The Last Appetite

Mekong on Swanston St: The meaty taste of disappointment

Phil Lees — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:06:10 +0000

I’m starting to become accustomed to the sense of betrayal that I feel after eating once again at old favourites in Melbourne. Most continue to please (or at least, meet expectations). But Mekong on Swanston Street in Melbourne, to use more common language, has gone to shit.

Well before I left Australia for Cambodia, Mekong on Swanston St was my reliable lunch joint. I’d worked my way through every offal-packed variation on their basic beef (bo) and chicken (ga). The stock was shining example of pho in Australia: both meaty (which is the key to Australian-style pho) and evenly spiced with star anise and cinnamon. Week to week, there was no variance. At a rough estimate, I would have spent between one and two thousand dollars at Mekong over the years.

It became my yardstick for a damn good bowl of phở; the sort of joint that you would recommend to newcomers to Melbourne to whet their appetite for the more challenging journey into suburban Vietnamese Food. Their staff had a vindictive shirtiness that was always refreshing. A friend often described one of their staff members as a “malign dwarf” but it came from a warm place in his heart.

But no more.

These days the pho at Mekong is like your average oil rig worker: big, meaty and covered in grease. The subtlety has disappeared; the serving sizes seem more gargantuan. The restaurant is still as packed as ever.

Also, the mention that “Bill Clinton had two bowls” is a lie. He ate two bowls at Pho 2000 in Saigon, Vietnam and has never set foot in Mekong in Melbourne. Unless he had two bowls sent up to him on one of speaking engagements in Melbourne, Bill Clinton did not eat two bowls of this particular pho.

Location: Mekong Restaurant, 241 Swanston St, Melbourne, Australia

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Vue De Monde

Phil Lees — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:06:17 +0000

When Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future Yet Come decides to take me out to dinner, he’d probably take me to Vue De Monde to wallow amongst the Baby Boomer dugongs in suits and pearls. That crystalline vision into how my life would transpire if I spent the next twenty odd years focusing upon crapulence would scare me much more than a pauper’s grave.

It did scare me.

This is no fault of Shannon Bennett’s, the oft lauded chef behind the restaurant frequently name-dropped as the best restaurant in Australia.

The only thing that Bennett has left lacking from Vue de Monde is a sense of pomposity. If you were fresh from doing the rounds of France’s most ostentatious eateries I’m not sure whether this would delight or disappoint. The room at Normanby Chambers in Little Collins St, Melbourne is lit with bare strings of oversized, chromed bulbs, the focus of the entire room being upon the open kitchen with mirror above the staff doing the plating. The architectural message is that you’re there for the food and for the front-of-house theatrics that accompany it.

(The Laguiole silverware is a little pompous but much like a Hard Rock Café, it is available for purchase in the gift shop. The fish fork would be a handy piece of equipment for aerating compost.)

It isn’t the level of service that sets apart Vue de Monde but its distinctiveness. It is not a slavish attentiveness that is confused for service at many a fine dining establishment but the ability of staff to have some agency in their roles. If I was making a bad decision in choosing a wine or dish or attempting to customise something to meet my foolish caprices, I get the feeling that Vue De Monde’s crew would tell me that I’m making a grave mistake in no uncertain terms rather than an obsequious “has Sir considered the…”-type suggestion.

The egalitarian service is the most Australian element of the whole experience but does rest upon retaining and training the best of staff, the people that you can rely upon to chat comfortably about how a thermomixer works or the technique used to turn parmesan into a rough sand. Delicious, delicious sand. There is no menu; you submit yourself to the whims of those service staff. They can be steered in a particular direction but the absolute and final control over your food is out of your hands. They chose:

Amuse bouche: A single cos lettuce leaf containing a smear of jamon paste and a sous-vide quail egg balanced atop a wine glass half filled with silky ham consommé and pea foam.

Salmon attacked from all sides: smoked, sliced, jerked, creamed; some sort of dried fish foam (salted cod, perchance?) and a frankly superfluous layer of gelatinized something. There is caviar and micro-herbage. Cubes of fried sourdough on each end.

