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Oct

Luke, Luke, Luke. It’s all about you. Even before you waltzed up to my table last night in the new Hilton on the Gold Coast, in your chef’s whites advertising airlines and restaurants, it was all about you.

I thoroughly enjoyed (and how often can you say this of cheap airline food) the tortilla with roast beef, vintage cheese and mesclun leaves as we flew up from Melbourne to the Gold Coast. There was the branding: Food by Luke Mangan. It was a deliciously far cry from your beef pie I ate with the same airline enroute to Fiji recently. Luke, leave rustic alone, please. It was so rustic, it comprised three enormous chunks of cow, so big that the wibbly plastic airline knife had no impact on it, leaving a plane of diners chewing like the animal they were consuming.

Then, last night, as we tossed over the difference between striploin, fillet and tenderloin, you schmoozed the room, smiling and shaking hands like the best-trained celebrity chef. Your name was on every plate that was laid on our table (and let me admit, there were many plates laid on our table).

Oh, how we ate. We ate the kingfish sashimi, with the most divine crust of ginger, eschallot and Persian feta. We at chargrilled quail on shredded zuchinni studded with pine nuts and currants. We at the tenderloin, we at the striploin. God help us, we went back for desert: chocolate three ways (which does sound a bit pervy) and a strip of sunshine-orange cheesecake.

I need to lie down. I need to run a marathon, or whatever the people of the Gold Coast do each morning. I need restraint, I need to avoid you, Luke.

Oct

Melbourne turns pink for Queen

The crowd in front of Flinders St Station

Today, I put my republican hat aside and went to visit the Queen. Well, technically, that’s not true. She came to visit me.

She was due at Fed Square at 12.15, and, being the queen and all, you’d expect her to be on time. Not so. Even though she had just four hours in the city before nicking off to Perth, she dallied and the crowd spent an hour mooching around the intersection in front of Flinders St Station. It was curiously silent as everyone waited to catch a glimpse of Liz II.

The crowd around me was mostly Chinese tourists and office workers who’d stepped out to do something different in their lunchhour.

Melbourne turned on the sunshine, so all the whiteys turned a gentle pink by the time she turned up. Me, I blame Melbourne trams. They never can run on time. Not even for the queen. If you weren’t aware, the Queen was travelling one leg on a new Royal Tram (or its decoy), complete with the usual vomitous-green seat upholstery that really should be burned.

I can confidently report that the Queen is On Trend. Her shocking pink ensemble was the dictionary definition of colour blocking, which is of course so hot right now. She certainly was the brightest note in a sea of Melbourne black, matching beautifully the newly sunburnt bald heads around me.

“I just saw her!” shrieked a British office worker behind me. “I saw someone wearing pink!” The crowd got collective whiplash following her pointing finger.

We watched as car after car was laden with flowers and teddy bears, then realised we were on the wrong side of the intersection, though nobody really knew quite where she was going to appear. She could have dropped in from the helicopters circling above, for all we knew.

The Queen did pay for her tram ride (with a pre-paid card, so she didn’t have to buggerise around looking for coins). Obviously she’s heard about the crackdown on fare evaders. The question of the day is: was the crowd bigger than the crowd that
turned out to greet the two rival football teams in the grand final a
few weeks ago?

The running joke of this royal visit is that the Queen didn’t feel the need to visit Sydney: there are enough queens there already.

Oct

More icing on the cake: Daylesford

Australia’s premier spa town just keeps getting better – and tastier. Discovers what’s new in Daylesford.

“PLEASE, no mobile phones,” requests the Lake House’s restaurant
menu. And, “Please, no thongs.” Oh, only because you ask so nicely, I
won’t wear my thongs into your two-hatted restaurant for the first
showing of its spring table.

They like to keep themselves nice in Daylesford.

Click here to read more/

Sep

Eat to ease East Africa’s famine

Sunday 16 October is World Food Day, and Oxfam is holding Shout the Horn to raise funds for its East Africa food crisis appeal.

Close to 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are currently facing desperate food shortages following the worst drought in 60 years. Oxfam aims to reach 3.5 million people with life-saving water, food and basic sanitation when people eat out at a participating restaurant.

If you work in a restaurant and cafe, could your place becoming a participating partner? The simple act of collecting donations on 16 October will make a difference to the lives of millions.

Full event details, including a list of participating venues and registration info can be found on Oxfam’s website. Please forward this to anyone who might be interested!

Find a participating restaurant near you – Oxfam will be updating the website daily until the event, so you can eat to ease East Africa’s famine.

My Chinese is a bit shabby, so I can’t give full attribution for this photo, but it pretty much says it all.

Sep

Notes from the back of a Daylesford wine bottle

Good Catholic Girl ‘Teresa’ Riesling 2010, Clare Valley:

‘St Teresa of Avila b. 1515 (patron of headache sufferers) is said to have been viewed levitating during deep prayer. My mother Teresa, prays, but to this point has not achieved levitation. The consumption of Clare Riesling over many decades has not caused her to levitate either. Could this dry crisp Riesling be the one?

Grapes grown by good catholic boys Faulkner and Pearson of Penworthham and Marsson of Watervale. Blessed with 600 dozen. Julie Ann Barry, Maker. www.goodcatholicgirl.com.au”

This excellent young Riesling was sitting perkily in the fridge of Monastiraki (Greek: ‘little monastery), the latest offering from Tina Banitski, the artist and mastermind
of The Convent, in Daylesford.

The forbidding former Catholic nunnery and school is now a cheeky art gallery, as well as Bad Habits cafe and the Altar bar (because the bar contains a chunk of the original altar in it, as well as the tabernacle).

