The order of things; Hellenic Republic II

434 Lygon St, Brunswick East; 03 9381 1222

8.30. Tuesday night. A quiet time for many a restaurant, but at Hellenic Republic it may as well be Cup Day. Our dinner at Hellenic was long overdue, an unexpected move (within the suburb, thankfully) having thrown a few unlaid plans into confusion. Since its birth last December, Hellenic has not wanted for custom. We chose a Tuesday evening in an attempt to bolster our chances of getting in. The place was rammed, with plenty of fresh diners arriving after our 8.30 allocation. There's no surprise in this. George Calombaris is one of Melbourne's most vaunted chefs, and the opportunity to eat his creations in the burbs and in budget is pretty irresistible.

His restaurant is not without resistance, however. On the day we dined Epicure mentioned that nearby residents are applying to Moreland Council to re-zone parking in the area. With all these greekophiles flocking to the northern end of Lygon St, residents of Stewart St are suddenly having to circle the block to find somewhere to park. It's the precise problem experienced by residents of nearby Mitchell St, on the corner of which sits the unassuming shopfront of i Carusi. I have a very simple solution to both problems: equidistant from the two restaurants lies a McDonalds. Bulldoze it, lay the turf with any leftover burger meat, and bingo, there's a carpark.

To digress momentarily into municipal issues, the residents have a pertinent point. I'm thrilled to have Calombaris in the neighbourhood, but I ride and walk everywhere. If I wasn't a food fan, and never intended to visit Hellenic, it would be galling to suddenly lose a fundamental aspect of my home. Having grown up near an ever-expanding shopping centre in Newcastle, I've known for a long time that increased traffic flow rarely seems to stop council approval of projects that bring in as much dosh as cars.

Back to our visit. We successfully resisted the banquet (for which there are three options, and the cheapest, at $49, can seem tempting), all reports being that it's simply way too much food. Our ordering was not adventurous; we stuck with the dishes raved about on blogs and in newspaper articles all over the city: lamb from the spit, beetroot with yoghurt and cumin, kalamari, hand-cut chips and the famous kefalograviera, served with peppered figs.
Our dishes were a straightforward representation of Calombaris' commitment to the staples of Greek cuisine: the meats, the cooking styles and the flavourings. Let's talk about two other staples, bread and water, which, despite being fundamental to most dining experiences, are so often mishandled.

We had two breads at the table - we ordered pita bread off the menu ($3.50), and a basket of leavened bread arrived with the first two plates. I find that peculiar, when a diner orders bread they need to pay for and is then brought the house bread regardless. While the pita bread was particularly pliant and a perfect wrap for the lamb, I couldn't believe that it was the fifth item brought to the table, after the beetroot, saganaki, lamb and potatoes. You wouldn't expect a curry to arrive minutes before rice, and it's the same with bread. Particularly in a restaurant that follows the trend of having a 'bread station': just slice it, get it in the basket, and the waiter picks one up on the way through with the first round of cooked dishes. We also weren't offered any water, which to my mind should happen without the waitstaff even realising they're reaching for the (in this case cutely raffia-twined) bottle.

Minor points? Maybe. But Calombaris is clearly riding a huge word-of-mouth swing at the moment. I'm enthusiastic about the place, but it does take some canny consideration to come out with a well-priced dinner (ours, with two glasses of wine and an ouzo, was just under $100. We were very full, so I think we got it pretty right.) Others are far less so, and still regard this as jazzed-up Greek - every post, whether for or against, produces a range of comments protesting one way or the other. I remain a fan of Calombaris' cooking - one could eat well on the lamb and saganaki for a long time - but no matter who's behind the pans, nor what genre of dishes they're producing and what price lies against them on the menu, I'll always give credit to a restaurant that remembers the basics, and when we're talking food, you can't get much more basic than bread and water.

'Divisadero' - Michael Ondaatje

Divisadero is a Spanish word, and in Ondaatje's 2007 novel it has a brief presence as the name of a street a character lives on for a time. Its meaning - either to divide or to make something out (from a distance) - encapsulates the whole structure and modulation of the book. The narrative is fractured, keeping the reader at arm's distance from the inner sanctum of the characters. It shifts point of view from chapter to chapter, dipping back into the past, changing the narrative voice from first person to third person, and changing tense from past to present. It also follows two distinct paths: a story of three characters in a modern, rural American community, and the background of an early-twentieth-century French poet and author, Lucien Segura, whose work is being translated by one of the modern characters, Anna.