Mushrooms: tubes of liquified Swiss Brown (?), slightly gummy and al dente on the outside but squirting silky shroom juice from within; with pan-fried shimeji (?) and slices of eringi(?); tarragon emulsion. My mushroom identification skills would kill me in an unforgiving forest.

Gel cannelloni with powdered parmesan cheese and olives; two perfectly ripe cherry tomatoes topped with their own dried skin; some respectable Serrano ham. Where the hell do you get a tomato this impeccable and ripe in winter? I love technique; the mix of industrialisation of food (gel) with small-producer artisanship (ham). It also seems to look like an in-joke about hot dogs, to which I am obviously not averse.

Foie gras, frozen in liquid nitrogen then powdered in a thermomixer, served cold with a dash of “Thai” curry sauce (poured at the table) and three flawless nasturtium leaves. I wish that I could get dispensation for punching people every time that they call a curry “Thai” because it contains coconut milk. But the foie gras, melting on the tongue, is awe-inspiring and smooth like chocolate.

Cold shot of verjus with hibiscus tea, served in a martini glass.

A dainty square of toro on a perfect corn puree; tuna ceviche topped with glass noodles soaked in a lightish soy, shredded fennel(?) and something else green. All surrounded by tuna bone stock and butter. A microdot of sesame salt on the side. By this point my palate is pretty much shot from all the permutations of fat.

Hare: two slices of hare loin on pureed, roasted garlic; a gamy hare jelly; yeast foam; a sourdough lattice. More microherbs.

We skipped out on dessert. I would possibly have burst an internal part. My stomach is still not well trained back into ingesting huge quantities of high fat, Western food. I walked out feeling like somebody had inflated a balloon full of rich creamery butter within me. I’m still recovering.

Probably the only complaint that I could muster was the umami-ness of nigh on everything; all playing on the centre and back of the palate rather than forcing anything to the edges of sour, astringent or bitter. I could have probably specified against this in advance. I’m sure that if you’re a much bigger aficionado of French cuisine, you’d pointy out that I’m missing much of the subtlety but the effect of having so much umami does feel like the chefs aren’t painting from the full palette available to them.

Price: we ate and drank at roughly the speed of $1 per minute per person, for three hours. You do the math.

Location: Vue de Monde, 430 Little Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9691 3888.

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Taieri George

Phil Lees — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:46:57 +0000

Spiced beers generally fit alongside those other joke beers like chili beer or a perfectly-skunked Corona. In the official judging guidelines, they’re relegated to the category of “Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer” to languish amongst the beers that simply don’t work elsewhere. At best, they get passed off as a Belgian specialty ale, a beer with too many characters to characterise.

Most of the people who brew them are certifiably mad; the type of brewer who thinks that the one missing flavor from their porter is pumpkin. I like the hint of coriander and orange peel in a Hoegaarden but don’t really want a beer that boasts that its primary appeal is that it tastes unlike beer but more like garden.

Thus I approached Taieri George with caution. It comes from the brilliant brewers at Emerson’s as a spiced ale, brewed seasonally and released on March 6, the birthday of brewer Richard Emerson’s father, George. It’s also named after a train. A train in New Zealand.

Emerson’s says: “The beer pours a reddish brown hue and offers a delightful aroma of freshly baked hot cross buns with a hint of chocolate…the luscious malt and spice flavours are balanced with just enough hop dryness”

I say: It is much like liquified hot cross bun, pouring with a foamy, dirty brown head at the suggested 8 degrees C. I imagine this is how the Easter Bunny tastes if you put him through the Pacojet. The added cinnamon and the spiciness of the nutmeg aren’t at all cloying and balance with the malt, and the high alcohol content remains slyly hidden. This is a fantastic beer for Winter. This batch, bottle-conditioned since March, would probably hold up to more aging, developing into something even more complex for next season.

