The Supertaster.

You could, like so many do, drive straight from Brisbane to Byron Bay. Beautiful beaches, beautiful people and bizarre people and everything in between. Byron Bay still has its charms but there’s more to the area.

Here’s a taste.

Harvest Newrybar

“Where the hell is Newrybar?” I hear you ask. It’s little more than a siding off the highway these days, so even if you visit Byron Bay regularly you’ll only find it if you go looking. The old highway ran through this small town just inland from Byron Bay and if you visit on a weekend these days, you’ll struggle to find a park. That’s because some very talented people are running Harvest, a café, restaurant, private dining room and a deli too. Arranged across three cream-painted timber clad buildings, you’d love Harvest if it were in a capital city and you’ll love it more for its rural location at the centre of a region known for its produce.

What’s great about Harvest is that they respect the local produce by letting it speak for itself. Flavours are vibrant and plating is unfussy. While ‘local’ and ‘organic’ are terms that are increasingly overplayed, the food at Harvest is what these words really mean. We had a very late breakfast and staff didn’t blink even though they were getting ready to reset for a fully booked lunch. The service here is astonishing, a well oiled machine of young local people who were unflappable despite the Easter crowds. Every one seems to know their job and do it well.

Coffee is from Allpress and expertly made by a deeply tanned barista with impressive dreadlocks. The kitchen is open to the indoor dining area and the team of chefs are as impressive as the floor staff. A verandah wraps around the dining room and its all charmingly un-designed and comfortable. Our breakfasts were delicious – sweet, flaked smoked trout encased in a super fine omlette on sourdough and pork and parsley sausages with poached eggs, grilled cheesy field mushroom and spinach. There’s lots of other delicious options, each given a bit of a twist to best use local ingredients. And to make breakfast here even more civilised there’s sparkling wine and champagne by the glass and Bloody Marys on offer too. A quick glance at the lunch and dinner menus and the wine list makes me keen to return.

The deli has just opened, but a cheese room as well as a selection of smallgoods and cured hams on the bone along with bread baked on site and plenty of other delicious things make it worth a look in it’s own right.

Harvest Cafe

18 Old Pacific Highway, Newrybar

02 6687 2644

Fat Belly Kaf, Brunswick Heads

I kept hearing about this place, so since we were in the area I rang to see if we could get a table for dinner.  We did a mid afternoon reccy and my heart sank a tiny bit. But then I was wearing the clothes I’d been in at the beach, with tangled, salty hair and thongs, hardly dressed for a night at the Ritz. It turned out we were made for one another.

Away from the other cafes and restaurants in the central part of Brunswick Heads, Fat Belly Kaf is a few streets over in Tweed Street. It’s next to the fish and chip shop with the Skilltester and the fluoro lights in one of those restaurant-at-the-motel arrangements.

It was a beautiful evening when we visited, the perfect antidote to living the city. We ate at a table outside, with geckos chirping, Jupiter and Venus burning brightly and the other side of the sky lit up by the waning moon right after Passover. At first the Motel’s ‘no vacancy’ sign over our table seemed incongruent but it made a nice light as the night grew darker.

The food at Fat Belly Kaf is a distillation of Greek, Turkish and similar cuisines. Concisely and appealingly described, the menu runs to a couple of pages ranging from small plates, larger share dishes, mains, desserts and sides. The only thing disappointing about what’s on offer is that you need a larger group so you can order all the small plates and share them. Or perhaps I’m just greedy.

We started out with a dozen Pacific oysters, a few dressed with pomegranate and shallot. All delicious. Small, sweet and briny, I didn’t ask if they were local but they seemed freshly shucked and could convincingly have come from a little further down the coast. Dressings on oysters seems hard to get right but the pomegranate and shallot was just right, not too acidic and just enough to compliment the oysters instead of consuming them.

A progression of small plates followed, nicely spaced so the table didn’t get crowded and we could appreciate what we were eating. The blue cheese croquettes with honey mayo had a winning interplay of crunchy exterior and yielding gooey interior with the honey mayo a nice counterpoint to the mild blue cheese flavour. Prawns with saganaki and tomato were also a winner, their soft, sweet tails a good indication of their freshness. I’m not usually one for crunching on prawn tails but it would have been blasphemy not to eat these.

