Category Archives: eating

The act of eating. Dining, products, flavours.

Lyon 2007

Lyon Basilica by day

Much delayed but newly relevant (as some friends were asking me about Lyon), it’s high time I published a description of a city I visited earlier this year and greatly enjoyed.

Lyon, about 400 km southeast of Paris and accessible by supergroovy double-decker high-speed trains (the TGV Duplex – I love two-storey trains, crave scenic trips in observation cars, but only ever get to ride on suburban versions (Sydney, Holland, Ontario), so a snazzy double-decker really does it for me!).

TGV Duplex

Anyway, as I was saying, Lyon is 400 km from Paris, is the main city of the Rhône-Alpes region (think Beaujolais), and is renowned for its pig-intestine sausages, andouillette, and its proximity to the home of Valrhona chocolate (in Tain-Hermitage) — ok that’s just my bias showing. Lyon is/was also the home to a weaver’s rebellion, a stunning textiles museum, has lots of groovy hidden passageways to get lost in (if you find the entry button on the hidden doorways in the first place), a scenic position and some fancy churches, trompe-l’oeil wall paintings, a good gastronomic bookshop, and a surfeit of homewares/decoration shops.

Traboule - hidden passageway  Trompe l'oeil - visual deception
Lyon Basilica by night

For a Melburnian, there was the added attraction of streets in a grid system (many Melburnians find bendy-street cities like Sydney, London, you-name-it hard to navigate… must be why I like Kyoto and central Lisbon;) ). Very liveable, as one says.

I stayed at Hotel Saint-Vincent, convenient to the old quarters (a bridge away) and the Place des Terraux (town hall, opera, shops). The hotel was simple (two-star) but adequate, though the lovely wooden floors made for lots of creaking as guests moved around and earplugs were necessary. The Russian toiletries were an interesting touch.

I was in Lyon for four evenings (a relevant way of describing it, given my obsession with food), but could only face two full restaurant dinners, alas. However, the dinners I chose to have were exceptionally good choices! Not high-end dining, but delicious hearty fare, well executed. The first dinner was at La Machonnerie. I had scouted out the menu earlier in the day and it looked very tempting. Seeing that the city was overflowing with tourists, I knew I’d have to dine early, so arrived at 6.30 (unusually early for me and for the French). The restaurant was empty, but the place was absolutely booked out. I looked as disconsolate as I could and the waitress took pity on me, offering me a little table squeezed into the back corner near the kitchen door. So nice of her!

La Machonnerie

Dinner consisted of

  • grattons – ‘pork scratchings’; cold, rather greasy pieces of pork rind, fromage blanc and good rye bread
  • salade lyonnaise – a generous salad of lettuce, lardons, croutons, poached egg, horseradish dressing
  • saucisson cuit – a thick, pleasantly porky cooked sausage on a bed of puy lentils cooked with onion in red wine. Delicious!
  • wine – a fillette (375 ml) of côte du Rhône; finally a decent house red!
  • sorbet de cassis – blackcurrant sorbet with a serious splash of marc de bourgogne poured over it (helpful article about marc at NYTimes). A bit harsh at first, but after a little evaporation the combination of grape spirit and blackcurrant worked very well.

A grand total of EUR 28 (A$ 47) made this quite a steal, especially in a rather touristy establishment (the clientele was mostly Japanese, American, British and Swiss, with one English-speaking waitress). This isn’t fancy food, but it was enjoyable, hearty and the atmosphere and service were pleasant.

The second dinner was even better. Oft-mentioned in guidebooks, a popular restaurant in typical traditional Lyon style, called a bouchon, is the Comptoir Restaurant des Deux Places (Tel: 04 78 82 95 10; 5, Place Fernand-Rey, 69001 LYON). The interior was so French you might have feared a tourist cliché, but it was genuinely atmospheric and many of the guests were regulars.

Comptoir 1 Comptoir 2 Comptoir 3

Dinner consisted of

  • langue d’agneau tiède, sauce ravigote – large slices of lamb’s tongue, served cold with a sauce of chopped capers, herbs, onion, stock and vinegar
  • andouillette et sa marmalade d’echalottes, pommes dauphine – traditional pork sausage made with pork intestine, both sweet and salty (almost disarmingly like a breakfast chipolata, though this makes me sound like a heathen), quite porky and with a visual texture of something between a coarse terrine and bubble-and-squeak, due to the strips of intestine (rather disconcerting! Gory picture here). Lusciously rich potatoes and tasty shallot confit too:)

EUR 30 (A$ 51) with some wine. Reasonable value for the quality and atmosphere, making allowance for the effects of its guidebook popularity. Again, hearty and enjoyable.

Now, regular readers are probably wondering where on earth the cakes, chocolate and other sweet comestibles have vanished too in this travel report… Yes, I’m witholding information! Naaaaturally, I ate ice-cream (pain d’epices (gingerbread) and a stunning, earthy rhubarb), munched on chocolate and tried the cakes from the premier pâtisserie/traîteur Pignol, but most of what is reportable there will appear in an article in a few days’ time (sorry!).

I can, however, tell you a little about the market. Lyon is a gastronomic haven, with many open-air markets and one large covered market. This marché couvert, Les Halles de Lyon, is a quite modern building with many rows of merchants (the grid theme again!) selling a wide range of edibilia, from meat to cheese to wine to spices. An impressive place and sure to be bustling if you don’t arrive straight after the lunch break (sigh!).

Les Halles de Lyon - outside
Les Halles de Lyon - inside

A much smaller city than Paris, of course, Lyon has a surprisingly comfortable feel to it. For the culinarily inclined, the presence of a wide variety of markets, food shops, chocolatiers and an astounding number of restaurants makes this a very attractive place.

