Gordon Ramsay’s Melbourne Restaurant

Unless you’ve been bound up in real news in Australia (e.g. remember Iraq? there’s still a war there), you’ve probably heard the words Gordon Ramsay Lesbian Tracy Grimshaw combined in some unholy fashion with great density. Chef Gordon Ramsay has been in town, stirring up the sort of misogyny that could only be surpassed by a visiting rugby team.

The media is loving it and milking it for a full week of coverage. The Prime Minister has weighed in saying Ramsay’s comments’ “as reflecting a new form of low life” which left me wondering what were the older forms of low life that are of concern to an Australian Prime Minister? Libertines? Footpads? Mountebanks?

Generally when you meet chefs or see them interviewed, their obsession with the minutiae of ingredients and the process of transforming those ingredients into food is evident and inescapable. Any attempt to interview them about nigh on any other topic eventually gets steered back to eating. What is most dismaying about Ramsay’s flight through town is his lack of focus on food and the media’s lack of care.

He’s planning to open an outlet of his Maze restaurant in Melbourne in the Crown Casino complex, and it hardly rated a mention by himself or anyone else. Odds on bets are that it will be doing haute tapas as it does in Cape Town and New York which will lead to an inevitable showdown with Movida. Anchovies at high noon. It is opening in the middle of an economic downturn. These are compelling food stories and they’re not being told. Ramsay seems to be too busy telling dick jokes to talk about food.

This is the outcome of food and television. Food plays a backdrop to human drama rather than a central focus because food alone makes for bad television. To be sure, television can mirror the soft-focus porniness of food magazines or blogs – the panning shots of a steaming meal, wide vistas of a cornucopia of ingredients – but to draw and keep an audience it needs narrative drive.

The narrative of food alone is either recipes or the path from living animal or vegetable to the plate. You could tell these stories almost without human intervention. By themselves, neither of these narratives are engaging because for the former, we’ve had almost 70 years of the “stand and cook” model of recipe TV to be oversaturated and for the latter, most of the public still don’t want to know from whence their food came. If you eat food with a head on it, you’re amongst the minority.

This is how we end up in a situation where we have food television without food. Human drama is the driving force behind food television. It seems that (in Australia, at least), we want chefs who say “fuck” to camera (Ramsay) or game shows (Masterchef). Nobody wants to see the prep chef peeling potatoes in the basement. The prep chef is only intriguing when she knifes someone.

Most telling of this whole foofaraw is a comment by Jason Atherton, one of Ramsay’s chefs, who is also in Melbourne at the moment presumably to begin staffing Maze. In Hospitality Magazine, he mentions:

“Atherton said Gordon Ramsay will spend as much time at the Melbourne restaurant “as the concept needs him”.”

It’s similar to McDonald’s: the concept needs the clown Ronald to make the occasional appearance. (At least, it used to). Gordon Ramsay’s primary qualification is no longer chef, it’s television presenter; the provider of drama against a food backdrop. He still needs the pretence that he cares about food lest the whole edifice and concept behind his restaurants crumble. The concept needs celebrity to survive and give it sustenance. It needs celebrity to somehow differentiate itself and draw in the punters who would never otherwise throw down a hundred dollars for a meal.

It no longer needs food.

Guerrilla Garden Bounty

The best part of growing a garden is harvesting more than you can eat in a single sitting. It’s easy to see how harvest festivals started with a seemingly endless bounty of food in a few scant weeks of ripeness.

The bucket of “Tommy Toe” heirloom tomatoes is hardly endless but the tomatoes have completely subsumed the entire garden. Originally there were four varieties of tomato in there, but I’ve only managed to harvest two.

Somewhere beneath are some suffering cucumbers, an eggplant that has borne a single fruit and a capsicum that has done nothing. I should have planned for this to happen. Just for comparison, below is how the garden looked in winter, detailed in the earlier guerrilla garden post. Neat rows, nothing untoward.

Gong Xi Fa Cai, Rendang

Another year, another chance for lion dancers to molest the unwary.

The risk of a lion dancer catching aflame grows each year.

The hanging iceberg lettuce attracts them. Welcome to the Chinese New Year.