After a few more excellent small dishes, our slow cooked lamb shoulder for two was presented on a platter. Fragrant and meltingly tender, it was served with sticky spice roasted pumpkin, roast potatoes and pan juices so good I took to spooning them over my veggies. Hardening of the arteries be damned!

By this stage of the evening we’d met Jake, one of the new owners. Fat Belly Kaf changed hands a few months back, after previous owners Kat and Damian Williams sold the business. Jake knows a thing or two about wine and after a bit of a chat it became clear how this place came to have such a great wine list. It’s not long but it’s clever and individual and a little quirky. Since we were ordering dessert, Jake organised a bottle of the Domain Day Dolcezza, a late harvest Garganega. Usually Garganega is made into Soave, a staple Italian table wine, of the sort drunk in summer by the pool with seafood. This was a sweet though restrained wine with lemony citrus and almond oil flavours well suited to the star dessert on the menu. Not for the easily defeated, it’s a sort of inside-out Greek custard bougatsa. Served in a large pudding bowl, there’s layers of light orange blossom water flavoured cream custard and pastry topped with flaked almonds. You could share it between a couple of people, but I was pleased to have the sublime dark chocolate tart with strega soaked figs to myself. This was faultless, and I don’t think I’ve had as good at more serious restaurants.

Because good Turkish Delight is always too good too pass up, and because its presented to you in a sort of fantasy magic carpet style silver dish with silver tongs for you to select a piece, we tried some of that too. Delicious.

In the interests of a proper evaluation of the menu and wine available at Fat Belly Kaf, I plan to head back soon with a group of friends. I recommend you do the same.

Fat Belly Kaf

Old Pacific Highway (Tweed Street)

02 6685 1100

Tweed River Seafoods, Chinderah

A visit to the area isn’t complete for me without a trip to Tweed River Seafoods at Chinderah, usually for fish and chips and sometimes for prawns and oysters. Chinderah is at the northern end of the Tweed Valley, not far over the border and near the new resorts around Kingscliff, now marketed as Casuarina Beach. But there’s no gentrification here at Tweed River Seafoods, it’s the same as always, good old fashioned service and staff who are pretty comfortable in their white gumboots. Golden, crispy batter and usually good chips, but mostly really fresh fish. You can also buy super fresh prawns, bugs, oysters and a big range of filleted and whole fish here.  Make sure you phone ahead to order prawns at Christmas time if you’re visiting the area. Special mention for the way they wrap the fish and chips.

78 Chinderah Bay Drive, Chinderah

02 6674 1134

There’s lots to love about this area and with the very last bit of the border bypass being completed at the moment, there’s never been a better time to skip the Gold Coast and head for where the beaches are quiet and the food is good.

Some of us eat for sustenance while others eat for pleasure. It’s safe to assume that those who see food as mere ballast to fill a hole are unlikely to read this blog.

‘Emotional eating’ is a term used in connection with obesity in a certain sort of women’s magazine, usually in articles up the back near the horoscopes. I’ve always found it a strange term, for a number of reasons.

So far as mainstream media is concerned, it would seem that only women suffer from this condition. There are thousands of articles on the internet for women who want to break free of a cycle of weight gain caused by their compulsion to eat to relieve stress or alleviate boredom and disaffection. Male obesity is a different matter altogether, with weight gain usually framed as having occurred ‘due an increasingly sedentary lifestyle’. In tune with our expectations about gender roles, the Journal of Applied Psychology found that women in a large study who were 11 kg below average weight took home an additional (US) $15,572 while men who were 11 kg below average weight earned less than their colleagues. The researchers commented:

“Perhaps the most startling finding of this investigation is that men and women experience opposite incentives regarding weight in the very thin to average weight range. Whereas women are punished for any weight gain, very thin women receive the most severe punishment for their first few pounds of weight gain. This finding is consistent with research showing that the media’s consistent depiction of an unrealistically thin female ideal leads people to see this ideal as normative, expected, and central to female attractiveness.”

Emotional eating is a problematic term on another level, as it conveys the idea that ‘emotions’ can only be negative and unattractive. That we would only eat prodigiously when things are bad. That emotion is valid as a pejorative term. Yet the spectrum of human emotion covers from deepest black to the brightest hues of happiness. And food can provoke or match a wide range of emotions too.