– DM

Lyon square, playing pétanque

Review: Lunch at The Fat Duck, Bray (UK)

The Fat Duck
[Aside: Publication of this review was delayed for a few months due to external factors. I’m now publishing it regardless!]

An inconspicuous old redbrick building in the Berkshire village of Bray bears a sign of a webbed foot, a feather and a duck’s bill, all with cutlery handles. Next to the door is a bronze plaque in French, ‘Relais & Chateaux Gourmands‘ and on the other side of the door, a large stylised fowl ‘Traditions et qualité‘.

This is The Fat Duck. Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant, closely associated with the molecular gastronomy movement (though he eschews this label), enjoys Michelin 3-star status and was recently ranked among the world’s top ten restaurants.

The welcome was friendly and not as stiff as the staff’s attire might have led us to expect. The first three staff we encountered were French — a common affectation in British fine dining. There were maybe fourteen tables in the low-ceilinged room, with wooden-beams and whitewashed walls featuring colourful abstract art. A relaxed ambience.

This is an establishment best known for ‘experience’ dining, having attracted much popular attention for dishes such as snail porridge and egg and bacon ice-cream. We were curious to see how this would affect the meal and the clientele.

Once seated we waited quite a while for menus, even though the room was not busy and guests who arrived simultaneously had been provided with menus promptly. Two menus are available. The à la carte choices were strongly biased towards fish and seafood. The tasting menu was more diverse and clearly the entertainment side of the experience. At GBP 80 (ca A$200) and 115 (ca A$290) respectively, the à la carte menu looked like the poorer choice.

The first clearly positive note was the enquiry about dietary restrictions. The questions were quite intelligent regarding allergies and permitted guests to opt out of certain dishes if they seemed too scary (I would guess this is primarily a snail issue). The standard dishes are strong on seafood and very poor for vegetarians.

Water was offered–the imported (French, in this case) bottled type, with which restaurants in Britain attempt to earn similar margins to those they do on wine. GBP 4.50 for less than a litre is quite a feat. Good bread was offered, accompanied by unpasteurised salted and unsalted butters. Delightful. And, remarkably, ‘free’.

Lunch

Nitro-green tea and lime mousse

Lunch commenced with a piece of theatre. A cooking station was set up next to the table. The waitress announced that she was about to cook a foam of eggwhite in liquid nitrogen and that the resulting ball should be placed whole in one’s mouth immediately. The foam was squirted onto a spoon and floated in the nitrogen, turned a few times and removed. The resulting hard white ball was placed on a plate, liquid drained off, and then dusted with a green tea powder and, as it was delivered to the first guest, the table was spritzed with ‘essence of lime grove’. Cute, theatrical, and setting the scene for a meal which would simultaneously titilate and irritate.

The eggwhite foam had become a cold, hard meringue-like shell which revealed a soft, refreshingly lime-tangy centre. It succeeds in the pleasant surprise and frisson of novelty. The dish was described as removing fat from the tongue and opening its ‘pores’. Uhuh.

Jellies

Shortly hereafter, a plate of two small squares of jelly was placed in front of each diner. We were told that these were orange and beetroot jellies, and it was recommended that we should eat the orange one first. The diner promptly goes for the orange-coloured jelly. It doesn’t take a lot to guess there would be some sort of novelty here. The orange jelly tasted of beetroot. Intense, earthy, fruity beetroot. The dark red jelly tasted of orange. Deep, tangy blood orange. The waiter removed the plates and asked us which one we liked most. ‘The one that tasted of beetroot.’ ‘Which colour was that?’ A didactic touch, rehearsed and stiffly delivered, unwilling to acknowledge that we had seen through the trickery.

Eavesdropping on the neighbouring table, it was clear that not everyone sees through this caprice. The couple debated whether the red jelly was blackcurrant flavour and felt the orange coloured jelly wasn’t very orangey. Yep.

The jellies behind us, it was time for the first savoury dish.

Oyster, passion fruit jelly, lavender

For me, the no-seafood guy, a martini glass with a small dollop of lentils surrounded by a peach puree and sprinkled with mint. The flavour was round and very savoury, despite the mild sweetness and perfume of the peach. There was more to this dish, but the waiter wasn’t inclined to be informative.

For the seafood people, a raw oyster with a thick passionfruit jelly and some notional lavender. Presented in shell, balanced on a mound of wet sea salt as a pedestal. This dish was received enthusiastically, despite the combination of sweet and savoury with oyster.

Pommery grain mustard ice cream, red cabbage gazpacho

A shockingly violet sauce (the gazpacho) was the pool for a ball of mustard ice-cream. Very savoury, but a pity that the gazpacho tasted like old cabbage water. More successful in visuals than olfactories, this one.

Jelly of quail, langoustine cream, parfait of foie gras
Oak moss and truffle toast

Next, more theatre. A wooden box containing a layer of oak moss was placed on the table. Atop the moss were three small plastic boxes which we recognised from Japanese flavoured films and certain brands of breath freshener. We were instructed to place the film in our mouths. The waiter poured water over the moss, which then gushed white mist like a disco smoke machine. Dry ice was lurking somewhere. I assume the mist carries aromas from the moss.

With the film dissipating in our mouths, we tasted a ‘truffle toast’ — a small rectangle of wafer-thin bread topped with dry black shavings, it was intense and absolutely delicious. The primary impression was less of truffle and more of a broad umami hit. And finally, we started exploring a cup of ‘foie gras parfait, langoustine crème, quail jelly and pea purée’. The parfait was a tiny quenelle of a sweet cream of foie gras. Delicate and rich. The langoustine cream was appreciated by the fishy people, while my replacement — truffle cream — was strong and a little overwhelming at first. Beneath this was a layer of quail aspic. Firm and also quite strong, yet another meaty note to this rich dish. The pea purée, concealed below the jelly, was mild and sweet, and not as mushy-pea flavoured as one might have feared.