That link between the two time periods is played out only briefly, however. Throughout the book, pairs of characters who significantly affect each other often spend only snatches of time together. In the modern thread, Anna and Claire are false sisters (born in the same week, one is adopted by the other's father) and often confused with one another, not in a 'look-alike' fashion, but instead in terms of mistaken identity. They embody the notion a single spirit divided at birth and shared between two people. Due to the tumultuous events of their past, however, they spend most of their lives apart. Segura, the writer, is ultimately able to admit and express his greatest love only when that woman is, in fact, not there.

Ondaatje's take on the distant past, as an informant or precedent to our current predilections, as well as the power of events in one's own life, is McEwanesque in its take on cause and effect. Ondaatje is perhaps more open about that theme than McEwan: he stresses that we need '...to accept the flawed barrier between cause and effect, how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one's life like an image through a camera obscura.'

With gentle beauty Ondaatje expresses how atuned we can become to the world: 'It was when he felt...most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him - a tree's sigh or his mother's song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him.' Hence, while superficially the two story threads have little connection, we know that Anna is channeling this entire, unknown past belonging to Segura as she sits in the places where he thought, felt, watched and wrote.

Divisadero is reminiscent too of A.S. Byatt's Possession, as both books not only present parallel stories in different times, but also offer them equal space, development and importance in the narrative, rather than one buoying or merely supplementing the other. As Divisadero progresses, the time-shifting intensifies, moving forward and back several years within the one segment, sometimes within the one recollection of a character. Again, Ondaatje is aware of the effect he is creating, using a comparison of photos of characters from each timescape to simultaneously remind us of their link, but also to separate them: 'We are much closer to the subject in this [later] picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed, eliminating vistas, the great forests, the ranging hills.'

To end, Ondaatje presents us with an image of birds over a lake 'flying as close to their reflections as possible'. The whole novel has presented us with these dualities: of the two timescapes, of two cultures, and within each pairing of characters. Anna can only understand what she is reading through the prism of her experience; hence, a current perspective informs the past. We can only re-live our memories and others' from the present: the notion of cause and effect moves both backwards and forwards in what we only imagine to be a linear progression of time.

Hungary in the suburbs; North Fitzroy Arms & 'Prague' - Arthur Phillips

296 Rae St, North Fitzroy; 03 9489 8519

Recently, I've been working through a novel called Prague, set thus far entirely in Budapest. I felt a similar, though far more rewarding, disconnection with expectations this week when I ate a fine goulash at a pub with the distinctly local name of the North Fitzroy Arms. Perhaps both the novel and the pub are living in another time: the former in the tumult of 1989, when capitalism flooded the Danube, and the latter when Fitzroy Lions + Brisbane Bears did not equal one team north of the border.

(A third, related disconnect cropped up coincidentally this afternoon, when I spotted a white Mercedes M-class with the number plate PRAGUE.)

Goulash is Hungary's version of the slow-cooked dish every nation worth its sea salt lays claim to as a national cuisine. The Hungarian offering - a stew of beef and onions in a rich gravy sometimes thick enough to submerge optional dumplings - has a vermillion vibrancy thanks to the addition of paprika. In this North Fitzroy interpretation, the meat, almost melted in its slow cooking, is cuddled around a wodge of creamy mash flecked with spring onion. It was simply divine. The pub's proprietors are named on its website as Volbi and Zorka and they've clearly brought home-learnt skills to spoil those in the inner north lucky enough to stumble upon them.

SG stuck with something a bit more nationalistic, the kangaroo fillets with mushroom risotto and beetroot. The pub is also known as Haskins Restaurant and the folk behind the stove certainly know how to treat their meat, serving up several slabs of pink, seared, juicy roo fillets. The food and wine prices are generous; customers are welcome to order from both bar and restaurant menu in either area of the pub; and they offer a varied, non-Fosters list of wines by the glass.

Arthur Phillips, Prague's author, is an American who lived in Budapest for two years immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The novel features five North American characters, each of whom has found themselves in Budapest for different reasons, although all are unified in feeling it's a place of opportunity thanks to the monumental economic and political changes underway. The perspective, however, is one of an outsider, although it does attempt to engage with locals and deliver, through character histories, an extensive history of Hungary through two World Wars and multiple revolutions. However, with all but one of the protagonists ignorant of Hungarian it is necessary for them to meet English-educated Hungarians in order to progress the story, which to me limits the efficacy of the native perspective (particularly as Russian was far more common as a second language than English in the eastern bloc).

To write such a story with an actual insider's perspective, however, would place it within the Hungarian canon and therefore immediately hinder its entry and acceptability to the readership of Western countries. Think of recent Nobel prize winners - such as Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (last year's winner) and most pertinently Hungarian Imre Kertész (2002), who are virtually unknown outside Europe, despite decades of reputable work. There is, therefore, an inherent dichotomy in a foreigner trying to tell the story, no matter how vital, of a land not his own.

