How enticing

Recently in Te Anau, New Zealand, I came across a restaurant with an irrestible promotion:

Exactly what I've been looking for. Frankly, you just don't get enough sass on menus these days.

Now, I'm sure I've piqued your curiousity. You want to know more. What's on this sassy new menu? Well, I think this sandwich board, proudly displayed outside the same restaurant, tells you what you need to know:

 

But perhaps you can't see all the detail. The small print, underneath the unbelievable price of 'Only $10.00', states: Picture shown indicative only

Attica

74 Glen Eira Road, Ripponlea; 03 9530 0111

A certain Big Event last year has seen us take advantage of various reasons to celebrate. Cumulus Inc has served us well on two visits - one with a family group of 14 that was every bit the Special Occasion, and the second time just the two of us, no reservation, at the bar, enjoying the rapport with the waitstaff as much as the characuterie selection we demolished down to the last pickle.

Rockpool delivered the goods in terms of venue and atmosphere (and celebrity spotting, with Kylie Minogue there taking her parents out to dinner, Spanish underwear-model boyfriend in tow), but also a less-than-perfect service story that's still doing the rounds.

The apotheosis of the food side of our celebratory journey came this week with a long-awaited visit to Attica, the little restaurant that could.

Attica is Melbourne's only representative on the San Pellegrino World's 100 Best Restaurants, coming in at number 53. (Sydney has three restaurants, which seems a crazy representation of the Australian dining scene. Then again, one article mentions that the setting for Attica 'is no match for most of the other restaurants on the list', which tells you something about the prerequisites for inclusion). The fact that a suburban restaurant, tucked in a shopping strip just down the road from Ripponlea station, is punching it with the big guys from Paris, New York and Tokyo, says so much about the quality of food coming out of Ben Shewry's kitchen. The restaurant is also current holder of The Age's Restaurant of the Year gong, and last year Shewry took out Chef of the Year.

Shewry is disturbingly young for what he's achieved. Growing up in country New Zealand, he developed a taste for both cooking and foraging as a kid. He's famous for gathering wild-grown ingredients on a daily basis then incorporating them with remarkable success into the dishes at his restaurant. In interviews, he frequently refers to wanting to recreate the emotion and nostalgia of his childhood on the plates of his diners.

Tuesday night is budget night at Attica, as much as a five-course degustation for $95 represents a cheap night out. It's the night that Shewry and his team try out new creations, which are often riffs on dishes already settled on their regular tasting menus. An extra $70 gets you matching wines - not a bad choice when few of the by-the-glass options come in under $20.

In the high-dining stakes, bread and butter has become a restaurant's, well, bread and butter. At Attica, we received a rye sourdough, with a curl of butter churned from creme fraiche, and cold-smoked olive oil that's whipped at high speed then dusted with black salt. The result is a moussey confection that retains a strong olive flavour without the acidity that can come with the oil in its (more normal) liquid form.

The meal proper started with Snow Crab, Sorrel and Buckwheat:

The dish was finished at the table with a dram of chicken stock. Snow crab is a deepwater crustacean whose pale shell is responsible for its name. The crabmeat was slivered into pieces that resembled vermicelli noodles in texture. The crunch from the toasted buckwheat provided a remarkable textural contrast.

The matching wine was in fact a sake - Uehara 'Soma No Tengu' Junmai Ginjo. Our sommelier was good enough to explain the relevance of each of those words, information I won't pretend to have fully understood or to now recall!

Course #2 featured cauliflower two ways: Cauliflower Cheese with 11 Basils and Smoked Eel

11 basils?? I hear you mock. Well, count 'em - there are in fact 11 basil leaves on the plate and every one of them tasted different. The soup is a rich combination of cauliflower and goats cheese, and lurking beneath are chunks of smoked eel and crumbles of roasted cauli.

Moving even further away from the wine list, the matching beverage for this course was a beer - a Belgian Chimay Grande Reserve.

The third course again featured seafood, this time Marron and Quinoa with a Sauce of Cured Pork Fat and Onion.

A note here about the tableware. Some plates are made for Attica and some are sourced from Made in Japan in South Melbourne. Their dark mottled surfaces meant that often the dishes seemed to leap forth from the plate in a trompe l'oeil effect.

The marron (or crayfish) is strewn with rosemary flowers, and the 'sauce' is a mere glaze on the flesh.

The matching wine was a 2012 Bobar Chardonnay from the Yarra Valley, quite the strangest smelling wine I've tried - it made me think of sour milk - but it worked wonderfully with the dish.

The last savoury course was Wallaby, Dried Mushrooms and Sea Wormwood.

There is so much going on with this plate. The sea wormwood is a herb from Attica's garden, and tastes, wait for it, exactly like cola. The large leaves are mushroom leaves, not from the fungi, but from the confusingly named mushroom plant. The piece of wallaby is seared only and completely rare in the middle. It was superb. The jumble next to it features a smear of pureed wallaby black pudding underneath - looking remarkably like melted chocolate - with a mix of cooked and dried mushrooms topped by red currants. The delicious wallaby aside, of the five courses this one didn't quite reach the same level of surprising and successful marriage of textures and flavours.

The matching wine, however, was my favourite. A 2009 nebbiolo from Ar Pe Pe in Lombardy, Italy.

Thence to dessert: Banana, Caramel, Kaffir and Native Lime.

Buried on the plate is a roast banana, sitting on a caramel sauce. Atop are a banana ice cream along with powdered kaffir lime, and a few slices of native lime. The plate arrived steamingly cold, and as different temperatures and textures intermingled the whole dish fogged intriguingly. Eaten bit by bit, the dish didn't seem all that promising. As all the flavours meshed, however, it became a dessert wonderfully balanced between cleansing and sweet.