Snail porridge

The first less fussy dish in the tasting was the dreaded snail porridge. Dreaded? I had resolved to try it, despite a not-so-adventurous palate, whereas my otherwise adventurous companions at first baulked at the idea, only to slowly find bravery in their hearts. The tables were turned when the plates arrived. My bravery evaporated as I saw that the porridge did not contain the snails. There were, instead, three or four whole snails perched atop the porridge. Small strips and cubes of jamon added texture and flavour to the dish. The porridge was, of course, not quite that. Yes, there was evidence of oatmeal, but it was really a thick parsley-coloured snail sauce with small pieces of oatmeal and jamon through it. The challenging snails were garnished with shaved fennel which tasted of walnut. I have no memory of being impressed… but snail trauma might have been to blame.

Up to this point we had enjoyed most of the dishes, with high points and low points clear amongst our preferences. What had been lacking was the ‘wow’ in all of it. Where was something that would impress us with flavour and texture in a ‘normal’ gustatory way, rather than because of cleverness or novelty?

It arrived.

Roast foie gras

In the centre of a plate decorated with a sour cherry, an amaretto cream, delightful little cubes of almond jelly and stripes of morello cherry sauce was a small piece of roasted foie gras. (There was, apparently, chamomile somewhere in all this, but we couldn’t sense it.) The foie gras was stunning. Unlike the typical paté-like texture, this was soft and light, almost a loose jelly in texture, with a sweet, mellow flavour only showing the characteristic foie gras bitterness at the very end of the flavour timeline. When the waiter was asked how this texture had been achieved, he started to describe a long, slow cooking process in a vacuum bag. That was fine and clear, but the surprise on his face when I asked if he was talking about the ‘sous vide’ method in turn left me surprised, and his unwillingness to say how long the foie gras was cooked for seemed petty (or ignorant).

Sound of the sea

A recent addition to the dishes that have had media attention is ‘Sound of the sea’, a multimedia dining experience. Dining with an iPod Shuffle for company – we were instructed to listen to the sound of seagulls and waves whilst eating. The food is intended to recreate a seashore image, with a loose white foam on one side of the rectangular glass plate, covering samphire, seaweed and mussels (or in my case konbu and broccoli), and delineated on the opposing side by a tapioca powder ‘sand’. Why the sound effects? Apparently it enhances the flavour impression. Evidence? Not within the walls of the restaurant, from my experience. I started with the earphones, removed them, replaced them, tested different parts of the food. Perhaps the effect doesn’t work so well with kelp. My seafood-friendly friends were more enthusiastic, with one objecting to the strong sound-induced seafoodiness. A waiter pointed out (towards the end of the dish) that I should be listening to the music. Thanks. Been there done that. Now doing my own testing, thank you very much.

Salmon poached with liquorice

One of the visually more challenging dishes was a square of salmon encased in a liquorice flavoured shell. This was served with asparagus, olive oil and a dusting of grated liquorice root. Feelings were mixed, with one of our party finding the salmon wet and characterless, completely lost against the liquorice. We asked a few previous diners over the following days and they almost unanimously felt that this dish was the least successful. Do some Googling and you’ll find numerous unenthusiastic comments.

I instead enjoyed a rectangle of pork belly, sweet and flavoursome, served with macaroni in an intense truffle sauce. The sauce so overpowered the wonderful meat that this dish seemed poorly judged. The macaroni were on the firmer side of al dente, small and not suited to the cutlery (or vice versa — widely spaced tines on the fork, a tapering pointed blade on the Laguiole knife). [I’ll write more about silly cutlery in restaurants another time.]

In a place where enthusiasm for the entertainment seemed rather essential, the waiter’s handling of one companion’s uneaten dish of liquorice salmon was interesting. He insisted on knowing what had been wrong with it, but then sought to explain the rationale for its character to counter the diner’s opinion. ‘The salmon shouldn’t overpower the liquorice as the flavours need to be balanced.’ Indeed. But wet and tasteless? He finished with a clearly rehearsed line, ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work for you.’

It was increasingly obvious that the oral description of the dishes, the theatre and service behaviours were strongly rehearsed and scripted. This is performance dining.

Best end of lamb

The final savoury dish, a sort of main course in a sea of tastings, was a beautifully tender lamb chop (also sous vide) with a light and fragrant thyme cream and an onion purée. Very un-played-with. Tasty, meaty, but after rather a lot of strong savoury dishes we were running out of appreciation.

Hot and iced tea

Between courses we were served a glass of two semi-liquid Earl Grey teas, one hot and one cold, though this wasn’t obvious until you started to drink. The two jellies had probably been poured into the cup with a divider, and with divider removed created two temperature zones in the cup. Later on, just the cold lightly gelled tea was served.

As palate cleansers before dessert, first an ice-cream cornet and then a sherbet fountain were served. The tiny cornet was a ginger-orange wafer filled with apple ice-cream. Very pleasant. The sherbet fountain was a small card cylinder filled with a modest dose of douglas fir flavoured sherbet. None of us could find this flavour, but sherbet makes most people happy. The sherbet was consumed with the aid of a vanilla bean straw — a length of vanilla pod, hollowed and dried to form a tube. Breathing through it flavoured the air with a musty vanilla aroma. Biting into it was a bit like eating vanilla charcoal (oops).

Mango and Douglas Fir purée

The dessert was a cube of lychee and mango bavarois with a dollop of mango and Douglas Fir purée — mildly woodsy – accompanied by an absolutely stunning blackcurrant sorbet and little blackcurrant jelly cubes.