As for the title, it is perhaps an ironic device (the blurb explains that the five American expats 'harbour the vague suspicion that their couterparts in Prague have it better'). Perhaps naming the novel outside its setting represents the cultures that have been imposed - forcefully through war or unwittingly through the embrace of capitalism - upon these small, confused eastern European countries. A simple name is not enough of an identity in the face of such change. However, as when one of the characters questions a Serb as to why he finds it so important to insist he's not Yugoslavian, since 'they're all the same', it is a device that belies its own effectiveness by what it denies: the importance and weight of these countries' centuries of history.

Bloggers' Meet, Take 2

The bloggers' meet, postponed in February due to Melbourne's hottest ever day, has been rescheduled for next weekend, Saturday 7 March, at the Commoner in Fitzroy, from 2 pm. Full details at Duncan's site.

'The Raw Shark Texts' - Steven Hall

My two-word review of the Raw Shark Texts would be 'utterly compelling'. I could hardly call that impartial, however! I do regard this as one of the best novels I've read in some years, but it's not without its flaws.

The strength of the novel comes through its concept, one that explores the dangers lurking in our communications and the power of some media to enter or control our thoughts. Ironically, I feel it's a book where less communication about its content offers the reader a more rewarding experience, as they can be freshly surprised by the genius of Hall's intellectual creation as the story unfolds.

There are weaknesses in the execution, however. Dialogue, for example, can be trite, and particularly within the romantic sub-plot, it can become overly derivative. Perhaps the author is aware of that, as the key character acknowledges that he has remembered the conversations he recounts as cleverer than they were.

Hall's language skills are better employed in physical descriptions and tight scenes of drama and suspense. His language is both surreal and precise, employing cunning comparisons that allow him to place his hyper-realistic story deep within the ordinariness of our existence. On the first page, the reader is sucked in at speed:

My eyes slammed themselves capital O open and my neck and shoulders arched back in a huge inward heave, a single world-swallowing lung gulp of air. Litres of dry oxygen and floor dust whistled in and snagged up my throat with knifey coughing spasms. I choked and spat through heaves and gasps and coughing coughing coughing heaves. Snot ropes unwound from my nose. My eyesight melted into hot blurs over my cheeks.

I found this character description particularly visual:

Dr Randle was more like an electrical storm or some complicated particle reaction than a person. A large clashing event of a woman whose frizzy hack job of white-brown hair hummed against a big noisy blouse which, in turn, strobed in protest against her tartan skirt. She had strontium grey eyes which crackled away to themselves behind baggy lids. She made the air feel doomy, faintly radioactive. You half expected your ears to pop.

Hall's similes demonstrate his capacity to twist language into inventive, unexpected associations, and his obsession for language is made clear as it finds its way into so many of his comparisons: 'It was still raining outside. A dramatic wet sheet broke against the window followed by a haiku of fat rain taps as the wind took a breath'.

Conceptually, the book carries out a relentless assault. The framework of Hall's extraordinary plot allows him to take a concept down from the shelf, put in a snowdome and shake it around to see how it comes out in a new arrangement:

Maybe it's natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don't die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea.

If you find the intellectual vacillations of the book a lot to take in, focus for a while on the various cameos of protagonist Eric's cat, Ian. He's a well-drawn character for an animal, his actions often described through brilliant, personifying descriptions:

After a moment, Ian's big ginger body stepped out, cautiously at first, and then, looking around with that not bad expression dads use when looking at other dads' new cars, he sauntered off into the depths of the warheouse.

The book also famously includes some dramatic typesetting, engineered by the author himself. I felt too that there was more to be read into some of the character names than first met the eye, either through aural similarity or the use of anagrams. In a book where a laptop becomes a lethal weapon, and someone's life can be endangered through an ill-chosen download, do the names Mycroft Ward and Clio Aames conjure any associations?

Salty and sweet; A Minor Place IIII and Giorno II

A Minor Place: 103 Albion St, Brunswick East; 03 9384 3131
Giorno: 608 High St, Thornbury; 03 9484 2040
I love a dish that combines two elements of the taste spectrum. It probably won't do my rep any favours to admit that in my formative years one my favourite indulgences was to dunk the fries from a certain corporate-evil fast-food franchise into said franchise's chocolate sundae. Sickly sweet chocolate sauce with extraordinarily salty chips...it was an inglorious start to a food obsession, but it's the same principle on which many great dishes are based.

A Minor Place has the right idea with one of the options for their scrambled eggs: adding fetta and caramelised onions. It promised a little more than it delivered, in that the salty fetta and sweetened onions didn't present quite the bold contrast I'd had in mind. It was, regardless, a very satisfying dish, with the creamy eggs sitting perkily atop the promised multigrain bread (I like a cafe prepared to go the grain).