Think: when do we choose to eat good food and wine? For many people, they celebrate special occasions with food, a decent steak or a roast at home with a special bottle of wine and warm company, or a meal at a restaurant, where a team of chefs take the best produce and their professional techniques to present several courses of the finest food for our enjoyment. Such an occasion is one of happiness and pleasure that is recalled fondly at a later date. Photos are taken, mementos tucked away so that we can prolong the enjoyment and recount the highlights to our friends. A whole industry is built on this that now extends to television shows, books, blogs, licensing deals and merchandising rights. Photosharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest are vehicles to parade our gustatory conquests  to others and record our good taste in food and wine for posterity. Our desire to extend the enjoyment of good eating seems boundless. These occasions are emotional and eating is central to them.

Even at a base level of choosing our food, emotions are involved. All of us have likes and dislikes, favourite foods and others we reject or avoid due to how they taste or their texture – these foods provoke feelings or emotions and are often tied to our memories of some other time when we experienced the same food. Have you ever found yourself  thinking about that amazing holiday you had by the sea years ago while your eating dinner or thinking about hanging out with your Granny as a kid as you catch the scent of your neighbour’s rose garden? Or of the dive-y sharehouse you lived in on the cusp of adulthood after you’ve just discovered a rotten onion or potato in your kitchen? Our olfactory memory is strong, smells and by extension food and flavours can bring all sorts of thoughts and feelings about the past sharply into our consciousness.

How food makes you feel is central to the act of eating. Eating is by its nature emotional, even if that feeling is simply the contentment of being able to fill your belly.

So, dear reader (I know there are at least three of you), tell me about your emotional eating experiences.

Curiously, people who visit Brisbane seem to enjoy Esquire.

Ryan Squires, a chef who began his career in Brisbane, having worked at French Laundry, Per Se, El Bulli, WD-50, Urbane, Buffalo Club etc has chose to return to Brisbane to open his almost-eponymous restaurant on the Brisbane River on the CBD site once occupied by Daniel’s Steakhouse.

Esquire comprises a casual dining/bar area opening onto a balcony perched above the river and a dining room, a calm space and quietly appointed in tones of Danish furniture, polished concrete and glass. Nothing that would distract your attention from what’s on the plate. And each plate is hand spun earthenware, anchoring your view on the food and its origins.

Our waiter introduces herself and explains the degustation menu options and the matched wines. Wines to match but not with every course. Fair enough. We choose the shorter of the two degustation menus with 8 courses and choose our own wine, since we know nothing of the reputation of the sommelier. The staff, while excellent thus far seem to be of an age barely graduated from goon bags and luridly coloured vodka drinks. They approve of our choices of Torbreck Rousanne Viognier Marsanne and a ‘natural wine’ from a well known Australian producer. They don’t have the natural wine any more, too many faulty bottles that couldn’t be poured. So we go with an Oregon Pinot. Each wine was around $45.

The menu is sparingly written, which is ideal for this format of dining. The arches of my feet twitch with the excitement and adventure of what’s to come. Describing each course in detail would seem futile, since the food is highly seasonal and changeable.

Here’s a selection from the menu on the night we visited:

Scallops -Sorrel and Buttermilk

Ike Jime Coral Trout – Perilla and Wasabi

Cod Belly – Yoghurt and Nori

Pineapple – Sage and Parmesan

Campari – Orange, Curds and Whey

Before we begin, we are presented with an envelope bearing a super fine sandwich of wagyu beef. I wonder if there is a way I can eat this more regularly, the concentration of flavour is fantastic and the texture is fascinating.

The sorrel in our first course is in the form of a granita and is fresh and cleansing with the scallops cloaked in the granita and buttermilk, served in a chilled heavy earthenware bowl. I haven’t eaten sorrel since I was a kid and the memories this evokes are pleasant. Our waiter does a lovely job of explaining this dish and each ensuing dish. She seems genuinely excited about her role as our guide for the night. It’s a pretty cool gig.

Ike Jime refers to the method of preparing the fish, a Japanese technique which Chef Squires explains via an iPad video. I’m fascinated by the texture of the fish, which is quite unlike what you experience with most sashimi. Other more squeamish diners squirm and cringe. I like that the food and the format puts less artifice between me and the food, so the video makes sense for me. The wasabi is the coating of a wedge of avocado. This course is delicious and harmoniously combines some of my favourite flavours.