Carrot and orange tuile, beetroot jelly

A wafer-thin rectangle of translucent carrot-orange flavoured ‘tuile’ on a stick. Can’t remember the beetroot jelly!

Parsley cereal

Strangely, it was now time for breakfast. A small cardboard cereal box in a bowl was presented to each of us with a greeting of ‘Good morning!’. The box contained a tiny sachet of parsnip flakes. Over these we poured parsnip milk. Trying not to gulp it down in one spoonful (it was a very small sachet, really très petite) we noticed that each mini-mouthful was sweeter than the one before. Curious!

And (almost) finally, the most written about dish at The Fat Duck.

Nitro-scrambled egg and bacon ice cream

Continuing the breakfast theme, the cries of ‘Good morning!’ seemed to have become a chorus. Merriment all round? No. Irritation. The waitress arrived with her cooking table and, with more than a theatrical flourish, cracked open some eggs to reveal that they had, miraculously, become custard inside. (Her thumb was strategically placed to hide the plug in the shell through which the egg had been drained and the custard injected.) In a copper pan over an unlit burner, she then ‘cooked’ the custard in liquid nitrogen. The custard cools very rapidly, creating an incomparably creamy ice-cream. Waiters suddenly arrived proclaiming ‘Good morning!’ (yet a-bloody-gain), bearing plates of pain perdu (‘French toast’, nicely brûléed in this case) with some tomato jam and a bacon tuile (?) on top. The ice-cream was added to this little pile. We did not feel this was successful. It was sweet and the ice-cream tasted of fake bacon flavour (think a packet of flavoured potato chips).

At last we were at the end. With coffee came whisky wine gums and violet tartlets, and some chocolates (from L’Artisan du Chocolat, which I’ve discussed in another article). The gums were like vinegar jellies and the tartlets were palely flavoured (if vibrantly coloured). I like violet, and am often disappointed at the lack of flavour nominally violet sweets have (but more about that another time). Coffee was tolerable but by no means great and a list of teas featured prices breathtaking enough to deter all but holders of a Centurion American Express card! (GBP 14 for a pot, for instance.)

Reflections

The meal came to GBP 140 (AUD 350) per person, including expensive water, coffee and the 12.5% merry service charge. As much as this cost will seem utterly ludicrous to many readers, one of my dining companions made the point that a three-course meal at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in London would cost not a great deal less and include the joyful experience of being rushed through a sitting! With that in mind, I guess The Fat Duck is a much more tolerable option.

The experience was novel but became less enjoyable as the meal (all four hours of it) progressed. We ate food we would never find elsewhere; we gained insight into the cooking, the movement and the experience which is really only attainable first hand. We were not struck dumb by the gustatory pleasure of the dishes. We were, however, very very impressed with a small number of items (for me, the roast foie gras). As the non-seafood diner, I was surprised at the number of truffle items I was served instead. It was unsubtle and overly intense.

Dining at The Fat Duck is unlikely to be something people would repeat – or at least not often. There was clearly a table of repeat customers when we were there, but as the menu changes only incrementally for the most part (six months after I was there, the menu is almost identical), you would probably want to have quite a hiatus between visits.

I didn’t feel it was a comfortable meal. It was an intellectual exercise. The contrived service performances made it seem particularly artificial and the fact that we could hear the same script delivered to each table at different times meant that any surprise was often dulled.

Others have had different opinions of the experience (as can be read all over the internet) and it is clearly a strongly individual preference. It was useful to be able to compare lunch at The Fat Duck with a meal at Melbourne’s Interlude a few weeks later, as I described here. These were two very different meals.

[Note: there’s a chance one or two minor details of the meal are slightly inaccurate… I defy anyone to politely (ie, without camera or filmcrew) dine for four hours and remember it all! 🙂 ]

– DM

Review: Maggie’s Harvest, by Maggie Beer

cover of book

Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. This is a stunning production imbued with the personality of the author, local context, and an appealing warmth, packaged with style and a sense of understanding of the author’s values.

pattern detail

Maggie Beer, one of the three modern icons of Australian food (the others being Gay Bilson and Stephanie Alexander), has written a book to weigh down your lap as you browse, read and cook from its pages. It’s a hefty tome, similar in size to Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion, though marginally thinner. The padded fabric cover is beautifully embroidered (!) with the image of a tree laden with fruit, presumably evoking the grand old pear tree Beer writes about on her property (farm), even though the fruit don’t seem to be pears…. A lone pheasant sits on the end of one bough — a reference to Beer’s Pheasant Farm Restaurant in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, which closed in 1993. Unusually, the book has been printed on good weight, smooth, cream coloured paper. Most cookbooks on the market using cream or yellow paper come from North America, using stock that is often rough and cheap, not lending itself to photographs. Maggie’s Harvest features numerous colour pictures, even though this is not the typical, glossy paper for colour book images. Following the increasing trend of printing pictures onto matte stock (Movida, Secrets of the Red Lantern, Jamie at Home), this book takes things one better: the quality of paper is good enough to produce wonderfully vibrant, slightly contrasty colour images. And even better, many of these images capture the essence of Australian rural life.

apricots excerpt

Maggie’s Harvest is, in keeping with the author’s own philosophy and the prevailing food ideology, organised by season. And in what feels quite Australian, it starts with summer and ends with spring (take that you northern hemispherics!). Within each season are entries for a range of ingredients (22-26 in each), with one exception: Christmas gets a special mention, and tasty it is too! And for each ingredient section there’s a large dose of enjoyable narrative, culinary knowledge and a handful of recipes. I’m often a little sceptical about books which organise by season or ingredient because they can end up as a mish-mash of insipid blurbs about this or that followed by illustrative recipes. That is not Maggie’s Harvest.

partridge excerpt

First I read about anchovies, then I became immersed in the apricots. I extracted myself only to fall headlong into the capers and capsicums. And here and there are memories and experiences which will resonate with many readers, Australian by birth or by adoption. My heart thumped a little harder when i saw sections on loquats (nespoli) (childhood backyard), quandongs (Aeroplane jelly!), kangaroo (abandon beef; eat Skippy!) and crabapples (Mum’s jelly). That’s not to say that overseas readers would find it too parochial — the wisdom about ingredients and cooking to be gleaned from the book is immense. Cultural enlightenment is an added bonus.