I had a vague plan to hit up some dumpling joints but was derailed by a newish Malaysian place: Old Town Kopitiam. It looks much like the gentrified coffee shops in Kuala Lumpur with shiny marble table tops, uncomfortable stools and dark timber aplenty. Maybe they’re not just a clone of the Old Town Coffee but a real franchisee? On the upside, the menu reads like Malaysia’s greatest culinary hits: bah kut teh, char kway teow, lor bak, rendang, cendol. Their char kway teow comes with the option of bonus clams which is always a good sign. And they’re all priced in the pre-millennium sub-$10 a plate range.

The nasi lemak ($8!) is a bit short on the coconut but has the crispiest ikan bilis (fried anchovies) possible. The beef rendang was collapsing under its own weight, thick with actual herbs and spices rather than something that had come from a can.

They were fresh out of cendol. All the more reason to go back.

Location: 195 Little Bourke St, Melbourne, Australia

Backyard Pizza

Happy New Year.

The great Australian side effect of Baby Boomers with too much time on their hands is the backyard pizza oven. I’m certainly not complaining. For all that grief that has been caused by Gen-X being locked out of the managerial class is now being repaid in hot, crusty pizza. Who else has the time to salvage bricks and construct or owns the property to put it on? Who else got so obsessed by Tuscany?

This is the caramelized leek and blue cheese pizza that I shamelessly stole from Y Carusi restaurant in Brunswick, Melbourne. If you’re short on leek, you can always bulk it up with caramelised onion but frankly anything sweet with blue cheese fits on pizza: cooked pumpkin, multitude stone fruits, pears, figs. I’m no purist.

In the background is sopressa, olives and Black And Gold-brand preshredded mozarella. Buffalo mozarella be damned.

Leek and blue cheese, coming fresh from the oven.

Sopressa pizza

The full spread.

ACA goes after faux import beer

Guess what? Blogging can change the food system. A few months back I wrote about faux import beer: the beer that looks imported but is actually brewed locally or by some third party. Yesterday, in The Age:

The Australian Consumers Association is demanding clearer, more prominent labels on bottles of foreign beer made locally under licence, to show drinkers exactly what they are buying.

Beck’s, Heineken, Stella Artois, Kirin, Guinness, Kronenbourg and Carlsberg are some of the foreign brands being made here.

The Sunday Age bought a random selection from a liquor store in St Kilda last week. A 330 millilitre bottle of Heineken ($3.39) was brewed in Sydney and a 330 millilitre bottle of Carlsberg ($3.49), which had “Copenhagen, Denmark” and “by appointment to the Royal Danish Court” on the front, was brewed by Foster’s Australia in Victoria.

Now, lets argue about correlation equalling causality.

Red Emperor, Melbourne

Har gau from Red Emperor, Melbourne

I always thought that only tourists ate on Southbank.

It’s the wrong side of the river for me; that strange cultural divide that bisects Melbourne wherein both sides can say that the other is the morally and culturally wrong side. Since the Casino that dominates the south bank of the Yarra is now taking restaurants more seriously than ever, it is time to reevaluate my prejudices. Southgate, the slightly earlier development on the river still looks like a soulless, polished shopping mall but maybe the food within has changed.

Red Emperor, the Cantonese restaurant within the Southgate complex, is showing its age. The mirrored tiles on the roof, cheap vinyl seats and silver spray-painted concrete columns make the restaurant feel more like a suburban reception centre than one of Melbourne’s leading proponents of Cantonese food (and specifically, yum cha). The superlative view of Flinders Street Station and Melbourne’s skyline from across the Yarra remains unchanged; floor to ceiling windows lend ample distraction from the interior.

Yum cha means “drink tea” in Cantonese. Dim sum is what you eat at yum cha. Yum cha is what you do at Red Emperor. I’ve never ordered much more than a plate of stir-fried gai lan or an extra serve of fried squid from their menu. My guess is that if the gai lan is A$22 a plate, then the rest of their à la carte fare will require me to promise them my first-born in exchange for one of the lobsters crowding their tanks at the entrance.

Salty, fried squid tentacle.

I’ve never set foot in the place after dark. Lobster before noon is morally reprehensible.