ABV: 6.8%

Price: A$10.99 per pint bottle

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Leftover shots

Phil Lees — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:28:25 +0000

Sorting back through my shots from Vietnam looking for something in particular, I’ve realised that there is so much content that I left behind. I was too busy enjoying myself to post them while I was on the road nor did I take any sort of notes that I could spin out into a meaningful post.

Kid who rents out mats to slide down the White Sand Dunes in Mui Ne, Vietnam. He looks that angry because I’ve just told him that under no circumstances will I be hiring a mat.

Bringing oranges across the bridge to market in Hue

Moving coconuts to market by cyclo, Hue

Serving pho in the back streets of Hội An

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Usufruct in Fitzroy

Phil Lees — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:30:21 +0000

Usufruct, the right to derive benefit from the property of others, is generally best (and in most societies, only) displayed by the example of picking fruit from trees that overhang the boundary of a private property into public space.

A Google User named kirsten has begun compiling a map of all of the overhanging fruit in the suburb of Fitzroy.

It’s collaborative, so the map could easily become a guide to all the free fruit in the whole city.

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Does Gordon Ramsay write his own extrafood column in the Herald Sun?

Phil Lees — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:50:14 +0000

Gordon Ramsay’s Humble Pie was a 2006 bestseller but it was the award-winning feature writer Rachel Cooke who quietly wore out the “f” key on her laptop. Then again, she can afford a new computer, having pocketed a rumoured £100,000 share of Ramsay’s rumoured £750,000 advance.

From “Literary Haunts”, The Times, November 12, 2007. Surely Ramsay has much more lucrative things to do with his time than pen a few hundred words a week for extrafood in Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper. So who is the food writer at Gordon Ramsay Holding’s PR agency, Sauce Communications? Any idea, Ed?

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Beer Flaw Tasting

Phil Lees — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:28:05 +0000

“T” is for Taint

If there is one thing that evaluating beer in Cambodia has primed my tastebuds for, it is tasting bad beer. I never particularly dwelt upon the reasons behind their badness because I was too busy trying to find synonyms for “watery”. I had never approached badness in a systematic way.

So the opportunity to pinpoint the reasons behind the badness could not be passed up. Tastes and the ability to discuss them with objectivity can be learned.

The key problem with beer is that it is a complex, living animal for at least some period of its existence. The yeast within it breeds and mutates; it acts differently when hot or cold, or in the presence of more or less oxygen. When dead, the yeast cells settle in clumps. Certain micronutrients inhibit the growth of some strains but promote the growth of others. It sometimes competes with other foreign organisms for the sugars used in brewing. The water used matters.

At every step of the brewing process, something can infect the beer: bacillus, clostridium, coliforms, acetobacter, gluconobacter. Other wild yeasts that float upon the breeze can drop in and take charge (in lambic beers, this is actually the goal rather than a problem).

It still amazes me that any two beers ever taste the same.

This weekend a friend and brewer, Ben from pint.com.au, bought The Enthusiast Beer Taste Troubleshooting Kit, a selection of 8 artificial flavors that are identical to the most common flaws in beer and invited a crew over to drink some deliberately and systematically tainted beer. Metal taint, spoilage by acetic acid bacteria, bacterial growth in the mash or fermentation, spoilage by wild yeasts, insufficient wort boiling, poor yeast health, use of old hops were all to be tasted. Often many of these things happen at once to beer but the ability to separate each of these problems out by taste alone is the cheapest way to improve the brewing process.

Some taints were much worse than others.

While most of my friends found the “infection by acetic acid bacteria” as a mild flaw, I thought it to be like drinking a cup of vinegar. The apple flavors of badly boiled wort weren’t right for a beer but nor were they hugely offensive to me. Nobody enjoyed the “bacterial growth in the mash” which I likened to having freshly regurgitated a whole fruitcake; others found it reminiscent of baby vomit. As someone who tastes things for a living, I’m still not sure if it is reassuring that I’ll now be able to identify that the goaty, damp basement smell in some beer is caused by coliform infection during fermentation or that the metallic flavor that I have come to associate with Angkor Lager is the fault of poor quality equipment at the brewing plant.

