Food & Drink | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Jul

Butter and pounds: it’s all a bit rich

How’s that couple in the UK who won £161 million the other day? That’s a whole lot of pounds. Yet they’ll keep the car and the same house, but might go on a few holidays…

Just as well they were retired, as I don’t buy that line that people say they’ll continue to work. Yeah, right! Like I’m going to keep slogging it out for some bogan boss who can’t believe I still turn up at 9am every single day.

I don’t buy that line that money won’t change us. Hell yes. Change me, baby. Change me. Bring on the vintage champagne and pool boy, I say. Sort of like that Imperial Leather ad doing the rounds at the moment. That’s my style..

One thing I would do would be to continue to eat incessantly around Melbourne. And one place I’d continue to haunt would be Le Traiteur. People, if you haven’t eaten there, go immediately. The kitchen churns out fresh baguettes and pastries twice daily, so the cafe is constantly perfumed by the smell of fresh-baked bread – that smell so beloved of real estate agents because it immediately makes us wrap our arms around our (ample) selves, and say, ‘I love this place’ (and, if it is an Australian house, ‘ I want to spend the next 30 years working to pay for it.’)

Back to Le Traiteur, it’s deliciously French with an Aussie twist, with gorgeous mustards, relishes, lots and lots of porky things and now I know where I’ll buy my next lot of saffron from. I was willingly led there by G, who knows her onions, pates, terrines and brioches. I was uncharacteristically early, so watched the legals around me scoff the last remaining pies de jour (a sensational looking chicken and leek). Dammit, I wanted to rip the pies from their very plates. But I desisted, instead taking G’s recommendation for a brioche so buttery it should carry a health warning.

The service: charming (hey, they welcomed a pram into the cafe during the lunchtime rush and owner Nick came out for a baby cuddle). The coffee: fabulous. Stick your nose in; trust me you won’t regret it.

Le Traiteur: 552 Lonsdale St, Melbourne

May

Essential guide to Dubai

Tips for exploring the glitz, glamour and a dash of grunge of the UAE’s star city.

Click here to read more…

Apr

Essential guide to Kuala Lumpur

There’s more to KL than those big towers – and what are they, anyway? You go up high, you look around, you go down…

Instead, we say hit the malls for some truly fabulous shopping, and get down and dirty on the streets of Little Inida, Chinatown, the Malay quarters…

Click here for where to shop, eat, sleep and sightsee in KL…

Mar

Kyneton: Cool Piper calls the tune

Prunella’s florist on Kyneton’s Piper St.

Cafes and galleries open at a rate of knots, yet there’s still a tractor shop in Kyneton’s hip main drag. How groovy can one town get?

IT’S a windy, rainy night, yet one street in this wee country town is buzzing with a crowd sipping sparkling wine and snacking while making dinner plans. Obviously country Victoria has changed since I last stuck my foot past Melbourne’s city limits sign.

To read more, click here

Feb

Liquid diet only at Ponyfish Island

Ponyfish Island – this pic should help you find it!

In my continued (and futile) quest to stay with the pack on new Melbourne café openings, I finally got to Ponyfish Island.

The signs were good: a sunny day, the Yarra River flowing brownly past, my café companion, GG, found the place under his own steam. This is no mean feat. Try describing where Ponyfish Island is: it’s on a pylon supporting one of the footbridges that runs across the river between Flinders St Station and Southbank.

Yeah, easy.

Anyway, Ponyfish Island has actually been around for a while, but despite its amazing location in the middle of the river, it just hadn’t taken off. New owners and a liquor licence have fixed all that, and last Thursday afternoon, the place was heaving. Literally heaving, with good music and happy punters enjoying an after-work jam jar of wine (tres egalitarian, what, serving wine in a jam jar).

We’d planned to hit the island for lunch, so popped in on Friday, scoring a table by the water at 12.30pm. We ordered: GG had the gnocchi and I went simplistic with a toasted sandwich with spinach, cheese and tomato. We had plenty to talk about but when a youth wandered past with gnocchi and sandwich, we hailed him over.

No, this can’t be your order. You haven’t been waiting long enough, he told us.

Fifteen minutes for a toastie isn’t long enough? I asked.

Not in this place, he said with a little laugh, oblivious to the two journalists committing his nonchalance to memory for future blogging.

It turned out it was our order. Reader, before we ate, we played ‘spot the spinach’ (I won, espying two tiny, wilted leaves tucked in one corner of the no-name white bread offering) and GG’s gnocchi was cold.

The day was sunny, the conversation good, the food queue was long; we gave up and ate.

It may have been a fool’s errand but we also ordered coffee. I placed the order at the counter and then asked, will it be long, as we’ve got to get back to work. The barista heard us and grinned. I’m all over it, he told me. Nevertheless, ignore all the other orders and make ours first, I suggested blithely.