Tina has also recently renovated a nearby house, stuffing it with work from her favourite artists, curios and wine to create Monastiraki, the perfect getaway for a bunch of friends or family.

People, it is officially Out There, from the paint-splattered mannequins hanging from the coat hooks to the scarlet or lime green bedroom walls, the fabulously wild artworks, cushion-tastic daybeds and buttock sculptures, essential, of course, for any self-respecting boudoir.

Sep

Spring in the city: good reasons to visit Melbourne

Newmarket Hotel.

Today, I was led astray, into the fabulous Melbourne Middle Eastern restaurant Maha. Little did I know that they are happy to serve up coffee to passers by, and to dish up the most divine donuts that ever wobbled on the face of the earth. They’re not even on the menu, they’re that good.

As we were mainlining the dough balls, crushed pistachios and white chocolate spill (a serve consists of five donuts – five – when inevitably two people are sharing?), I was reminded that Taste of Melbourne starts tomorrow. No time to crash diet before cruising the halls of the Royal Exhibition Building to taste dishes from some of the city’s top restaurants.

There are eight great reasons to visit Melbourne at the moment:
Fringe Festival September 21 — October 9
Melbourne Festival October 6-22
Art deco walking tours
Madonna & Child by Correggio
The Art of Brick LEGO exhibition, until October 9
New bars
Food meets design
and Taste of Melbourne September 15-18

Click here to read more.

Sep

Saturday night in Daylesford

On Saturday night, I
was in Kazuki, the newest restaurant in delicious Daylesford, about 90 minutes
north of Melbourne. Daylesford is, of course, hip to the eyeballs. Only a
population of 7000 people, yet it has art galleries, cafes, restaurants and
beautiful villas wriggling out of every pore.

Kazuki is a Japanese
restaurant on up and coming Howe St, and while I was snacking on tiny plates of
smoked eel ravioli and Japanese mushroom and celery soup, I looked across at
the next table, to see a couple enjoying a romantic evening: the wine, the
food, the view of the darkened street. The only odd note was that they were both about 20. Was I so
composed that at 20, I was taking dates out to swanky restaurants full of
ingredients I couldn’t pronounce? I can quite safely admit that no, I was far
too busy skulking around looking for low-budget entertainment in band pubs,
existing on a diet of unflavoured boiled rice, to even contemplate such
refinement.

“These kids of
Daylesford,” I thought, “they’re in a class of their own.”

Mind you, several
hours later into the evening, a band of the buggers ripped the two wing mirrors
off my daggy old, hardworking car. They’re not so bloody different, after all.

Sep

Poor Ned, it’s hard to get a head

Death mask of Ned Kelly.

Police killer or a true, blue Aussie? Bushranger Ned Kelly
is back in the news, 130 years after he was hung till dead in Old Melbourne
Gaol.

For the foreigners in the crowd, Our Ned had a penchant for
holding up banks, but was forced to go on the run after killing one or three police
officers during raids.

Ned, whose dad, Red Kelly, came from Moyglass in Co
Tipperary, was hanged in Melbourne in 1880, but his remains, along with those
of 134 other prisoners, were later moved to Pentridge Prison, in the Melbourne
suburb of Coburg. Prison officers had poured lime over the remains,
unintentionally preserving them so that 130 years later, the DNA from Ned’s
sister’s great-grandson could identify that the bones were, in fact, the
infamous bushranger’s.

Mick Jagger does Ned.

Ned’s skull was stolen in 1978, but when it was returned,
recent comparisons between the skull and his death mask, modelled on his face
while his dead body was cooling, have showed it’s not Kelly’s cranium, but is
possibly the skull of notorious British murderer Fred Deeming.

It’s a rough trot for a bloke, to have his bones carted
around in the public gaze nearly a century and a half later. And now, the Kelly
family and government bodies are beginning the wrangle over where those bones, it
will be a while till he’s finally laid to rest. But where? In a tacky tourist
trap or displayed tastefully in a museum, alongside his death mask? Either way,
his skull is still missing. To use Ned’s last words, “Such is life.”

Aug

A different direction: Lovin’ Lorne

My drive from Melbourne to Lorne, on the Victorian coastline, is not quite Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic road journey, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he packs his attorney, two bags of grass, mescaline, acid and a salt shaker half full of cocaine: I’m packin’ my mum, some nice nectarines and a swimsuit in the hope that the water in Lorne’s Loutit Bay, aka Bass Strait, isn’t going to freeze my blood.

Click here to read more.

Aug

Where good looks count: Clear Mountain Lodge, Brisbane

Here’s a little tale about a lodge on Brisbane’s far northern fringe, near Samford. So I played down the arguments about the GPS, but it truly was a grim, bleak drive up to the lodge. Well worth it, really.

IT IS a cold and windy night, the night we head to Clear Mountain Lodge, a small hotel about 35 minutes’ drive north of the Brisbane city centre.

The lodge is, unsurprisingly, at the top of lonely Clear Mountain, in Brisbane’s little-known hinterland. In the dark of night, having been unceremoniously stranded in Queensland thanks to Chilean volcanic ash clouds, the lodge could be on the moon, for all I can see.

Thank goodness for the GPS, the neo-tech husband says. I’ll switch off my Walkman so I can hear you call me antediluvian but I just don’t trust them. So we argue all the way to Clear Mountain, before calling the hotel to check its location.

“Just drive to the top of the hill. You can’t miss it,” the receptionist says. “Don’t follow the GPS and go on Old School Road. It’ll send you down a four-wheel-drive track through a forest.” Tres Wolf Creek.

Click here to read more.

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