The full set of beer flaw tasting notes (PDF) is now at Pint.

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“Fetal bovine serum, you say”

Phil Lees — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:49:26 +0000

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with bio-artist Oron Catts which probably rates as one of the strangest I’ve ever had. I used the words “fetal bovine serum” far too often for somebody who writes about food. He spoke of his work as “semi-living” where I might have used the term “undead”. His art left me with the dissonant feelings of both complete repulsion and the obsessive desire to find out more.

So this week over at SBS, I take on ethicist Peter Singer and PETA regarding their support of laboratory-grown meat. Why not take on some big targets?

It’s as goddamn weird as food gets.

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Measuring web statistics for your food blog

Phil Lees — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:45:18 +0000

Unless you’re going to act upon it, measuring anything is nothing more than statistical masturbation, whether it be on the web or anywhere else. There is the warm afterglow that you get from the first time that you hit a hundred; a thousand or a hundred thousand visitors to your blog a day, but once you know that people are reading your blog: then what?

Web traffic alone is meaningless without a goal attached to it. And this leads me back to the first post in this series where I asked you what is motivating you to get into the business and art of food blogging. If you don’t have a goal, there is no need to measure anything at all on your blog.

How should I measure:

Get Google Analytics for whatever blogging platform you use. It is both a blessing (it’s free! at least if you don’t count Google harvesting your rich and creamy data as a cost) and a curse (it’s so powerful that you can spend more time analysing statistics and staring like a rabbit in the headlights into an oncoming graph than you can writing about food). It’s also inaccurate; but still accurate enough for the common food blogger who doesn’t need to worry about a 25% margin for error or so.

What should I measure:

Generally:

Always measure trends

Daily bumps and spikes in web traffic are meaningless if they cannot be repeated at will or sustained. What all bloggers should aim at is growth in audience (unique visitors), average page views, time spent on site, and readers of your RSS feed over time. It will take a few months after the launch of your blog for any of these things to become apparent. In the early days you (probably) won’t have enough content or readers to make a real assessment of where your food blog is headed.

Always measure your goals

Amongst people like me who measure web traffic for a living, there is much talk about how to judge the meaningfulness of web traffic beyond just visits to your website or even “conversions” (the people who buy your product and the path by which they arrive there). If you’re not selling a product and your goals are as ephemeral as the vagaries of food blogging then what is worth measuring?

Unless you’ve read the how to start a food blog, design, and making money posts, the following goals will sound a little vague.

Specifically for food bloggers:

Goal: I want to meet people who write on the web that aren’t freaks and be a part of a community of like-minded, passionate food junkies

Most important metric: Incoming links from blogs that you respect; conversations started. And who you’ve met.

Incoming links is by far the easiest of these to quantify. Google Analytics does it under Traffic Sources > Referring Links. You can also chase up the links that have never been clicked to your site by typing site:www.yourblog.com into Google’s maw. This will output a raw number of incoming links and it’s easy enough to scan through the list to see if any blog that personally matters to you

Conversations started can encompass much more than just the number of comments on your site. The trend for blogging is that an increasing amount of the talk generated about what you write about will happen on sites other than your own: on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, on other people’s blogs and in the mainstream media. There isn’t a convenient tool yet to roll all the conversations together and come out the other side with a useful metric. When someone comes up with a widely agreed upon “conversation quotient“, I’ll be a happy web marketer. Nielsen BlogPulse is the beginning of these tools, along with Tweetscan or Summize for Twitter.

Check your address book to see who you’ve met. Poke your Facebook friends or something.

Goal:I want to make money

Most important metric: How much money you’re making.

Yes, it is that obvious.

While masses of visitors to your site will often be a proxy to how much money you’ll make (and is a direct correlation if you’re lucky enough to be paid per visit rather than per click), if you want to make money, measure what works. If you’re using Google Adsense, they include handy information on the click-through rate for each ad that you place on your site. Use this information to tweak ad placement.