I can’t clearly recall the Cod Belly course, but it was studded with garlic flowers. A punchy flavour bomb that creeps up then smacks you between the eyes. An additional course of dehydrated cod belly, a sort of cod jerky with chive flowers is intriguing and delicious. It made me think about my parents vegetable garden when I was growing up, garlic flowers and chive flowers. We ate borage flowers with our salad but not these. Why not? Where have they been all my life?

You may not think that a degustation menu would be a vehicle for tapping such a seam of memory and emotions. But the food at Esquire is transporting. The format and the venue somehow focusses the senses and in doing so, your emotions and memories become joined to the experience.

The final course of Campari, orange, curds and whey was a highlight, some of the flavours I love the most. However the most eyebrow raising, sit up straight moment was the Concord grape sorbet in an additional course.

The focus and inventiveness displayed by the Esquire team is without parallel in Brisbane. This is food to get you thinking, to challenge your preconceived ideas of what a meal at a restaurant can be. Well, really, what food can be.

But a question remains for me, the curiosity expressed at the outset. Why does it seem that visitors to our city ‘get’ Esquire, but Brisbane locals do not? We embrace GOMA, and some areas of the performing arts, and increasingly we want to believe that we are catching pace with Sydney and Melbourne, but this expression of artistry, each plate, doesn’t seem to have found its audience. I encourage you to make yourself a patron here, the value on offer is frankly astonishing. At least start your journey by having a drink and a snack at the bar. It’s a very nice time of year to perch and enjoy the climate and the view that this talented chef has chosen to pin his career and reputation to.

esquire

145 Eagle Street, brisbane

Ph: 3220 2123

I managed to take a few days off between Christmas and New Year and particularly savoured time spent catching up on hundreds of bookmarked articles I’d gathered in an email folder over the last 9 months or so. I squirrel away all these shiny little gems like a bowerbird, and to extend the metaphor, a few of my treasures turn out to be as exciting as milk bottle lids and bread tags.

One article that provided some food for thought was this short paper from the Social Issues Research Centre on ‘Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective‘. It touches lightly on eating at restaurants and how their role has adapted to societal changes over time. My own relationship with restaurants has gone from a strange and foreign world I found myself working in to a ‘third place’ where I find myself much too frequently. A wardrobe full of size-too-small clothes testifies to this transformation.

As it’s a short walk from my office and home, Bar Barossa is one of a small group of restaurants I visit regularly. Sometimes for a chat with Darren Davis, one of the proprietors, sometimes for a wine dinner, sometimes because I’m exhausted beyond cooking and my partner wants a good steak. I’ve never had a bad meal here, but the extensive Barossa led wine list has always shone brighter than the rest of the restaurant experience. It’s been comfortably good, without being dazzling. But this has all changed.

The menu has had a bit of a rework, something that was long overdue.  Bar Barossa divides their menu into light plates, grazing plates and hearty plates, and servings are generous. There’s now a lot more colour and shade on the menu, without moving too far from the wine friendly fare that is their stock in trade. Flavours are simple and direct, with good quality beef, lamb and pork and fresh briney oysters. I’m more likely to order fish when I eat out as I rarely cook it at home, and the NT barramundi with potato cake, asparagus and beurre blanc I had on Friday night was fantastic. I’d have liked a bit more sauce, but then I mostly eat for sauces. My entrée of Cape Grim beef carpaccio with white anchovies was also excellent, with the beef seared and then sliced into glistening, translucent sheets and dressed with a just right mix of olive oil and lemony acid. A glass of Rockford Alicante Bouchet is a great match for this dish. Desserts aren’t really the strong suit of the kitchen, but the choose your own adventure cheese plate is worth a look, dressed with Barossa preserves and crispbread, as is the broad selection of stickies and fortifieds.

But the food is not the reason why I’d recommend you pay a visit to Bar Barossa. It’s the floor staff. A group of properly enthusiastic professionals, who love what they do and where they work is what elevated our meal at Bar Barossa. They’re hooked into what’s good on the menu, what works from the wine list and what’s happening around town. As Bar Barossa attracts plenty of business and tourist patronage, it’s great to see good ambassadors for our city and our dining scene. Darren was nowhere in sight, and yet service hummed along and the diners around us seemed to be enjoying themselves even more than we did.