Maggie Beer has achieved something quite enviable. She tells stories, reminisces, mentions friends and shares enthusiasms all without developing the rather supercilious or pretentious tone that others often do (I mention no names!). There’s no self-aggrandising and it’s written with an air of warmth and openness which just pulls the reader in. This is not a book you can skim through.

Come Christmas, I can see many a scrawny pine tree or glowing fibre-optic masterpiece with a Maggie’s Harvest nestled beneath it. Perhaps it will still be sleeping in the brown paper it comes wrapped in from the publishers (the fabric is wont to mark, alas), but hopefully not the tacky shrinkwrap that some booksellers have been suffocating it in.

I’ve been reading Maggie’s Harvest for the last three days and haven’t yet found a flaw (except for the very occasional mention of her own products which I find a little irritating). Unlike the last book I reviewed, the text is literate, strong and flowing, and Beer acknowledges the work of her editors in shaping this wonderful book. At the risk of exhausting you with one last burst of effusive gush, this is what a good book about food and cooking can be!

Maggie’s Harvest is published by Penguin Books (under the Lantern imprint). 736pp. ISBN-13: 9781920989545. RRP A$125.

bottom of cover

Phew, I’m all worn out by this positive energy. Like my review of Interlude (restaurant), I’m just not recognising myself anymore!

– DM

Review: Interlude Restaurant, Melbourne

What do you do when you find dinner too enjoyable? How is an irritable, jinxed diner like me to cope with a meal which delivers no disappointments and offers barely a scrap to quibble about? I felt embarrassed at how effusive I was. I sat through the meal thinking of all the people I needed to tell.

This might look like a puff-piece (an advertorial), especially as I dined as a guest of the establishment, but I assure you it isn’t.

Interlude, at 211 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy (Melbourne, Australia), has attracted attention for chef Robin Wickens’s use of avant garde cooking techniques and for the food he produces. I came to Interlude because of the techniques, while preparing an article on modernist cookery (oft confused with the concept ‘molecular gastronomy‘, see here for the contrast) in Melbourne. Earlier in the year I had dined at one of the temples of this new cookery, Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, and was prepared for a similar experience at Interlude (though hopefully slightly less theatrical). The Fat Duck review can be found by clicking here.

The meal comprised of fourteen dishes, of which four were sweet. The use of sous-vide, gelling, dehydration and other techniques is interesting and exploited well. I am deliberately not going to provide comprehensive detail about the dishes, and nor will there be photos. Imagine and then try the food yourself (or don’t). One of the banes of any chef’s existence is the expectation created by detailed reviews of specific dishes.

The food

It started with some lattice potato crisps and beer nuts. The crisps were delicious (though eventually went soggy, as homemade crisps are wont to do) and the peanuts tasted of beer. A nice touch, but also one that led me to anticipate more surprises later.

A chestnut dish with elements that many might expect to be sweet, but which were in fact distinctly savoury. It was rich and almost overwhelming. I wondered if this would be a continuing problem.

Grits with buffalo wings (a type of chicken dish for those who don’t know the term). No trickery. Not really. But the novelty of Mexican truffle was interesting. (Mexican truffle is really huitlacoche or ‘corn smut‘, which is much less likely to succeed on a menu!)

Lamb with coffee. Let’s just say it involved an atomiser. I’d had the atomisation thing done to me before (at the Fat Duck), with ‘Essence of Lime Grove’ being sprayed over the table. At Interlude the diner gets to self-administer the spray, with the unintended result that my wardrobe smells of coffee.

Like cauliflower purée through a straw… one of Wickens’s better known dishes is a glass tube of four flavours. I don’t know how successful this is. I watched four other diners ‘eat’ this dish, and most sucked and swallowed with barely an olfactory moment intervening. A pity. If you happen to go to Interlude, please let the contents of the tube dwell a while on your tongue.

Jerusalem artichoke soup. Very welcome on a cold Melbourne night. Combined beautifully with brussel sprouts and tonka beans, amongst other flavours.

Squab breast with quinoa, black treacle and blackberry. Perhaps the only dish where I thought the balance of flavours was off. It tasted fine, but the squab lost the battle.

Aged sirloin and rib meat. A whimsical presentation but serious food. Look carefully at the onion rings.

Venison with celeriac cream. Without doubt the most ‘mature’ dish of my meal. I would gladly have eaten this many times over. I began to wonder what it would be like to dine à la carte at Interlude.

Energy drink. Okay, it tasted like those effervescent indigestion salts. Lemony and tangy and fizzy. Not a winner for me. Certainly zaps your palate clean though!

Piña colada in a spoon. Heaven – though only if you have a soft spot for piña colada (me).

There’s something wonderful about a table set with three dessert spoons and three dessert forks. Per person! A dessert lover’s utopia?

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. And a touch of cashew. But not a lump of rhubarb in sight. Whereas the savoury courses had, for the most part, used new cooking techniques for practical purposes and with obvious result, the desserts seemed to use these techniques to more entertaining or surprising effect. The difference between Robin Wickens on savoury and Pierre Roelofs on sweet?