Alongside was a 22-year-old Auslese from Moselle. Decidedly unsweet, it fairly zinged when sipped after eating some powdered lime.

Thus we came to the end of the printed menu. But one more dish was to come. We'd been eyeing these off as they came out to each table throughout the evening.

These were preceded with a whimsical story, printed on the back of a drawing of the Kiwi pukeko bird by the chef's father. I wasn't quite sure how the analogy of the pukeko - a 'confident, inquisitive and vociferous' bird - to the life of a chef worked, but dear lord, these were exceptional. Once the white chocolate shell was pierced it revealed a filling of that most wondrous of creations - salted caramel.

The eggs were a delectable end to a meal wherein contrasts of textures were as notable as strong and surprising flavours. It wasn't the most sustainable meal, with at least one ingredient from most if not every course hailing from interstate, but it was perfectly satisfying.

A final word on the service. The same article mentioned above also referenced the service at Attica as one of the elements not at a high standard. Allowing that any restaurant can have its good and bad nights, at Attica we received some of the best floor service I've experienced. The team ran like a well-oiled machine, working in unison to bring and clear wine and plates of food in a seamless fashion. Courses were timed with sufficient pauses to allow for digestion, without dragging out into an overnight stay. The dishes were explained patiently and clearly, and any questions were answered enthusiastically.

Cool-o-Cream Bermagui

When the reward is worth it, I'm not averse to some serious travel to get to good food. Seven hours on bus and train for a bucatini alla amatriciana in its hometown is one of my most memorable efforts. But an eight-hour drive for what is probably Australia's best gelato may just top that.

Bermagui is a small town on NSW's idyllic South Coast. Less well known than southern neighbours Eden and Merimbula, it is regardless a delightful, perfectly sized town boasting a compact, curving beach of gentle, aquamarine waves.

Even more impressive is the Blue Pool, which combines the safety of swimming in a pool with the views of swimming in the ocean.

All that swimming inevitably leads to craving for two things: fish and chips, and ice cream.

The fried stuff is taken care of by Saltwater Cafe, with its pleasing view over the very harbour where the battered fish most likely arrived that morning.

Any fish missed by the fisherman might be taken care of by these big-beaked chaps.

As for the ice cream craving, there's no better place in Australia to indulge it. Officially called Cool-o-Cream, Bermagui's hidden culinary treasure is better known as the Gelati Clinic: having taken over the spot previously occupied by Bermi's veterinary clinic they simply painted over the only word on the sign that no longer fitted and replaced and with that which they do best - gelati.

And do they what. Flavours rotate often enough that my promised three visits a day always threw up different choices. The range is divided into half creamy - which tended to have the more interesting combinations - and half icy - normally featuring fruit. Without exception, all the fruit flavours tasted intensely of their ingredients. Local growers bring down produce in exchange for vouchers, so the range matches local availability.

Even without repetition between the two of us over six visits, we only scratched the surface of their full range, judging by the box of labels (all in both English and Italian) we saw them ferreting through each morning. Burnt milk, sadly, did not make an appearance while we were there, but, happily, neither did curry! Over three days, this is what we managed to cover:

Liquirizia (Licorice): most of us are firmly pro- or anti-licorice. If you're in the former camp, get in the car now and drive to Bermi. I only had a taste of this (being more in the latter camp), but it's strong, super salty, and with an astonishing aniseed after-hit

Ciccolata piccante (Chilli chocolate): Richly chocolate, undeniably hot

Miele e zenzero (Honey and ginger): One of those great combos where both flavours are strongly identifiable but go together perfectly

Fragola (Strawberry): Creamier and more strawberry than a bowl at Wimbledon

Ananas (Banana): All it needed was a touch of honeycomb to be the perfect ice cream treat

Pesca (Peach): Peachier than the peachiest peach

Campari e pompelmo (Campari and grapefruit): Every bit as bitter as the aperitif

Mandarino cinese (Kumquat): So sour my mouth went slightly numb

Tangelo: The surprise favourite. Imagine the freshest fruit you can, add ice (and the smell of the sea) and you've got the taste

Rabarbaro (Rhubarb): An amazing complement to the tangelo. Where one was all icy tang, this was incredibly smooth and creamy

Cardamom, saffron and nut: (tasted only)

Chocolate sorbet: Judged by some to be the ultimate in iced desserts. This was rich yet bitter, and best taken in small portions

Uvetta, ciccolata e grappa (Chocolate, grappa and raisin): an Italian take on rum and raisin. Two scoops of this and you'd probably be tipsy

Pecan e cannella (Pecan and cinnamon): Delicious. Exactly what you're looking for in gelato

Stracciatela (Chocolate cuts): a gelato classic, immensely satisfying

Arancia, limone e carota (Orange, lemon and carrot): I thought this was mango from its colour. Instead it was unbelievably refreshing, fruity flavour, balanced by what was definitely carrot, but which mixed in so well I wouldn't have picked it if I hadn't known

Drawn Wisdom I

What's on the menu?

Or, more to the point, what isn't?

Menus can start to read like shopping lists, or a particularly deconstructionist piece of fiction, if they get too particular about listing every morsel involved in each plate of food.

Then again, it can be surprising when elements of a dish don't make it onto the menu at all. So there's a balance to be struck between being informative, allowing the diner to reasonably picture what they're ordering, and not presenting too much wank in an effort to show you know your produce.

At the moment, I'm loving Monsieur Truffe on Lygon St (a chilli hot chocolate will resolve any problem you choose to take there). I had a lunch special the other day of cornbeef hash salad, and was surprised - though not disappointed - to discover a fried egg atop the plate. It worked fine in the dish, but it's a particularly significant element to have overlooked in its description.