Now in its second year of operation, Bar Barossa has hit its straps. Now if they can just squeeze in that mezzanine floor to make room for twice as many tables…..

Bar Barossa

545 Queen Street

Brisbane

Phone:    07 3832 3530

Web:  www.barbarossa.com.au

Tuesday to Friday:  Lunch and Dinner

Saturday: Dinner until late

Regular winemaker events

In the last couple of month’s there’s been a rash of dumpling houses open in Brisbane city.  No, not at Sunnybank, and not by Asian families expanding their established businesses.  All three of these new dumpling restaurants are backed by Westerners who have spotted an opportunity to provide sociable, snacky and tasty dumplings until the wee small hours.

Brunswick Social (Fortitude Valley) and Dragonfly both got on the dumpling train a little earlier with Harajuku Gyoza (Fortitude Valley) having just opened.

All do their own take of the dumpling house, running from the nightclub feel of Dragonfly to the ‘Japanese McDonalds’ feel of Harajuku Gyoza.  As I’m yet to eat at Brunswick Social (even the most dedicated eater cannot live on dumplings alone) I’ll leave further commentary for another time, other than to say the word on the street is that it has great cocktails.

Dragonfly

Opposite Queens Plaza, you descend the stairs between Rowes Arcade and Breadtop to the expansive and moodily lit dining and bar area.  It’s quite a change from its previous guise as a venue for metal and emo bands with sticky carpet and an aura of unattractive decay.  It’s a very different kind of patron lining the pavement on Edward Street now, with well groomed guys and girls replacing the goths and bikies.

Chef Josh Clunas is young, French trained and cares deeply about making great dumplings.  The venue is owned by a pub group, and while this could be a problem, there’s enough team members with a fine dining background to ensure the service is nicely balanced between attentive and informal.  The dumplings are hand made and well flavoured, with fillings and construction based on Shanghainese cuisine.

My picks are pork sui mai (pork, prawn and goji berry), pork and peanut and the sweet and succulent steamed prawn dumplings.  The menu also extends to soups, salads, pork buns and more.  The drinks list seems a little out of kilter with the food, and mostly features big brands and heavier wines, perhaps a reflection of its ownership.  Hopefully this will be tweaked with time to provide better matches for the food.

The décor and lighting provides a textured and exotic setting, where everyone looks just a little more beautiful.  All in all, it’s a very smart package and there’s also plenty of good people watching on offer as well as a DJs, regular discounts and events.

Harajuku Gyoza

On the site that formerly hosted Mint Indian Cuisine, Harajuku Gyoza is compact, bright and the brainchild of a couple of talented former advertising executives.  It’s clear that a lot of thought, research and capital has gone into its development with clever branding and details evident in the décor, marketing, menu and drinks.  I’d heard about the queues, so we arrived right on opening time for lunch.  Within 10 minutes, the place was full of couples, groups, young families and one table of Ma and Pa with their awkward hipster daughter.  Floor staff seem to be mostly Japanese and service is polite and friendly even if some cultural cues are missed or minor misunderstandings occur.

The menu is short with grilled and poached gyoza and a couple of sterotypical Japanese ‘izakaya’ dishes like agedashi tofu, pork katsu, beef gyudon and edamame.  The cooking of the gyoza seems a little variable, with some overcooked and others lacking construction robust enough to contain their fillings.  Whole prawn gyoza seem a little strange and are certainly difficult to eat with dignity, but the package of good Japanese beers, warm, filling dumplings and an atmosphere of fun make it worth a visit, if perhaps not a 30 minute wait in a queue at dinner time.  Details like the mix your own sauce condiment containers, Japanese pop art printed flatware and a mix of jazz and J-pop and relentlessly excitable staff add up to make Harajuku Gyoza an appealing package, and I suspect, a package that can be replicated across a number of locations.

The drinks list, while brief, deftly lists good value and Japanese food friendly beers & wines that make sense for the menu, service and likely patrons, without being condescending.

I’m keen for thoughts on how Brunswick Social compares and look forward to completing my dumpling trilogy soon.

Dragonfly

235 Edward Street, Brisbane

Phone: 07 3220 1477

Open for lunch Tuesday to Friday; Dinner Tuesday to Saturday, kitchen open until 10pm.