If I tell you that the next dish comprised of the flavours parsnip, apple, vinegar, rosemary and date, and that these were presented as lumps, ice-cream, puffs, cream, cubes and crisps, would you be able to work out which ingredient took which form? It hardly matters when it tastes so good.

The third dessert consisted of sago, vanilla, pink grapefruit, almond, rosewater and yuzu. As long as you like rosewater, this is a fresh, clever dish. Less fussy that the previous dessert, but just as impressive.

And a surprise fourth dessert which leaves you wondering how a doughnut can be distilled into an ice-cream. A touch of whimsy to end the meal. I almost wished it had preceded the more sophisticated desserts, but I concede it would be a cute lead in to a digestif coffee or the like.

[I’m sure I’ve missed at least one dish, but hey, you get the picture!]

Conclusion

This is sophisticated, clever food without a hint of patronising the diner or prioritising tricks over gustatory enjoyment. I don’t know how well it works à la carte because, as with all dishes that are in some way novel, there’s a risk that the satiation-value of a meal is underplayed. I don’t know how large the à la carte portions are, but I did see a table devour theirs very very quickly. Customers were not all dining there for the food experience, but all seemed to be aware that their meal might challenge preconceptions (positively).

It seems on the face of it that one of the three dégustation options is a better bet. The meal I had was something like the largest dégustation menu (17 dishes, A$175 without wine). I believe a diner would probably come away from that menu feeling that the meal had been worth it. Just as an aside, the wines were excellent matches to most dishes.

A final note: If you go looking for lay reviews of Interlude, you will occasionally find complaints that the dishes were ‘too salty’. I was perplexed by this before I went, not understanding how a number of diners could have a similar complaint over a period of time, yet the restaurant has regular received high praise in the food media. Having now eaten at Interlude, I think I understand the problem. Well, it isn’t a problem, as far as I’m concerned. I think Robin Wickens’s cooking presents a strong umami profile across all of the savoury dishes. Umami is the fifth ‘savoury’ sense, often written about in association with Japanese cuisine and associated with the presence of glutamates which give a ’rounder’ or ‘fuller’ flavour sensation. Mushrooms, cheeses, meat, meat stocks and a number of other foods fall into this category. Wickens’s dishes are fantastically umamamami, but not in a monotonous one-note sense. These dishes were complex and full. The problem? I would guess that diners who aren’t familiar with this sort of flavour landscape, or who perhaps prefer flatter or less orchestrated flavours, will associate the umami with saltiness.

Another glowing description of Interlude can be found at Morsels & Musings.

The restaurant

Interlude Restaurant
211 Brunswick Street
Fitzroy VIC 3065
Tel: 03 9415 7300

Note that Interlude will be moving to a new city location in the middle of 2008.

– DM

Paris 2007

Paris: woman with baguettes and small dog
[This is the third article about travel. Others: London/UK, chocolate in London.]

There are so many reasons to visit Paris; so many reasons to enjoy the city and – most pertinently – the food. Lacking the resources to hop from one name-restaurant to another (to be honest, places like L’Arpège, L’Atelier du Joël Robuchon, Alain Ducasse and so on aren’t likely to be my preferred eating experience anyway), it seemed much better to wander through markets, browse the shops, and pour money into chocolate, pâtisserie and macarons while staying in a 2-star establishment somewhere for EUR 50 (A$82) per night!

I’ve been to Paris more than a handful of times and have gradually become more careful in choosing the markets to visit, the restaurants I’ll eat at and the pâtisseries worth revisiting. What I haven’t achieved is regular access to a kitchen and the time to exploit that properly. In fact, staying in a simple apartment (EUR 65 (A$107) per night) with a basic kitchen (two hotplates, a fridge, a microwave, some useful pots and enough space to twirl a dishcloth) was only made possible this year.

Markets | Shops | Eating

I’d love to tell you that I cooked up a storm every night. I didn’t. But I did stuff the fridge fulllll of cheese, olives, cakes, charcuterie and butter! And mushrooms and cumquats. And Normandy cider.

I could wax lyrical about the olives…

But let me tell you about food and eating.

Food-related shops

The two most impressive épiceries (loosely: foodhalls, strictly: grocers) in Paris are at Bon Marché and Lafayette (click on the ‘Gourmet’ link in the French version). The former is a cavernous supermarket-like space (without the tacky supermarket feel), part of a department store. The latter is more like the foodhalls of Harrods or David Jones, with numerous delicatessen counters, ready-to-eat meals, café counters and more. Where Bon Marché feels relatively calm and stylish, Lafayette maintains some style whilst drowning in a novel mélange of old ladies who do all their grocery shopping there, Japanese tourists and German schoolgirls. (Both the Japanese and Germans – and presumably numerous other groups – descend like wasps on the impressive chocolate aisles.)

At last I made it to Dehillerin and Mora, the two most renowned cookware shops in Paris. Dehillerin is particularly famous because it’s, well, rather reminiscent of an old, old hardware shop with poky aisles of bits and bobs and men in sensible coats (the people who serve you, not flashers). It was all a little overwhelming, and you can hear hordes of American tourists salivating over the copper pots. Me, I just salivated over the copper bordelais (canelés bordelaises, sometimes spelt cannelé) moulds. As delish as canelés are (and there are long long discussions over at eGullet), I don’t feel quite the same foolish enthusiasm for them as I do for other pâtisserie items, so I decided not to splurge EUR 8 (A$14) per little mould (consider that one mould doesn’t get you far, and four moulds is still a little meagre) and will just leave it for when I’m rich (assuming mortality doesn’t intervene). By the way, if it’s good chocolate moulds you’re after, Mora seems to be the place to go.