Sometimes it goes the other way: the menu is right, but the dish - or the chef - is new, and things get missed. Or, in the case of Little Henri, the whole place is new and everyone is still getting the hang of things. At a weekend brunch there, the table next to us received baked eggs with ham, gruyere and garlic crumble sans the meat. I'd ordered the lunch bruschetta: smashed broad beans and ricotta with a soft egg. When the dish arrived I was surprised (again!) to find roasted tomatoes plopped on top of each piece of toast, which had been blistered to a point of dominating smokiness. As I pondered the oddity of not including the strongest taste element in the dish, I realised that the promised soft egg was AWOL. Full credit to the staff: after I checked with the waiter, a perfectly poached egg was added post-haste, while my (exceptional) coffee was just as efficiently removed from the bill.

And what about the elaborately explained dishes that don't make it on to the menu - the specials delivered with breathless, rehearsed haste? I always find them a bit of a challenge - if the waiter explains them before you've looked at the menu, you don't know how they fit in with what else is on offer. If you've agonised over the menu already, adding more choice can be a disaster for the indecisive. Listening to a range of specials that takes a couple of minutes to deliver feels like an educative psychology experiment, testing your memory on verbal versus written memory.

Despite specials often being delivered with a boggling amount of detail, the price point isn't always there at the end. My thinking is that a special shouldn't take any longer to explain than a menu item would to read aloud. Particularly if it's something you're definitely not going to order - for example when a waiter launches into the life and times of tonight's oyster special, I'd love to interrupt, but you can tell they're in full flight and cutting them off would only cause a restart so they could find their place in the recital again. I understand why restaurants don't type them up daily, but printed specials really are easier, unless you're a world champion at that 'I went to the shops and bought a comb, a coffee, a newspaper, a tin of paint etc etc etc' game. I'd be all for waiters saying, 'On the specials tonight are a vegetarian entree, a duck main and a pizza. Would you like me to tell you more about any of those?'

It's a science, producing a menu - and an underrated one at that.

A Boy Named Sue

 87 Burns Rd, St Andrews; 03 9710 1023

What better way to top off a sunny afternoon in the country than with some exceptional pizza? First incarnated as simply the St Andrews Pizza Shop, A Boy Named Sue has been generating quite the buzz from its humble home perched high above - but not so far from - the big city.

Rocking up as the last of the day's warmth flew moonward and the icy night air descended, St Andrews took on the aspect of a ski town as locals hovered around a brazier while awaiting takeaways, and travellers like us gradually divested of woollens as we settled into Sue's welcoming space and took in the smells of woodsmoke, dough and garlic.

There's plenty of the latter on their white-based pizzas, such as the Peter Broccoli - with tallegio and walnut pesto. And chilli - quite an ample smattering of chopped fire, seeds and all. The Italian Job, with salami and olives, featured an exceptional tomato base, which was surely not tinned but merely blistered toms smeared liberally on the base.

And the base's are something else. They're thicker than us Brunswickers might be used to or prefer, but they have all the lightness of the thinnest, crispiest based pizza you can get. A lot of the thickness is air, as the bases puff up in craters worthy of the full moon that overlooked our evening.

Head north and check it out.

Look. Stop. Taste @ Little Press

Pomegranate seeds turn dishes - whether simple or already extravagant - into beautiful arrays. Here is Little Press's (the bar at The Press Club) individual Yarra Valley lamb cutlet, served with quinoa and sheep's milk yoghurt.

Perhaps not as tasty as the hapuka ceviche with avocado on toast, but far prettier.

Check out Look. Stop. Taste. as part of the State Library's Gusto exhibit.

Cutler & Co

Special occasions require special meals. And all the better if they incorporate special drinks too.

The latter was more than adequately taken of by The Everleigh, the kind of place that needs the excuse of a blow-out evening to get me through the door (and up the stairs). It's a gorgeous cocktail bar, taking the trade of bartending super seriously. I've chosen my words carefully there - the menu includes a quote from the 1930s deriding the term 'mixologist' and the notion that being a barman is a professional's job. Instead, it's a trade: that is, an area of craftsmanship.

And the Everleigh staff certainly mix an artful cocktail. All drinkers have the option of Bartender's Choice: you can talk to the staff about your drink preferences - much as you would discuss food at a chef's table dinner - and they'll suggest a suitable mix for your taste.

Taking advantage of this led me to a Detroit Daisy - a tart and hefty cocktail, made with Havana Reserva Jamaican rum, pomegranate juice, lime and mint - and a New York Sour - bourbon with lemon, sugar, egg white and a drizzle of red wine, lending it quite a curious flavour.

Suitably chipper, we headed across the road and up a bit to Cutler & Co, to see what wonders Andrew McConnell's crew could deliver to our evening.

By day, C&C is a warm space, with a dramatic black metal shelter bending over the central bar; muted greys; whitewashed brick wall and a fern garden along the back wall lending colour contrast. By night, while still effective and suitably swish, the lights are a little low, the volume a little high and some of the contrasting effect gets lost in the shadows. What doesn't get lost are the flouncy tulle light covers creating some of that muted effect. They've taken advantage of the building's depth to give each table a bit of space, so you can easily hear your dining partner - and not your neighbours - over the hubbub, although the same couldn't always be said of the waiters.

The first item to arrive at our table was a snack of something something tapioca with something something black sesame. It was brought in a hurry, placed in a hurry and explained in a hurry and the odd ingredient was all we managed to pick up between us.

I've always had great respect for waitstaff who can explain the same specials to dozens of customers with enthusiasm throughout the night. At the other end of the scale, waitstaff can seem almost embarrassed about lengthy dish descriptions, and deliver them in the way you give your name and DOB over the phone - quickly to get it out of the way and hoping no-one else is listening - while already scurrying back to the kitchen.