Two seconds later, he appeared with my flat white and GG’s double piccolo, both beautifully executed in delicious Niccolo coffee.

The moral of the story: put nothing solid, I repeat, nothing solid, in your mouth on Ponyfish Island, and treat it like the beautifully ambient bar that it is.

Open 8am till 1am.

Jan

Great Melbourne CBD cafes

Following on from the last post about great Melbourne cafes, I couldn’t find an up-to-date definitive list of fab, new CBD cafes, so I made one, with a little help from my friends. Feel free to add your own…

Bon a Manger, 387 Little Bourke St (modelled on London’s Pret a Manger),

Tuckshop, 500 Bourke St, opened by cafe maestro and St Ali owner Salvatore Malatesta,

Cup of Truth, Degraves St subway (reportedly run by ex Vue de Monde guys)

Clem’s Island, on an island in the Yarra, via the Flinders St Station-Southbank walkway (no, I have no idea either, but will let you know if I ever find it).

65 Degrees, 309 Exhibition St, opened in Feb last year, the name refers allegedly to the perfect temp for coffee milk.

And further afield, the Age‘s round-up of the best 2010 openings are: Monk Bodhi Dharma (Balaclava), Omar and the Marvellous Coffee Bird (worth it for the name alone – heavens knows where Gardenvale is…), the Social Roasting Company (Flemington), Three Bags Full (Abbotsford, which I’ve been threatening to stagger down to for two months now), Nabiha (Moonee Ponds), Sonido! (Fitzroy), Dr Jekyll (St Kilda), the Premises (Kensington) and Coin Laundry (Armadale).

I’m also throwing Sydney icon Campos in there (144 Elgin Street Carlton) and Naked for Satan (285 Brunswick St, Fitzroy) because I like the name and the cheap pinxtos and De Clieu (Gertrude St, Fitzroy) is on the list for its owners’ immaculate coffee pedigree.

And FYI hardened addicts, the winners of the Victorian Barista Championships, held last weekend, were: (winner) Caleb Pohcanski from roaster Five Senses, (second) Matt Perger from roaster and cafe Market Lane, in Prahran Market and (third) Erin Sampson from roasters Veneziano.

Jan

Coffee, rain and hair straighteners; Bourke St’s got it all

I was catching up with a recently ex-Sydney coffee fiend in the CBD today, so thought I’d better take him somewhere that flashes Melbourne’s serious coffee expertise. A truly great cafe in the CBD? Some would sneer that doesn’t exist, and that I should head for Carlton, Fitzroy or South Melbourne. Online searches drew a blank up the Spring St side of town, so I gave up and thought I’d see what I found on the way, hoping for inspiration.

Through the near-blinding rain that has been a feature of Australia’s eastern seaboard these past few weeks, I walked down the top (ie Paris end) of Bourke St and had a mild revelation.

How could I have forgotten: tiny little Von Haus (good for cosy evenings and slices of lemon tart, 1 Crossley St), Mess Hall (outside tables great in the sunshine, not so great for asthma sufferers, 51 Bourke St) and Pellegrini (allegedly Melbourne’s oldest espresso bar, fine for mama’s slap-up pasta, but I’ve found the espresso bitter in the past, 66 Bourke St). I wandered past boho Lane’s Edge (39 Bourke St) and then clocked Society (23-29 Bourke St), which has dwelt in my subconscious only as a place for great cocktails.

It being a 10.30am catch-up, it might have been a little early for Flaming Lamborghinis, but it was the best looking interior in the street, and not too crowded, so I pulled ‘George’ (whose name has been changed to preserve his identity) into a black-velvet booth and we ordered coffee.

Now, I’m not mainlining that much caffeine at the mo, but when I gets it, I want a hit – and am a little bit past being served a soupcon of latte for $4, so I asked the grey ponytailed waiter (think Byron, rather than Byron Bay) for the biggest coffee on board. He said they all come in the regular cup or a larger mug. A mug o your finest flat white, then, please sir.

Reader, he turned up with a satisfyingly large bucket. George, a raging addict who’d been inhaling coffee since the early morn, had a regular skinny latte. And it was good. Not bitter, not too milky, a touch of chocolate. George even got another one to go, so he could keep his caffeine levels up on the way back to the office. It was the old-school Lygon St roaster, Dimattina. Bonus points for the ladies’ loo, which features a $2 hair straightener to iron your locks turned lank on humid days like today. Too fabulous.

Nov

Feed me, Portuguese

You can end up in a world of pain, trying to be authentic in an ethnic restaurant. Try, for example, lunch yesterday in Madeira restaurant in suburban Melbourne, a Portuguese restaurant, if the name didn’t give it away. Actually, we were there to talk about the former Portuguese colony, Macau, off the coast of mainland China, so ethnicity was the name of the game.