Goal: I have a food business/restaurant/am a food professional and need somewhere to honestly link up with the punters/debate my awesomeness

Most important metric: Local traffic and conversions. Unless you’re running a destination restaurant that punters will fly in from all over the world to visit, the most important thing for a restaurant/locally-focussed food business is the traffic from your immediate region and how many of those people eat your food or buy your product. To measure this traffic on Google Analytics, go to Visitors > Map Overlay, click your country then use the Segment selector to segment up your national or regional audience however you choose.

Secondly, if you’re selling something, you can set up goals to measure whatever action/conversion is desired. Google can tell you more about setting goals in Analytics. Offline, you need to harvest this data wherever you can. Can you ask those who book or buy where they found out about you?

How should I act upon it:

Repeat the things that are successful. Stop doing the things that aren’t successful. If you’re tracking a goal, defining what counts as success is straightforward. Do you write posts that start more conversations than others? Could you spin them out into a monthly series? While you were building an audience did something spur a huge number of people to subscribe to your RSS feed? Could you, in good conscience, repeat it?

If you were obsessed with statistics, you could test every change to your website using multivariate analysis before you commit to any change, but for the average food blogger, it is not worth it.

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One-plus-One Dumplings: Uyghur-licious

Phil Lees — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:59:28 +0000

Chinese food in Australia is for the most part, awful, but it is an awfulness within which you can revel. Steak and black bean sauce, paint-liftingly acidic lemon chicken, your-meat-of-choice stir-fried with cashew nut and cornstarch. Fried rice with peas in it and those little prawns (jumbo krill?) from a can that only exist to populate this specific dish. I still have a lot of love for it, mostly because it represents a resolutely Australian cuisine.

It does bear a passing resemblance to Cantonese food, if you squint hard enough and have a terrible aversion to vegetable matter, offal and real seafood. I’ve been meaning to do some research to uncover Australia’s first Chinese restaurant as a way to find out whom or where gave birth to this food, and why it was Cantonese and not the Uighur food from Western China that captured the Australian palate.

If Central New South Wales had have invented a Chinese cuisine of their own (and been originally populated by nomadic Central Asians subjected to 2500 years of bloody invasion), it would probably look much like Uighur food.

The far Western province of China is built upon sheep and wheat; which the food reflects, as does its location between Tibet, Mongolia, Russia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan- and India-controlled Kashmir. It thus has a byzantine political history whose richness is only surpassed by its daedal religious intricacy. As a consequence, people eat potatoes; piles of cumin; chili in crazed abundance, both whole dried and as flakes. Fresh wheat noodles are pulled or are presented flattened and hand-cut.

lamb is omnipresent: in the cumin-coated kebabs (above), atop and beneath hot noodles ands soups, providing filling for the dumplings and pastries. Apart from the spices, it couldn’t conform more to the cliche of the Anglo-Australian palate.

Green salads even arrive uncooked and unpreserved which is about as far from the rest of Chinese cuisine as you can possibly veer. Why isn’t this food in every Australian country town?

Apart from the obvious reason that there is no critical mass of Uighur people spread about the countryside, there is probably a Western Chinese restaurant nearby that you wouldn’t otherwise notice unless you could read Chinese characters. One-plus-One Dumplings in Footscray is a case in point. Their name is little more than a ruse to hide their true cuisine; their dumplings only notable for being forgettable; the interior indistinguishable from any other Chinese restaurant under the disinfectant glare of fluorescent lighting and mirror-halled walls.

But the lamb and noodles will transport you straight back to Ürümqi.

While one should eat Uighur food apropos of nothing, this particular occasion to hit up some Western Chinese in the Western suburbs was that Maytel from Gut Feelings was in Melbourne, as were ex-Cambodian expats Andrew and Anth. We are all still bound to upholding the myth that every English language blogger in Cambodia knows each other. And there isn’t a decent Cambodian joint for miles.

Address: One-Plus-One Dumplings, 84 Hopkins St, Footscray

Addendum (27 May 2008): Added Tibet to list of neighbouring nations. I missed it.

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