The snacks were lovely, but nothing on the sourdough bread that came next. Small individual loaves shaped like creme caramels are studded with salt and accompanied by the most wonderful salted butter. They've quite a crust to crack open, but when you do...wow.

C&C keep the menu blessedly simple: six appetisers (three types of oyster); five entrees or a sample of each; five mains; or a kilo of rib-eye to share for $160. Chef's menu is available for $150.

My entree was reminiscent of a recent, comparable dining experience at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner restaurant in London: roasted breast and confit leg of pigeon, morcilla, carrot and gingerbread.

I couldn't go past it - McConnell's morcilla has drawn the crowds to Cumulus Inc for breakfast, and I was terribly eager to try it. It was suitably wonderful, and the pigeon breast - as in London - was commendably tender.

It did provoke one awkward moment, however. I'd remembered from the menu that the dish featured breast and leg, and thought that the miniscule piece of meat on the bone represented both - a bit rich for a $34 entree, I thought! In the low, reddish light, the two pieces of breast looked decidedly orange and I mistook them for carrot. Upon enquiry (and after a bit of confusion!) we determined that 'carrot and gingerbread' meant puree - the smear under the meat. A useful word to include :)

It's another reason that I do appreciate, in this dining environment, when waitstaff don't simply recite the menu description, but actually indicate how it relates to what has appeared in front of you on the plate!

SG's entree was the hand-picked mud crab, buttermilk potato, almond & brown butter.

This was the prettiest of the dishes, with edible flowers dotted among the daubs of smooth-as-cream potato and shredded crab meat.

Our worship at the meat temple continued with the mains. For SG, the slow roast chicken breast, pancetta,
braised turnips and onion.

A reduction was poured over the dish after it came to the table. It was divine, and when mopped up with the aforementioned sourdough was worth the price of admission on its own.

(More brownie points to C&C for specifying onion on the menu - for those like me who can't tolerate it, it's frustrating how often it arrives unannounced.)

I went for braised beef cheek, smoked tongue, roasted kohlrabi, sans the onion soubise on the menu. (The least pretty, but made up for looks in flavour!)

Soubise is a bechamel-style sauce - ie with flour and butter - but cooked down with a hefty wodge of onions. The beef cheek was superb - one of the best pieces of meat I've eaten anywhere or anywhen. The dish did suffer a bit though without its sauce - all that gelatinous meat without a break in texture.

About halfway through the beef cheek I started dreaming about a salted caramel crepe from La Petite Creperie. Happily the menu could make part of that wish come true, and we ordered a chocolate ice cream sandwich, vanilla parfait and salted caramel for dessert to share. Our trio of waitstaff miscommunications was completed when two separate dishes arrived, and the ice cream was just starting to drip before we could hail our man and remind him we'd wanted to share. It was a shared serve, he'd explained, that they'd plated up separately, meaning we scored an extra splodge of ice cream. A much-appreciated gesture, but again, take the time to explain these things!

In another throwback to our Heston experience, dessert was anteceded by another rich morsel - a peanut butter cup.

Delicious, but excessive after already eating our fill of very similar flavours (as the picture, below, shows). Is the amuse bouche being overtaken by the après met?

It was a decadent night out, with price tag to match, and happily the food and wine were up to the task of making it a special one.

Referencing the self

I've come across a lot of self-referential fiction of late - lots of writers writing about writers. John Irving's Widow for One Year manages to feature, and sample, for novelists in the one book, and spends many of its several hundred pages ruminating on whether writers should be able to imagine their stories and characters or whether they routinely fictionalise their own experiences as a form of catharsis.

Now I'm reading Nick Earls' latest novel, The Fix. Anyone who's read Earls knows how much of himself lands in his novels: his universally male protagonists, with some form of legal or medical training, living in Brisbane and developing awkward crushes on witty, self-assured women. In The Fix, his main man Josh is in PR, making a freelance living writing a blog about such inanities as how they get the stripes into toothpaste. His crush on law-student-by-day/stripper-by-night Hayley has given him writers' block.

"Two hundred and seventy-three words, and the toothbrushes had gone. Was there five hundred words in stupid crushes? No, there were novels in that, for too many of us."

Career crisis Nick?

The old divide: 'Melbourne' by Sophie Cunningham and 'Sydney' by Delia Falconer

Publishers New South are producing a series of books, penned as memoirs or love-letters to the author's hometown. Having read Sophie Cunningham's Melbourne late last year, I was intrigued to contrast and compare her highly personal journey through the city, and its mix of anecdote and history, with Delia Falconer's homage to my former hometown, Sydney.

I read many reviews of Cunningham's book before I dived in myself. They uniformly fell into one of two camps: Melbourne reviewers loved it, Sydney reviewers felt excluded by it and commented on its narrowness.

The inside cover of the book features a hand-drawn map of Melbourne. It extends from Footscray in the west, with an arrow pointing to Geelon;, to Hawthorn in the east, this time with Camberwell represented on an arrow; and to Brunswick in the north. You can see then where some of the criticism around its blinkered perspective came from.

I didn't find it narrow. True, my six years in Melbourne have geographically coincided with Cunningham's experience of the city. It seemed clear that New South's brief to the author was to write her Melbourne. The book was a synedoche of the city: Cunningham's experience of Melbourne, seen through the prism of a select number of suburbs and interests, stands in for the wider, general experience of other suburbs and occupations.

I did find it strangely jumbled, however. Cunningham frequently jumped between personal anecdotes to issues of national history and culture via some spurious tangents. References to Meanjin articles were frequent; fair enough, given the author is a former editor of the journal, but it pushed the personal touch a little too far. It was fine for Cunningham to focus on her experience, but to mainly bring in support from within that personal experience was a little too inward.