The Librairie Gourmande moved to a new location (90 rue Montmartre) near métro Sentier in the 2nd arrondissement earlier this year. It is now on two floors, so has considerably more space than the old location in the 6th. It felt a little chaotic when I was there, hopefully as a result of the recent move. It’s hard to find a really good selection of gastronomic literature in Paris and I hope this shop picks up. I’ve written previously about Librairie Badiane in Lyon, where the shop and their website were a good deal more with-it than Librairie Gourmande when I visited. (Note that the second best shop in Paris for gastronomic literature (primarily cookbooks) is probably Gilbert Joseph on Bd. Saint Michel, followed by Gilbert Jeune on Place Saint Michel.)

Markets

This year I made it to the markets on Boulevard Richard Lenoir (Oberkampf, 11th arrondissement), sometimes called the Marché Popincourt, which is my ‘local’ if I dare be so pretentious. A long way further down Bd. Richard Lenoir is the Marché Bastille. And a little to the east is the market at Place d’Aligre. The first of these three has changed from being strongly local to increasingly having tourists in the mix and merchants who know it. The Bastille market is a bit larger, but apart from some nicknacks and a Portuguese bloke selling (primarily) Italian wares (but real chouriço too!), it didn’t feel that much better than the first. The Marché d’Aligre, including the fixed covered market known as Marché Beauvau, is a much more down-to-earth affair. Some of the produce is crap. There’s a bit of a flea market. The covered market is small but has a range of meat and other produce stalls – I almost bought some horse fillet to try, but chickened out (so to speak) for fear of the opprobrium which certain Parisian friends might have directed at me. Nay, it was to be cumquats and comté rather than cheval and chèvre.

Marché Bastille bread
Marché Bastille chicken

I bought lots of cumquats. Well, I asked for not so many. I got a lot. And paid for a lot. But it gave me an excuse to practise making cumquat tea. Cumquat tea? Yep. It’s quite delicious, and I had converted quite a few Parisians to it by the time I left. I would include a recipe here, but that would be a little distracting, so I shall post again once the weather is warmer in Melbourne and someone deigns to donate a bushell of cumquats to the cause.

Dining

Multilingual menu

Bon Marché (see beginning) has one more attraction: a café called Delicabar, nestled in the women’s fashion department on the first floor. Not my usual place to tarry, but well worth the exception. I first visited Delicabar after reading early mentions of it on eGullet back in 2004. The novelty? An interesting approach to desserts and pastry, and a blurring of lines between sweet and savoury. Jellies, mousses, fine pastry, vegetables, fresh flavours all find expression in ways which were, at first, novel and unexpected: a glass of spiced fruits in a jelly; a ‘bubble’ (dome) of carrot mousse; sablés (shortbreads) flavoured with olive oil or rosemary; chocolate soup; green tea tartelettes… you get the picture.

Delicabar bar
Delicabar seating

The setting was cool and bright – natural light, white walls, and curvaceous bright pink or yellow banquettes, stools and islands. Staff dressed in black. Delicabar lived up to its tagline: snack chic.

A year or two after opening, Delicabar was extended to include an open-air courtyard that is delightful in warmer weather, successfully extending the simple, naturally lit ambience of the venue.

Alas, the experience has begun to undermine the style. Last year and this, we found staff less and less engaging (they were never effusive, but stylish hauteur seems to have become unmotivated and a little tatty). Last year I found my millefeuille pastry was overcooked. This year, the previously stunning sablés tasted less fresh than usual. And the coffee had declined.

Five visits in four years might not be enough to give an accurate reflection of change – maybe I was unlucky on my last two visits – but my bar chic companions shared my view. Nonetheless, the food at Delicabar can still be special and, more interestingly, you should come back to syrupandtang in about a month’s time for more detail about the food and the chef.

After pigging out on cakes and croques monsieurs (if you feel tempted to pronounce that Crock Mon-Sewers, then please use ‘French toasted ham and cheese sandwich thingo’ instead!), cumquat tea and chouriço, tomme de brebis (a ewe’s milk version of Tomme de Savoie, I believe) and cidre, it was necessary to dine a little more upmarket. Two lovely discoveries were Le P’tit Manger (11th) on Rue Richard Lenoir, near Rue Parmentier (métro Voltaire), serving pretty good Liègeois cuisine at quite reasonable prices. Excellent confit de canard and good chips! Another place was the Corsican Restaurant Alivi at 27, Rue du Roi de Sicile in the Marais (4th). Can’t remember my main dish (veal?) but did have a delightful honey cake, a recipe for which I must go a-searching.

Goodbye

Métro Sèvres-Babylone

I’m going to separate the account of cakes and chocolate into a separate post, so stay tuned for that one.

– DM
[This is the third article about travel. Others: London/UK, chocolate in London.]

Some disappointments don’t need naming

Today I visited a place-that-serves-fancy-cakes. It will not be named. To name it might encourage people to visit it. That would put money in coffers which don’t seem to deserve it.

Sometimes you want to read an honest review to help make a decision (visit/not-visit) or to know how to approach an establishment. But occasionally I just don’t want to so much as plant the seed of curiosity.

I was recently tipped off about a new fancy-cake-place in Melbourne. Allegedly popular and probably good. It was the sort of tip you might embrace with exuberant expectation, but which history has taught you to approach circumspectly for fear of desperate disappointment.

It’s très très chic. It’s got the look. These cakes are under glass, not behind glass (no tacky cake-shop cabinets here). You might think yourself transported to a Pierre Hermé or Jean-Paul Hévin boutique, given all the straight lines and shiny surfaces.