Harajuku Gyoza

394 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley

Open 7 days, midday until late.

No bookings

The Brunswick Social

367 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley

Phone:  07 3252 3234

Open Wednesday to Sunday from 4pm until late

It’s a busy time for restaurant openings in Brisbane with a brace of new venues at Riverbend, the new South Bank restaurant precinct as well as in the CBD.

Spring (Cnr Felix & Mary Streets, Brisbane)

One of the most anticipated openings, for me anyway, is Spring, opposite Waterfront Place and near Urbane and The Euro.  With Lizzie Loel, former restaurant critic, chef and more recently consultant to John Kilroy’s restaurant group as general manager, its fair to say there’s a keen interest from city workers and industry types alike in seeing what Spring delivers.

Spring brings together a bistro, cooking school, wine store, retail and a ‘market table’ for quick but high quality lunches and breakfasts.  I was lucky enough to have a quick tour from Lizzie prior to opening and to find out about the philosophy and intent of Spring.  Owner Sarah Hancock is a Queenslander with evident passion for interiors and design who has put together a high calibre team, with chef Andrew Clarke, formerly of Poole’s Rock Winery in the Hunter Valley heading up the kitchen and sommelier and Brisbane hospitality industry figure Peter Marchant announced this week as Spring’s Fine Wine Manager.

In its various guises, Spring will provide regional and seasonal food in a comfortable setting, designed to evoke the ambiance of a gracious country home, with chef Andrew Clarke keen to continue his use of sustainable and organic ingredients in dishes with simple, bold flavours at the fore.  As you walk towards Spring, you’ll notice the rotisserie on display through the corner glass windows which will be used to produce roast meats for market table lunches.  In another show of Spring’s philosophy of sourcing high quality products unique to Brisbane, Spring will serve Niccolo coffee, roasted in Melbourne under the direction of former Illy master, Manuel Terzi.  The blend of mostly arabica and some robusta beans is a flat white drinker’s dream.  Pastries from young Brisbane pastry chef Matt Tierney (formerly of Brew Bakers and Aria) are excellent.  Spring’s market table is open for trade from 7am for breakfast, lunch and in between snacks.

The retail offer includes homewares, condiments and both new and vintage cookbooks.  With Marchant now onboard to steer the wine offer and sommelier/consultant Liz Carey (MoVida, Universal) having laid the foundations with a  focus on organic and biodynamic wines, I’m looking forward seeing how Spring evolves as the bistro and retail components open for trade at the end of the month.  The cooking school should be popular with corporate groups and Lizzie says they plan to mix it up with local talent and producers rather than just rely on big name chefs.

Stokehouse & Stoke Bar (South Bank)

The first Brisbane foray for the Melbourne based Van Haandel Group, Stokehouse Brisbane occupies the top spot in the new Riverbend precinct and includes a fine dining restaurant and a bar.  It’s great to see more venues on the river, and as a big fan of the Stokehouse in St Kilda I’m looking forward to trying Stokehouse.  A quick peek at the bar and its menu and drinks list shows plenty of promise.

Cove Bar and Dining (South Bank)

Just along from Stokehouse, I think this is the pick of the Riverbend precinct for views and pure relaxation.  The décor is simple with seats at the bar, a scattering of banquettes, stools and tables and a contender for best view in Brisbane.  Cocktails are excellent and the wine list, while small, is well conceived with smart options by the glass.  A selection of oysters served 10 ways and a promising menu with items like charred goat ribs with black garlic, scallops with black pudding crumble and vanilla pea puree & cocoa dusted quail with ajo blanco look worthy of further exploration.

Burnett Lane Bars (CBD)

Joining Brew in the CBD’s Burnett Lane (running from around the corner from Rocking Horse Records and back up to George Street) are new bars Super Whatnot and The Survey Company Bar and Bistro.  I know little more about Super Whatnot than its hidden away location and whacky name but how can it not be good with a name like that?

Survey on the other hand has been well publicised and owner Simon Livingstone  is no stranger to operating bars and bistros with Piaf and Sardine Tin at South Brisbane both well loved and established venues.  I hope these three venues do a great job of proving beyond doubt that small bars are both supported and viable in Brisbane.  Both are close to opening – watch this space.