Her account of Melbourne is reverent, loving and at times admonishing. More so than Falconer, she uses Melbourne as a springboard - or testing ground - for national issues. In a discussion on comedy, for example, she rightly points out Melbourne's strong comedy scene as host of the International Comedy Festival. She quotes Rod Quantock, who says he would 'never be a regular guest on Hey Hey It's Saturday', which provides a link for Cunningham to discuss - in a single paragraph - the show's re-emergence, the fact that the majority of its audience came from Melbourne, memories of her and her brother watching the original, and the psyche of homegrown humour inculcated under John Howard. The links are valid, but the execution is necessarily jumbled as she moves between the personal and the public without so much as a hard return.

Delia Falconer takes longer to warm her audience to Sydney. In the opening pages she says Sydney's 'fundamental temperament is melancholy'. In fact, while 'Sydney may look golden' its bright notes 'cast themselves out across a great abyss'. Her Sydney is more ephemeral than Cunningham's Melbourne. Perhaps this is where Cunningham's narrow-gauge storytelling has its strength. It is possible to make valid sweeping generalisations about Fitzroy; harder to make them stick to a full metropolis, which Falconer attempts. Her Sydney is a city with its own light, a city haunted by an erased indigenous history, a unique city in Australia with it origins in the conflict between prisoners and middle-class law enforcers.

Falconer's childhood memories seem to come from a further-off place. I was surprised when I checked to discover she is actually three years younger than Cunningham. Perhaps therein lies a truth about the two cities, and their eternal divide - maybe Sydney stayed in the past for longer, and the city's 'brashness', which Falconer both highlights and criticises, is in fact symptomatic of its desire to grow up quickly.

Butchering realism

I think Jamie Oliver should be knighted. Sure, he's long since lost the affability of The Naked Chef days, and his insistence on calling every woman he meets darlin', regardless of age or race, is annoying to say the least. But he gets food. And he gets that Britain has a wonderful food culture, both indigenous and imported, and has devoted his career to convincing people of that fact. I believe that's worth acknowledging.

For all that, I don't spend a lot of time watching him on the tele. I couldn't resist tuning in for Jamie's Great Britain last night, however, when I read this description of the episode in The Age:

This week's instalment...includes an unusually graphic and lengthy butchering scene...Jamie carts off a dead pig and hacks it to pieces with a saw. Only the most hardened carnivores will be able to sit through the bone-slicing scene.

Here's a link to a portion of the episode containing the scene:

The scene starts with an inspection of the breed of pigs in question, at about the 2 min mark, and the 'graphic and lengthy' scene is over about a minute later, most of which has been taken up with chatter.

It seems a particularly overwrought description for something you could see if you looked past the counter of my local butchers on any Saturday.

The journalist did go on to point out:

There are some who would say that it's about time we saw such realism in our cooking shows, that if we're going to eat meat, we should face up to where it comes from. Those viewers are probably right. But I challenge you to daydream about Oliver's crackling after you've watched a pig get sawn in half.

I agree with the notion of the first clause, and wholeheartedly with the second clause. I don't see how you can call for realism though and then be shocked by this scene. To do so seems the mindset of someone who thinks meat is manufactured, rather than grown, into steak-sized portions, shrink-wrapped and sold.

I do eat meat, and I do think about where the food came from and what the animal went through, and I can tell you it went through much more gruesome stuff than what this clip shows. In it we see Jamie meeting the pigs, talking to the farmer, bringing out a dead pig and then about 10-15sec of cutting it up, while he chats to the butchers. There's no blood, there's no noise, there's no skinning.

I absolutely agree we have to know more about where out meat comes from, but it seems to be disingenuous to be squeamish about this. We should be far more shocked by footage of a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) than by the posthumous fate of these hand-reared animals.

I acknowledge that for those against the consumption of animal products it would be upsetting regardless, but if a scene like this upsets any carnivores, I suggest they give up on crackling altogether.

'The True Story of Butterfish' - Nick Earls

Nick Earls writes what he knows. He's obviously learnt a few new things in recent years. The True Story of Butterfish introduces a new protagonist: rather than a member of the medical fraternity, Curtis Holland is a former rockstar. He's producing albums now and divides his time - and technical descriptions - between music software and cooking.

All familiarity is not lost, however. He lives in Brisbane. He has a persistent internal monologue. He's nervous around women, finds himself in unexpected and awkward situations, but has pop-culture funny lines at the ready.

I enjoy Nick Earls' novels. He writes genuinely amusing scenes, and underpins them every now and then with worthwhile bigger-picture musings. He's whimsical, sure, but there's a philosophy to his writing as well. And plenty of authors use their hometown as a touchstone or motif, so why can't Brisbane play that role?

And you really have to hand it to Earls for the aspirational quality of his work. In an earlier novel, his protagonist - in his thirties - admits that he'd only very recently given up serious hopes of playing cricket for Australia. His male characters (eventually) always ending up liking the girls who like them back, and who can give as good as they get when it comes to those pop-culture-laden one-liners. The protagonist in Butterfish played keyboards in a hugely successful rockband, and while the lead-singer has stayed true to the party-hard stereotype, Curtis remains the deep thinker, enigmatic, moody, lonely. All that fame has led him back to the Brisbane suburbs, and the happy fortune of moving in next door to a woman he comes to fancy (the aspiration works for her too - a highly recognisable rockstar moves in next door and they hit it off).