My only true desire was for the pasteis de nata, the egg tarts for which Portugal is famous, so it was with glee I learned of the new delights of the espetada, a vertical skewer hanging from a frame, which is brought to the table, the juices from the marinated meat dripping into the rice or potatoes heaped below. Embroiled in a dinner-party war? A few of these puppies slung on the table and you’d totally win.

In the name of authenticity, we said no to the kangaroo espetada, but went for beef, lamb, chicken and, er barramundi (there was no Portuguese cod). All’s well.

Would you like entrees, perhaps? asked the waitress. Ah, no thanks, we said, patting our waistlines. Not even Portuguese chorizo (grilled, spicy sausage)? said the canny saleswoman. Well, ok then. Since we’re in a going local.

And bread? I think we’re fine. Not the traditional Maderian garlic bread, bolo do caco, which we make inhouse? Oh, we must have that, if it’s Maderian.

And come dessert time, the tarts were on order, except for one non-sweet-eater, who declined any dessert, ordering just an espresso.

Wouldn’t sir like a brandy with that? The table witnessed the mildly sheepish grin of the man who’se already tried the Portuguese beer, the slightly carbonated Portuguese white wine, and is planning to return to the office for the afternoon. No thanks.

Oh, says the waitress. All Portuguese men finish with a short black coffee and a Portuguese brandy.

The table does the hard sell for her. Go on, we all encourage Mr Non-Dessert. He relents and declares the imported brandy ‘actually very good’.

It just proves the old adage learned long ago when I was cutting my teeth in design magazines: say it in French (or in this case, Portuguese) and it always sounds better.

28 Nov 2010: As a coda to this piece, written a few days ago, I notice a euro-bureaucrat saying recently that to haul itself out of its crippling economic blues, “the Portuguese are going to have to find a way to make things that other countries want to buy from them”.

Enter the espetada.

Aqui e, Europe’s financial woes solved!

Nov

CPI: the cappucino index

According to the most CPI (that’s Cappuccino Price Index to you), Brisbane has the most expensive coffee in the country.

A cuppa will set you back on average $3.31 compared with $3.22 in Melbourne and $3.06 in Sydney.

This tidbit cropped up while I was shooting an Obama blend (‘yes we can!’) espresso in the new Campos cafe in Melbourne.

Campos originally started in Sydney’s capital of grunge, Newtown, and the Brisbane cafe recently was named Australia’s 2010 best coffee, according to Lifestyle Channel viewers… so if you know and trust a LC watcher, then you’d better make tracks to the Valley in BrisVegas.

The Melbourne staff delighted in showing off The Slayer (“How do you spell that?” “You know, like the American band”) a new-style espresso machine from the US that costs $23,000 and there are only 15 in Australia so far.

Despite the Slayer’s best efforts, I realised I’m not an espresso girl anymore, but I’d go back to 144 Elgin St, in Carlton for another of their creamy piccolo lattes. They’re pitching against some serious heavyweights (think St Ali in South Yarra, Seven Seeds on the other side of Carlton), but you know what they say about Melburnians – three or more standing together and someone’ll wheel an espresso machine by…

Oct

The recipe for world peace? Choux pastry and mangoes

“Hip Brisbane?” said a friend who’d grown up in Brissy in the 60s. “Visit first, then try to convince me.”

If she’d spend just a couple of hours with me this morning, she may have started to relent. The hotel, Spicer’s Balfour, is a nine-room Queenslander (painted weatherboard with wide verandas, a rooftop bar and open-air reception) in New Farm with views across to the Story Bridge and into the back yards of the neighbours, which I love. To paraphrase George Negus, I’m a suburban perv.

Yesterday, I ate lunch at a nearby cafe, the Little Larder, then found I’d left my wallet behind. “No worries,” said the sparky girl serving me. “Just pop in tomorrow!” So I did, and at 8am, the cafe, on a relatively quiet street, was full with a happy buzz of Wednesday morning breakfasters. Who breakfasts out on a Wednesday morning? Brisbanites, it would appear.

And then I swung past Chouquette, which has been turning out the butteriest, Frenchest pastries since before it opened at 6.30 this morning. The smell, people, is a scent to inspire you to write poetry, solve cryptics and create world peace.

Just $1.50 bought me a little bag of chouquettes, sweet little balls of cream puff, rolled in pearl sugar, for a crunch in the mouth. My snack bag of dried fruits has been slung into the dark recesses of my suitcase. Again, this cafe had a scattering of regular patrons sipping milky coffee and buying fresh olive batons – so lucky to have such a gem in their neighbourhood.

The mood in these little streets is relaxed, the scent is of gardenias, jasmine and freshly baked bread, the spring temps are perfect. If ‘hip’ meant feeling angst, wearing black and not eating fresh mango for breakfast, then give hip the heave. I’ll take New Farm (not New York).

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