There’s plenty of other new places opening and it will be interesting to see them evolve and how they land with Brisbane’s sometimes novelty seeking dining public. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these new venues and which ones you’ve tried or are looking foward to trying.

I have a soft spot for the wines and winemakers of the region where I grew up, and after meeting Craig Underhill of DiscoverVin via Twitter, who is based in my hometown, I was curious about what kind of wine importer would base themselves there.

DiscoverVin import wine from the Bordeaux and South West Regions of France and rather than focusing solely on classified wines, they instead search out wines that they feel offer quality and value for money, many from independent, organic or bio-dynamic producers. They then go one step further and provide very helpful advice on selecting wine to suit your tastes.

On his mission to introduce more people to these fantastic wines, Craig and DiscoverVin are hosting a wine dinner in Brisbane this Thursday 16th at C’est Bon Restaurant in Woolloongabba with a fittingly French menu and matched wines. You can find more details on the DiscoverVin website. There’s still a few spots available and you can contact Craig to book on 02 6020 6016.

You can follow DiscoverVin on Twitter: @DiscoverVin

So I’ll admit it. I love the US East Coast.

In contrast with Australia, there’s a palpable sense of history, cultural evolution, fascinating architecture and galleries and museums that never fail to blow my mind. The density of population can sustain specialist retail ventures in a way that Australia just can’t do. Year round Christmas shops may not be the pinnacle of human achievement but they illustrate my point.

Boston and New York are great cities, but Philadelphia is pretty special too, and I’m lucky enough that it’s the annual destination for a business conference I participate in. Perhaps by design, it coincided with Philly Beer Week, where Philly’s many craft beer venues turn their massive beer love up to 11. After flying from Brisbane to LA, then from LA to New York, then driving up the New Jersey Turnpike and onto Philly, I still got excited to see our hotel’s bar was in on the craft beer action. After a Walt Wit, a Yuengling Amber Lager and a Flying Fish Belgian Abbey Dubbel, we were relaxed and settled in for the week ahead.

Staying on the Delaware River on the edge of Old City, we’d been curious about an imposing Greek Revival building with red velvet curtains in the windows set amongst restaurants and bars. National Mechanics turns out to be one of the best places to sample craft beers and features a style of cuisine we’d probably call Dude Food. To complement the architecture, the interiors take Victorian and Steampunk elements to create at atmosphere where its 1am 24/7. You can also visit their webpage and queue up tunes to play while you choose your next beer. It’s easy to get comfortable – we started our session at around 3pm and stayed until the end of open mic night. Everyone is more talented, more attractive and more amusing after a dozen craft beers.

Keen to avoid the hotel buffet, we headed out the next morning and discovered Fork Etc., a more casual version of Fork, its fine dining sister venue right next door. Selected more for its prominent espresso machine than much else, Fork features local produce, quality ingredients and artisan bread. While breakfast menus in the US continue to confound me, the food was good enough that we immediately planned a visit to its big sister Fork. The conversation of PR people, wine distributors and restaurateurs at the next able was an unexpected bonus.

Thanks to a tip off from Brisbane art gallery manager Chris Hassall, we ditched a visit to the Italian Markets in favour of a tour of Philadelphia Art Museum. This is an incredible gallery and a testament to the wealth and generosity of some of Philly’s founding families. There’s an impressive collection of classics, modern art and sculpture – but what really amazed me was the extensive collection of armory and gallery after gallery of complete, reconstructed rooms displaying the finest examples of European interior architecture over a span of the last 250 years. I’m keen to return next year and spend more time viewing these amazing collections. A little footsore, we slipped into the overstuffed upholstery of the Art Museum’s elegant Granite Hill restaurant. Beautiful food and some very East Coast flavours, with a chef’s table appetiser comprising seafood, smoked trout, roast meats, cheeses and salads. With such excellent food on offer, we also ordered a main each. My simple rag pasta with pesto and heirloom tomatoes was generous in size and flavours, and provided sufficient ballast to tour a few more galleries.