Some of the early scenes focus step-by-step on the process of making music, namedropping software and techniques. Then Curtis starts to cook, and it happens all over again in the kitchen. But once he really gets to know the family next door - and develops surprising relationships with mother, daughter and son - and the lead-singer returns to face family issues, the book gets stronger. Earls isn't scared to give us an overweight, almost-forty protagonist who is hard on himself and full of regret. True to form, however, his character finds redemption in new beginnings, new relationships and new choices.

Butterfish is more thematic than many of Earls' earlier novels. Its resolution doesn't come from neatly tied-up plot points, but rather from Curtis accepting his past, his choices, and how his actions affected others' choices.

Bimbo poster

I bloody love this poster, used at Bimbo Deluxe for their special needs pizza:

Sewing and reaping

Mr Fothergills - an Australian seed retailer - has an 'ad' in this month's Gardening Australia magazine. I put ad in inverted commas as it's quite clearly designed to look like an article, with no branding on the page but plenty of text.

The text focuses on two things: that Australians, on average, don't eat enough vegetables; and that part of the reason for that is their high cost. The ad claims '5 daily serves of vegetables for a family of four can average well over $1,000 a year'. The alternative, of course, is to grow one's own, and to that end the ad contains a table listing half a dozen of Mr Fotherfill's seeds, their estimated yield and the cost per kilo of yield, versus the average supermarket price of the same product.

I'm a strong believer in urban sustainability, growing your own, locavorism etc. But I'm surprised to see a company that ostensibly shares the same values presenting such a biased version of cost. First of all, I don't think $1,000 a year, for four people, is too much to pay for vegetables. Secondly, why do vegetables have to be 'cheap'? I think this is a great misnomer of our time, the cost of fresh produce. People are rejoicing that bananas are back down to $2 a kilo. Remember when they were more than $15? It was terrible!

Well, it was frustrating that a couple of bananas cost several dollars, but a cyclone had wiped out an enormous portion of supply. Lower supply + same demand = high prices. It's really simple market economics. And, frankly, I think $2 a kilo is an absurdly low price for a weighty product that doesn't grow within a thousand or more kilometres of Melbourne.

As Alla Wolf-Tasker - chef extraordinaire at the Lake House - says, 'There is no such thing as cheap food'.

A part of the marketing strategy for many supermarkets is advertising products that cost less than they did a year ago. I've always found that a bit strange, and the message I get from it is that we can't take their word on what a product 'costs'. Fresh produce should not sit at a fixed price. We should not expect to always be able to get apples for $6 a kilo or tomatoes for $4. We recognise that with the products that are still acknowledged as seasonal - mangoes, grapes, berries etc. But it goes for all of them.

Mr Fothergills does have a point though. Even though they ignore the cost of potting mix, plant food etc in their pricing of produce grown from their seed, at least a vegetable grown in your backyard demonstrates a truism more certain than market economics - you get out what you put in.

Vitamin WTF

VitaminWater are going all out with a new set of billboards advertising VitaminWaterZero, an improvement on VitaminWater10 because it's low calorie. That's a relief, cos all those calories in water have been bothering me...

Let's wind back a step here. They are advertising low-calorie water. Water. The stuff that comes out of the tap, made up of hydrogen and oxygen, rather than a bunch of carbohydrates that want to make friends with your hips.

I've been pretty flabbergasted over the last few years as these super-waters started, ahem, flooding the market. Bottled water is bad enough, with each 600ml bottle requiring about twice that much water to manufacture and distribute. Even advertisers tip their cap to the industry that has made so much money out of the ultimate free commodity.

But any product, no matter how successful, needs innovation to keep up the buying trend, so the gurus at Coca-Cola (Glaceau, who puts out VitaminWater, is a subsidiary of the soft drink giant) put their heads down and came up with stuff to put in the water to make it better for us. Advertising for VitaminWater is admirable - it's Gen Y styley with plenty of social media presence, and products spruiked to help in situations from hangovers ('get perky when you're feeling murky') to workouts ('more muscles than Brussels'). There's even VitaminWater 'uncapped' which sets out, armed with 600ml bottles of pick-me-up, to uncover the latest in music, sports and fashion.

The original VitaminWater10 range, with products names such as Focus, Revive and Spark, is pitched as a 'nutrient enhanced water beverage'. The liquid of life is improved with an alphabet of vitamins and flavours described as both fruit and 'other natural'.

They push the healthy line pretty hard: in the products area of the VitaminWater site, the interactive feature allows users to 'rollover to view nutrition info', which merely enlarges the front label of the bottle - already clearly visible - to zoom on the list of vitamins and additives such as taurine and chromium. It's a simple nutrition panel - it must be good for you!

So where, in amongst the -ins, -ines and -iums are the -oses? Where does sugar come into this? It seems pretty extraordinary that enough sweetener had been added all along to make it worth their while to bring out a whole new range that in effect spruiks the unhealthiness of the original product.

And it shits me that the conglomerates have carte blanche to take over the 'healthy' soapbox with 'enhanced water' (come on, it's a ridiculous phrase) when in fact that enhancement is in no small part sugar, the ingredient against which genuine health experts are fighting an uphill battle.

Hotbeautyhealth.com can't get enough of it. 'No more worries about high calories in our favorite beverages because Glaceau has come to the rescue creating Vitamin Water 10!' They spruik its benefits of only 10 calories per serving (although there are 2.5 servings in a standard bottle) and mentions three times how tasty it is, and as many times how 'natural' it is. 'Sounds unreal!'

My oath it does.

Fructose free III - at what cost?

I give great credit to Sacs in Westgarth. Formerly the wonderfully named Silly Yaks, this cafe and foodstore serves a full range of food suitable not only for a coeliac diet, but also for those avoiding fructose.