Over at Giorno, I'd learnt on previous visits that their menu can understate things. Dropping in for a post-groceries spot of lunch, I was keen to try out one of their piadinas (available from 11am), the Italian contribution to flatbreads. More robust than a crepe, and more closely resembling naan than a tortilla in looks, piadina is perfect to wrap around some Italian meat and cheese. My choice at Giorno featured proscuitto, artichokes, fontina and rocket. 'Sounds like a salty combo!' I hear you say. You're not wrong! Hopefully it was an unusual batch of bread, as the piadina itself could have sold more beer than a bowl of peanuts. The Giorno/Pizza Farro staff are always friendly and forthcoming, and I did mention that the bread seemed unreasonably salty. The waitress didn't think they normally added salt to the dough, so fingers crossed in most cases it's the quality of filling that is allowed to dominate and linger, rather than the need to slake a thirst!

'Naked' - David Sedaris

He's deceiving, that David Sedaris. Not only is he almost impossible to classify (as discussed in an earlier review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim), it also takes some perseverance to get into the right frame of mind to fully appreciate his essays. He can be outrageously funny, but even while delivering a riposte as sharp as a needle dipped in lemon juice, he can ruminate on deep social questions. Reading for seriousness can mean you miss some humour; reading to laugh can mean missing the provocations that elevate Sedaris above a simple humourist.

In the last, and eponymous, essay in his collection Naked, there is a passage of humour that exceeds even Bill Bryson's awe at the range of incontinence pads he found in an American supermarket. The essay is a lengthy one, describing Sedaris' experience at a nudist camp. He originally requested a brochure for the camp as part of an ongoing joke at the expense of his brother; he later decides to attend for a week, a decision born out of the noble belief that if he can be comfortable being naked around others, he will be better able to accept himself for who he is. That reasoning is a good example of the intellectualism and honesty Sedaris employs in his essays. It's easily missed, however, if, like me, you were still wiping your eyes after reading the previous page:

The brochure [for the nudist camp] pictures a swimming pool...and the inevitable volleyball court, which leaves me to wonder: What is it with these people and volleyball? The two go hand in hand. When I think nudist, I don't think penis - I think net.

Included in the envelope is a calendar of events...In May they held a golf-cart rally, several theme campfires, a chili cook-off, and something called 'Wild West horseback riding'.

Test eye shadow on all the rabbits you want. Strap electrodes to the skulls of rhesus monkeys and shock them into a stupor, but it is inhumane to place a nudist on horseback the day after a chili cook-off. ('Was he always an Appaloosa?')

Toast; North Island and Crunch

North Island: 111 Scotchmer St, North Fitzroy; 03 9486 8864
Crunch: 669 High St, Thornbury; 03 9495 1655

"It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you," opined British food writer Nigel Slater in his memoir, Toast. I haven't quite fallen in love with the cafe staff who have provided me with a golden serve of carb with toppings in the last couple of weeks, but as long as the bread is good and the grilling hand steady, it is a marvellous thing to sit down to.

In an attempt to reclaim January as a relaxed, vacationing month, I headed out on spontaneous mid-week jaunts to tick yet more local cafes off the list. I wasn't after Big Breakfasts - more to get a feel of the place, sample the coffee, and quiet my gurgling morning belly. It can seem odd to leave a kitchen amply stocked with a toaster, bakery bread and quality Australian honey to order and pay for a plate of toast; then again, like a cup of tea, the flavour and crunchy delight of toast is somehow enhanced when someone else makes it for you.

At North Island, they took care of the toasting and slicing, but the rest was up to the diner.The simply served plate of pide, avocado and lemon fits the cafe's atmosphere, a proponent of the Brunswick model of minimal kitout, eschewing fancy touches in favour of good coffee and basic menu items with a twist. I had to interrupt David Sedaris (not him in person, unfortunately; rather, his humour, in the form of Naked) to effect my own avocado and lemon distribution. But look at that avocado - that's why you order out. I've never had one at home that looked like that: mine are browny green and mushed before they even leave the skin (due to my flesh-extracting technique, rather than inferior produce!). Accompanying this indulgently simple start to the day was a fine coffee.

Thornbury's Crunch probably isn't a cafe that many people cross town for, but it's one that looks after local shopkeepers and families with adequately prepared cafe staples for breakfast and lunch.

Their sourdough toast comes with a side bowl of orange and tamarind marmalade. Tamarind is vital for giving that extra oomph to good satay sauce, and combined here with the orange it produced a tartness best enjoyed via a light smear, rather than a good dollop. A refreshingly intercultural way to start the day with toast.