On our last free day before our conference started, we returned to Fork for lunch. For me, the highlight of East Coast dining is the abundance of crab, lobster and oysters available on even the most humble of menus. The crab cake sandwich was an easy choice, and Fork’s version was perfection. Wholegrain bread, sweet succulent crab meat, tangy whole egg mayo and hand cut french fries. The preceding charcuterie plate also deserves a mention, representing a cross section of cured meats of different cultures, in keeping with Philly’s heritage. And in a smart move approved by the young sommelier we chose a Mas Martinet 2007 Priorat Menut to have with our lunch. My tip for Aussie diners is to stick to European wine while in the US. More satisfying and the prices are good too.

It wouldn’t be a trip to Philly without a cheesesteak, and while I’m unsure the ones on offer at the conference were authentic, they were good enough that I went back for seconds.

And it wouldn’t be a blog post about Philly without some original gansta rap from Schoolly D.

The AM radio hisses, then the signal gets clearer.  ‘You know where I was when this one came out?’ he says as the opening notes of Roy Orbison’s ‘Only The Lonely’ play.  ‘I was in Tasmania picking apples’.  This is my dad speaking, who links all his best memories as a young man to the hits of the day.

I’m kind of the same, but for me its not just the tunes, but the smells as well.  My mum’s velvet soap and cammomile Grassroots woolwash mixed with the woollen kilt and jumper that was my school uniform.  Lanolin, mud and straw from my Uncle’s farm and my Grandma’s dusty old coat I wore on winter holidays there. Eucalyptus, fresh cow pats and crisp mountain air in the Alpine Valleys; hops in the sun, malt on the stove and steaming sterilsed beer bottles of Dad’s homebrew production line.  My Nanny’s Yorkshire pud with beef dripping from the pan, mashed parnsips and a spoonful of molasses for each day you stayed over at their house by the Hume Weir.

Access to these sorts of memories via a snatch of a familiar tune or the scent of times, places and people past is a highly personal experience, often difficult to put into words. But the rush of memories can make your pulse quicken and leave you short of breath.

One of the first meals I found truly exciting was my mum’s Osso Bucco.  She didn’t make it really that often, and despite my parents strained relationship, I think it was something my Dad particularly enjoyed too.  Somewhere, I have the page out of her battered Women’s Weekly cook book which was the genesis for this favourite dish.  She served it with ’smashed’ potatoes – a decidedly plain take on classic mash – made with lumpily mashed greying boiled spuds, powdered skim milk and a small amount of butter, a sort of Depression era style that ensured the meal was cheap to make.  And that’s really what Osso Bucco is, a way to make something luxe and complex from simple ingredients and a cheap cut of meat.

I make a version of this whenever I can buy some veal shin, the cut known in Italian as ‘osso bucco’, or ‘bone with a hole’ owing to the marrow filled bone at the centre of each slice of meat.  Here’s how it goes, approximately.

Ingredients

Olive oil

1 brown onion, finely diced

2 carrots, sliced

2 – 3 sticks of celery, finely diced

5 – 6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

1.5 kg of veal shin, cut into slices (ask your butcher for Osso Bucco)

2 tablespoons of tomato paste

1 cup of wine (traditionally white, red is fine too)

2 cups of beef stock

2 tins of Italian tomatoes

3 springs of thyme

3 thick strips of lemon peel

Flour, salt and pepper

For gremolata

Zest of 1 lemon

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

2 – 3 tablespoons of parsley, finely chopped

Method

Combine enough flour, salt and pepper to toss the meat in before cooking.  Heat olive oil over high heat in a heavy pan, like Le Creuset or similar.  Brown the veal in batches on all sides and set aside.

Heat a good glug of olive oil in the same pan, cook the onion, then the garlic, carrot and celery for 5 minutes or until coloured and softening.  Add the some wine to deglaze the pan.  Add stock, tomatoes, wine, thyme and lemon peel and then veal pieces to the pan, taking care to stand them up so the marrow doesn’t fall out.  Bring the mixture to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered to 2.5 – 3 hours, or transfer to the oven at around 140 degrees C.  Adjust seasoning as required.

Combine the gremolata ingredients in a bowl. Serve with creamy polenta or mash, and sprinkle gremolata over the Osso Bucco.

The gremolata transforms what could be another boring casserole, lifting the flavours and delivering a fresh acid hit that highlights the complex flavours of the sauce.

Serve with a glass of pinot and imagine there’s a crackling fire and tunes loaded with memories and longing.  Enjoy.