A range of breads, pasta and ready meals are available from the freezer, and the cafe offers pies, pizzas and sweets, all marked out as FF or GF. They even offer tarts with forbidden fructose-laden fruits, wherein the fruit has been cooked with dextrose, which binds with the fructose to carry it across the stomach wall, hence avoiding the deleterious effects of fructose malabsorption.

But...and this is a big but...their takeaway products are horrendously expensive. I ducked in this morning to look for some gluten-free breadrolls (pack of 4) so I could partake of burgers at home, as well as pastry to wrap around the mince we bought in readiness for sausage rolls. What would you expect to pay for two such pantry staples?

$30.

That's what the guy at the counter asked for. $10 for the rolls, $20 for the pastry. Most of their products aren't marked with a price, perhaps to avoid screams of the nature I swallowed as I calmly handed over enough food to feed myself for a week, in return for two pantry items. As I left the store, I imagined other uses for that $30. I could:

• See two films at Nova as a RRR subscriber, and get a choc top
• Buy one and half six packs of beer
• Buy two bottles of very reasonable wine, or three bottles of Gran Sasso from that place on Lygon St
• Travel to Yea and back, and back again, on the bus
• When Tiger's in a good mood, fly to Tasmania
  
• Buy three pairs of shoes from Green Collective
• Revamp my summer wardrobe at Savers
• Revamp my entire wardrobe at Salvos
• Pick up a desk and drawers at Don Boscos
• Eat at Don Dons five times
• Get two courses and a glass of wine at innumerable Melbourne restaurants

Instead, for that money, I have two meal components, not even two complete meals.

Now, grumbling aside (and I confess that as I left the shop I was pretty grumpy), let's consider what this actually means. The food we stock our pantries with, despite protests to the contrary, is, in the main part, quite cheap. A large proportion of the population can't satisfactorily process a lot of wheat, yet white flour is a staple of our diet. It's cheap and easy to grow, harvest and mill, and it has just the right amount of stickiness - or gluten - that we've come to expect in everything from bread to muffins to pastry. And, thanks to monoculture farming, it keeps the costs of those types of products low.

So it's pretty scary when you step outside the protected world of mainstream groceries. Firstly, to discover how many alternatives there are - rice, tapioca, soy, barley, oat, buckwheat and maize flour to name some - and what the cost of production and distribution is when you don't have the back-up of a large corporation.

You can't just replace wheat flour one for one with another choice - to get a reasonable consistency you need a mix, so there is more involved in product development. And, not everyone likes it, so the market is smaller. However, not everyone likes stomach cramps and headaches after a sandwich either, so people like me who are trying to lessen health problems are faced with elevated costs for alternative items, in part because mainstream costs are kept so low.

Think about bananas. When they're $17 a kilo people get angry. But that's what they cost when supply is low. When they're $4 a kilo, noone's thinking about the fact that they're still travelling thousands of kilometres to fill the market in cooler climates. The cost of food isn't a static one, yet supermarkets push prices down on lead items as if they can control the weather. If stores stocked a range of bread products, the white flour options might cost a little more, but the alternatives would almost certainly cost a lot less.

I'm still thinking of other options for that $30, and while the cost will make the sausage sandwich I've got planned for lunch a little tougher to swallow, I can take some comfort from contributing to the possiblity of alternatives one day actually breaking into the mainstream. And the lack of physical symptoms afterwards will feel pretty good too.

Where's your kitchen?

An intriguing part of the cafe boom around Brunswick is the forebearance of installing a kitchen. It's a pretty vital part of the food-service industry, but many venues go instead for a food-preparation area of grill and sink behind the counter, with as much bench space given to the coffee machine and its accessories.

The breadth of cafe options in the area owes thanks to that decision - it is, of course, about cutting start-up costs, making it possible to make rent and offer high-quality coffee with a small range of breakfasts and lunches, often under or around $10.

But, when the crowds arrive - as they inevitably do in Brunswick - the limitations of the set-up become more obvious, with 45-minute waits for breakfast orders, since only one or two items can be prepared at once.

It's a relief to visit somewhere like Mixed Business in Clifton Hill to see a cafe with closer to a 50-50 split between customer and kitchen space. A kitchen laden with colanders, steaming pots, aproned and hatted cooks is discreetly visible at the back of a single, large, light room. Filled with mish-mashed wooden furniture, it's an echoey space, but customers are given enough room that conversation is still an easy proposition.

Similarly, a recent lunch at Pope Joan was over refreshingly quickly, since their enormous food-prep area - with a separate room at the back and a finishing station at the front, often staffed by owner Matt Wilkinson - gives them capacity to cope with the endlessly eager crowd of customers.

Congrats to said Mr Wilkinson also, for recently being crowned Australia's best sandwich maker. I can attest that the ones on offer at Pope Joan are fantastic!

Cheap as chips

Down at Bridie O'Reillys, Friday nights are a bargain...for them. How does only getting a fifth of your meal sound? (Maybe one of the loads of 'give aways' is the chance to win the other 80%...)

Click on the pic to see in larger detail.

Hungry City - Carolyn Steel

I've rarely enjoyed the pleasure of a non-fiction book that brings together so many of my favourite themes for consideration.

I came across Carolyn Steel as the presenter of the keynote address for this year's State of Design festival. Steel is an architect by trade, but some years ago started researching how the design of our cities reflects, is influenced by and (especially in modern cities) ignores our relationship with food and its supply.

Steel is a rapid and enthusiastic speaker, unable to resist delving into tangents, then berating herself for not sticking to the vital facts in her allotted time. Despite both the restrictions and diversion, she did an impressive job of precising much of the book's 300 pages of content in an hour. Steel is clearly intimately engaged with her subject and it's a further credit to her that the book is so nuanced; she doesn't run away with passionate polemic, but her message is forceful regardless.