As a midday meal, yum cha is more about the company that you keep than the food itself. It is built to be social: the most memorable yum cha meals should have very little to do with the food. Bamboo steamer baskets filled with mystery dumplings waft by on a trolley for your pleasure, you pick whichever takes your fancy, and then get back to the real task of constructing a conversation. Memorable dumplings help but are not essential.

At least since the last time I’d eaten at Red Emperor, the more interesting items that drift by on the trolley have vanished. The pickles, slices of 100-year old egg, and the cartilaginous steamed chicken’s feet have disappeared. I thought that Melbourne was well past gentrifying its Chinese Food, but in this case, I guess not.

The quality of dumplings – while still good – is only marginally better than you’d receive at one of the mid-range yum cha-focused joints around the CBD, like Westlake, Shark Fin House or Shark Fin Inn. Trekking out to the suburb of Box Hill is even better. At $40-ish a head, you’d get better value elsewhere and charging $8 for tea, normally gratis, is a bitter end to the meal.

Anyhow, on with the short depth of field dumpling porn.

Har gau (North); Random seafood roll (East); “Shark’s Fin” dumpling, not containing actual shark’s fin (South); Siu Mai (West).

Sin Chet Kuen: Beancurd skin rolls stuffed with prawn and shitake mushrooms.

Char Siew Sou: Flaky pastry topped with sesame seeds, filled with sweet red roast pork. My friend J uses these salty-sweet pastries as his yardstick for a good dumpling joint, which makes sense. Both an excellent pastry and top roast pork are hard to achieve, not to mention plating them up to the punters steaming hot.

Tentacle.

Location:
Level 3 Southgate,
Southbank, VIC 3006
Tel: (03) 9699-4170

Lunch: Mon – Sat 12 to 3pm, Sun 11 to 4pm
Dinner: 6pm onwards, daily

Little Creatures Brewery, Fremantle

Had I forgotten something from the menu at Little Creatures Dining Hall in Fitzroy? Had I made an unfair comparison to its Western Australian brewery progenitor?

In the interests of factual accuracy, I flew across the country to Perth to find out.

Click the image to see full panoramic glory

On the westside, Little Creatures seems to be undergoing an identity crisis. Originally, the Little Creatures brewhouse and restaurant was housed in a set of two identical, adjoining sheds converted from their earlier role housing boats for the America’s Cup. It was a grand building to convert for this purpose: almost central Fremantle; overlooking the harbour with its eponymous medicament breeze; open space aplenty for the stainless tanks of a professional but small-scale local brewery. A thin membrane of plexiglass bisected the two sheds dividing the drinker from the brewer whilst keeping them in close proximity. The men’s urinal even had a chest-high window into the brewery so that male patrons could see the beer come full circle.

The bar and restaurant retained an ad hoc feel of a joint that was built to satisfy the brewers next door rather than the general public. It was packed with pipes, girders, pallets, bare chain link, fairy lights. For all its gleaming stainless steel and cavernous industrial space, the bar and restaurant had an appropriate feel of little-ness and being a bit half-arsed in a way that suggested that the owners were too busy making hand-crafted ale to care where the public drank it.

Little Creatures Brewery, original pair of sheds on the left, new sheds on the right. This is how Perth looks in midwinter. Sunny and laden with cockatoos.

Where once a microbrewery stood (albeit, a microbrewery with an impeccable fitout) now stands an industrial cathedral worship of hops. The site has now expanded into an extra shed and some grain silos. They’ve built a lounge bar next door called The Loft, a name with all the generic urbanity of Ikea. Ikea would probably fit an umlaut in there somewhere, though.

The original bar and restaurant are otherwise unchanged, apart from the old urinal with a view, which has shifted. On my Monday morning visit, my waiter apologized at 11:00am that the table service might slow down because a table of 60 people had arrived, unannounced. Amongst the hundred or so breweries that I’ve seen, I can’t think of another that is getting hammered by customers early on Monday – so my guess is that the bar and restaurant wouldn’t want to change their business, ever.

