate fried fish, and a tandoori sort of chicken which was supposed to be spicy, and wasn’t too spicy (both pictured above). We had a goat curry with a thick gravy. I like goat since it’s unusual. Two different kinds of naan bread, very crisp and tasty.
Washed it down with an unusual natural sparkling wine from across the road, a bit strange but not bad with Indian food.
I thought it was fine. Good, friendly service. Tasty. Nothing special (to me, though the naan bread was exceptional) but if I was from the UK, in search of British Indian food, perhaps I’d have been very excited.
We were looking for coffee, perhaps Vietnamese coffee, after our amazing pork rolls at Alex ‘N’ Rolls. On that little strip of Illawarra Road, we couldn’t find anything. Lots of small restaurants, but nothing that looked like it served Vietnamese coffee. Until we saw Take Coffee. Hurrah!
We split a mango pudding as well, and each had a Vietnamese coffee, though mine was salted! Strong coffee. Condensed milk. And a pinch of salt. It was a bit like salted caramel. Absolutely delicious and a change from your regular Aussie latte!
I always liked cocktails, and got into a regular negroni habit, but the cocktail making really kicked off with the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s been fun to explore new drinks and treat ourselves to a covid cocktail. My strategy is to find an interesting liqueur (or possibly spirit) and then try a whole bunch of different drinks made with it!
We thought we’d grab a quick lunch in the neighbourhood before hitting Peter’s of Kensington to scratch that kitchenware itch. Kensington’s long had a reputation for interesting and tasty Asian food, but on this day, a Sunday, it looks like places are still closed because of COVID, are are closed for good, or closed a while ago and I didn’t notice.
This place was open and has a good name! And the Indonesian place on the corner was actually so packed, we couldn’t get into it. I didn’t even know Turpan was Uighur before I sat down but was excited. I’ve really enjoyed Uighur food in the past.
There was a lunch special for two, which included handmade noodles, a pilaf and some lamb skewers for $40, which sounded like a good deal. I really, really like the texture of Chinese handmade noodles: springy and with a good bite to them.
I found the rice a little greasy. Tasty, but a little rich.
Newsflash!
While I really wanted to find savoury tart shells, I couldn’t! So, I made my own out of frozen shortcrust pastry (that turned out much better than I thought), filled them with fresh ricotta (delicious, and better than when I’ve made it myself, and relatively cheap as I went for the cow’s milk version rather than buffalo milk), and then put thin slices of the truffle on top (with a bit of basil to top it off).