So what is that message? Hungry City argues that we cannot persist with building cities that ignore the realities of food supply. The 'sustainable city' is a common theme in today's media, whether in discussions about more bike paths, urban gardening or solar power rebates. Steel's argument, however, is more fundamental than that. It's not about improving what we have, it's about rethinking design and paying closer attention to the chains of power that control the supply of food around the world.

This is also about much more than food miles, which themselves aren't a new phenomenon. In Ancient Rome, the citizens dined on delicacies from as far away as Egypt and Spain. Steel traces the history of town- and city-building back to Sumerian times, when the first zoned habitable areas appeared out of a need to store and trade grain. (Ironically, it was our evolution to eat grass, rather than just meat, that was the first step in the journey that led to today's megalopises - we were no longer limited to town sizes that could be supported by the amount of livestock within walking distance.)

The story travels from Sumeria to Rome to post-industrialisation, to the development of the shopping mall in mid-20th-century America, the decline of independent stores in Britain and absurd zoning allowances for megamarkets, all the way through to a futuristic city of vertical factories. It's a lot to stomach, but in a fulfilling way.

'Small World' - Matt Beaumont

In 2000, Matt Beaumont published e, a novel written entirely in email exchanges between the employees of an ego-drenched London advertising agency. Its humour and observations would appeal to any fans of The Gruen Transfer. I've followed his work since that first novel had me chuckling and referencing for days.

Where There's a Will continued the vein of comedy, but added a more bittersweet twist. It tells the story of Alvin, a perennial do-gooder, whose philanthropy is out of kilter with the cynicism and solipsism of those around him. It featured some wry and worthy observations, but the plot relied a little too heavily on coincidence and circumstance.

Enter Small World, wherein Beaumont combines key elements of both of those earlier novels, to varying effect. Clearly not one to be too limited by straight prose, but wanting something other than a modern 'epistolary' novel, Beaumont presents a story told from a dozen different perspectives. The first-person narrator switches within scenes, within pieces of dialogue, introduced simply by the character's name and a colon.

It's unbelievably off-putting at first, and my experience of this novel very nearly ended within twenty pages. We firstly meet a group of three married couples - tricky enough to remember who is friends with whom, who is married to whom, who fancies (or indeed stalks) whom. The perspectives then branch ever further: a policeman arrives at the house where the six are having a dinner party, and enters the first-person milieu. So does his girlfriend, who's the PA to one of the Original Six, a HR manager. So does the nanny of the HR manager, and the nurse she sees at the hospital when she takes her young charge for treatment. The nurse is the mother of the boyfriend of the shop assistant for another member of the Original Six (who is being stalked by the husband of the HR manager).

It's a complex latticework, and one that does stretch the boundaries of credulity a little bit. Some characters seem to be there just to add to the complexity - not all of them manage a distinctive voice, nor do all their stories contribute significantly to the overall plot momentum. The differences between each character voice are subtle for the most part, and that's one of the most curious elements of the novel. Normally books with multiple perspectives present each voice in large chunks, giving the reader time to get to know the character through their voice, mannerisms and reactions. With such rapid changes between perspective, there would be no narrative cohesion if Beaumont did that: the language remains much the same; at least it does between the white upper-class characters who make up the bulk of the cast. When it comes to Jenka, a Czech nanny, Beaumont is cruelly stereotypical and patronising, giving her broken, comedic English and furnishing her only with a desire to have her nose reshaped to look like Charlize Theron.

But what of the story? Just as this group of characters is implausibly connected (it would seem only ten or 15 people provide all the services and action in north London) their lives contain the melodrama of a daytime soap. Characters die, get attacked, have surgery, almost lose family members, end marriages, lose jobs and generally have a pretty shit time of it for much of the novel. For most, their saving grace is the power of the people around them to help, whether friends or strangers.

Beaumont weaves a tight web of interactivity, and with so many characters funnelling their experiences into the plot the reader is presented with several stereotypes - of mothers (or women desperate to be mothers) in particular. The connections between the characters do become ridiculous, especially with a long lost half-sister finding herself (unknowingly) on the same hospital ward as her sibling, although they live hundreds of kilometres apart. Perhaps, however, Beaumont was aiming for archetypes. With so many characters to empathise with, they need to be quickly sketched so we know who we're dealing with as the narrative perspective continually changes. (At times the perspective changes mid-dialogue just to give us a first-person reaction that could as easily have been described in the third-person.) The intended effect was perhaps to remind us of the propensity to find love and support in any of our relationships, and that anyone we meet could be connected to us in a way that means they deserve our respect and attention, rather than admonition and judgement.

Of course, attendant to that is the idea that people who do bad things could just as easily be closely connected to us. The 'bad guys' in Beaumont's novel are not fully redeemed, although they do reach a state of contrition.

In some ways, this novel can be compared to Christon Tsiolkas' The Slap (which has done very well in England), in that it details the machinations of a closely connected group of (mainly) young people, who are as connected to their urban environment as they are to each other. It does have some provocative themes. A character undergoing IVF is frank about the negative effect of the treatment on her emotions and the unfair impact this has on her husband. It has a character to match Harry, Tsiolkas' most hateful creation: Keith the policeman, an unsatisfiable arsehole of thwarted ambitions. Nannying and the respective responsibilities of paid help versus parents get a look-in as well.

The novel's ending is far brighter than much of the dark humour that has pervaded throughout, but given the licence taken with all these intersecting lives it's hardly surprising that things end up unrealistically cheesy as well. Beaumont manages to create enough intrigue for us to crave a conclusion, but I'm not convinced that this story and its message were strong enough on their own, separated from the conceit of multi-perspective narration.