There is no mistaking that Little Creatures are stepping up from the micro-league and are taking aim at the mainstream drinkers of Australia. The place now feels big. With their extra brewing capacity, they’re now covering as much of the mainstream palate as possible.

They now produce a pilsner as bland as the style requires, a cider (Pipsqueak), an amber ale (Roger’s) and a “bright” ale that has less bold hops and maltiness than their flagship American pale ale. I certainly don’t begrudge them for brewing blander and less complex beers. If they are planning on moving up from a microbrewer to challenge the mid-sized likes of Coopers in Australia (and beginning to export seriously) then it is inevitable that they will brew less challenging beers because that is what the global market currently drinks in vast and unending quantities. As much as I whined about bland Asian pilsners in Cambodia, I did neglect to mention that bland pilsners are the brew that the majority of the world’s drinkers enjoy; the more nondescript, the better. “Interesting” is not an adjective that most people would ever wish to append to their beer. The decision to go blander has seen Little Creatures bright and amber ales achieve double digit growth in the last year.

Little Creatures early success came from doing something that would seem unremarkable if viewed from the perspective of the American microbrew market: brewing consistent American pale ale in Australia. That they managed to thrive from the start by doing so is an achievement and a nice testament to Perth’s preference for drinking locally. We could be drinking any number of floral American pale ales from America (or elsewhere), but we were smitten by the one from Fremantle.

The added bonus of Little Creature’s changing identity from micro to mid-size for Melburnian drinkers is that the old equipment from the Fremantle brewery is headed over east to Healesville.

When brewery logos attack.

According to Little Creatures press release:

Work has commenced on building a brewery in the Yarra Valley town of Healesville…The original Fremantle brew house will be relocated to the site and the first brew of what will be a new national brand will be ready for sale early in the new calendar year.

The brewery is under construction Lot 2/316-336 Maroondah Highway, Healesville, next to the Innocent Bystander winery.

My guess for that new brand: Hoegaarden clone. The last few years of Australian brewing have been awash with cloudy and “blonde” beers, so why shouldn’t Little Creatures follow the pack instead of leading?

A pint of Little Creatures Pale Ale, as delightful as ever

Location: Little Creatures Brewing, 40 Mews Road, Fremantle, Western Australia. A short walk from the Fremantle train station.

Little Creatures, Fitzroy: Invasion from the West

There is only one thing that can turn me off the citrus-y and floral pale ales of Little Creatures Brewery and that is the music of Collette Roberts. Her ode to campanology was blaring across the industrial Viking beer hall that brewery Little Creatures have infested in Fitzroy in Melbourne as I entered.

When did 1987 become cool? Am I getting that old? Or is this just a musical taste of Perth-ness from across the Nullabor?

I had never wondered what had happened to Collette after her career of impersonating Kylie Minogue came to an abrupt end. If you’re keen to find out, you can hire her from modeling agency Real Faces and ask her in person whether it is in Western Australia alone that her music never died.

Along with poor choices of soundtrack, Little Creatures make sublime American pale ales in their brewery in Western Australia; the sort of beers that feel like the hops monster has burrowed into your sinuses and deposited its fragrant and addictive spawn. Their immaculate waterfront brewery is the only valid reason to go to Fremantle, but now that a piece of that has been transported to inner Melbourne, what’s the point of Fremantle altogether?

Their space in Fitzroy bears a remarkable similarity to their converted boatshed in WA: a cavernous open warehouse serving up good value pub food along with their ales. The only thing missing is their stainless brewing tanks and ready access to the sea. I’d swear that the menu and wine list is the same but with the addition of pies. I might be wrong.

So I had a pie, just in case.

Chunky meat pie, peas, mashed potato glue substitute, super-salty coleslaw. Thin gravy.

As for the beer, their pale ale, amber ale, pilsener and bright ale come from the tap as freshly as it does straight from the brewery door. There is no trace of oxidation, the hops are as bright and clean as if the beer was being poured straight from the tank. They come in three sizes: pony ($3), pot ($4) and weirdo-not-quite-a-pint-but-larger-than-schooner ($6.50). There is probably a Western Australian term for this beer size.

I’m going to call it the Collette.

Little Creatures Dining Hall
Address: 222 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

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The Last Appetite

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