My real focus was the food, but my darting eyes almost darted over the sweet things. Honey, they’ve shrunk the cakes! I had found myself in a fancy-cake-boutique. The diminutive items are labelled with small squares of card, printed rather than written. There are no prices.

No prices. That really annoys me. It’s rare to see such an exquisitely arrogant conceit in Australia. I would normally turn on my heel and leave, but I had set my mind to tasting their fancy-cake-boutique wares. The très petits wares were attractive and, given their blushingly modest dimensions, seemed to promise (1) quality, and (2) sticker-shock (except they were, after all, sans stickers).

A little lemon tart (perhaps 7 cm diameter, sloped sides) was $5. A modest hazelnut and chocolate millefeuille (perhaps 8 cm long, 3 cm wide) was $6.50. Not so shocking, to be fair (all is relative: I’m taking into account target clientele, visuals and snobbery).

Lemon tart: the undistinguished pastry was too thick; the lemon curd lacked zing and clarity of aroma, despite tasting of decent ingredients. We’re not in France, Toto.

Hazelnut-chocolate millefeuille: a bit of a mish mash of chocolate, gianduja, hazelnuts in caramel and more. The gianduja was a little too soft and sweet under a layer of chocolate to permit a clean bite. The hazelnuts were soft (How old was the cake? How long had the nuts been sitting in caramel?) and tasted less than fresh. An unfortunate final touch was one bad hazelnut — not the pastry chef’s fault.

You encounter places like this all over the world. Usually with a premium or a decent dose of snob. The concept looks like the genuine article, the presentation is excellent and any lover of the real thing will be beguiled for a moment. If my sampling is representative of the gamut of their wares, the seduction should be short-lived. A pity. There are other (too few) places in Melbourne doing better for both higher and lower prices (visible) and without quite the same pretence.

As the establishment is, I believe, a corporate vehicle rather than a pastry chef’s project, I don’t know if the chef has been forced to create and pitch the wares in a regrettable direction — there’s clearly talent in the kitchen, despite my misgivings about the product and setting. I’m sure the place will be a hit. Dommage.

– DM

London 2007

Borough Market
[This is the second article about travel. Others: chocolate in London, Paris.]

It’s three years since I was last in Britain and I was curious to see what might have changed in the food scene. I’ve tried to keep up, reading the Observer Food Monthly as often as possible (I prefer the paper version rather than just browsing articles online) and paying attention to discussions on eGullet. It wasn’t hard to miss the popularity of gastropubs, the growth of decent chocolatiers, and the burgeoning enthusiasm for organics. (I last lived in Britain at the turn of the millenium and saw the beginnings of the organic boom there.) Below are some observational tidbits.

Organics and markets

Daylesford Organic

A fairly new chain of organic lifestyle stores in the UK (not to be confused with a grower in Australia). The emphasis at Daylesford Organic is primarily on food, but they also stock other items (homewares). I visited the store in Pimlico – a large store over three floors, with very clean, minimalist appearance (polished stone surfaces, pale timber, white white white). The ground floor contained an eatery (absolutely bustling on a Saturday morning) and fresh produce, while upstairs were honeys, oils and other edibilia, plus homewares. It won’t come as a surprise to you that the prices were, well, hhhhigh… which is not to disparage the impressive range of products.

At the back left of the ground floor were refrigerated displays of dairy and other products, including some very pretty gull eggs. A lady was carefully filling a six-egg carton. As she walked past me, I asked her what she would use them for.

‘Oh they make a wonderful omelette,’ she said. ‘The flavour is lovely. Though probably not enough to justify the expense.’

I wandered over to the cabinet and finally saw the price tag. GBP 3.50 (A$8.75) per egg.

Pimlico Road Farmers’ Market

Opposite Daylesford Organic is an island of concrete and trees. This is Orange Square, the site for the weekly Saturday farmers market. A modest market, with approximately 20 stalls. (The London Farmers’ Markets website lists 42 vendors, but this is a far cry from the number there on my visit.) Juice is a popular item. Fresh, variety-specific apple and pear juices. Some meat and cheese stalls, bread, flowers and veg. The produce was interesting and generally of good quality, but not all stall-holders were able to answer (fairly basic) questions about their produce.

Markets require planning and control, so there are often quotas on how many competing stalls there can be. The rather perverse result is that some stall-holders sell ‘unauthorised’ wares under the counter.

Marylebone Farmers’ Market

This one is a Sunday market. Definitely larger than Pimlico’s, there are about 40 stalls. Produce variety is slightly greater, though I saw more ready-to-eat food here than at Pimlico. Some overlap in vendors between the two markets, which probably shouldn’t be surprising.
Marylebone Farmers
The greatest happiness came with the discovery of a stall selling unpasteurised milk. Descriptions of fresh (raw) milk often talk about the warmth and creaminess of the milk. Unfortunately, I find warm milk quite vile, so the thought of warm, thick, tasty milk has never been a marketing success in my books. Thank goodness the Grove Farm Hollesley Bay Dairy were offering tastings, chilled. The milk was, well, not at all vile. Not special either. Just nice, cold milk with more cream. We bought a bottle.
Real milk
Look at the cream
Close by, on Moxon Street, is the London butcher and charcuterer The Ginger Pig, renowned for raising their own livestock, thus controlling the entire foodchain for most of the products they sell. They also have a refreshingly blunt philosophy about this process:

We need to move on from our obsession with the word ‘organic’, which is now less about product than about lifestyle. From planting the seed to harvesting the crop, from breeding the animal to feeding it and slaughtering, we oversee the whole process. We’re not selling a lifestyle. We’re selling food. (Read more)

A few doors up from The Ginger Pig is La Fromagerie, a grocer and café with an impressive cheese room. The website has numerous pictures that give a good feel for the place, and a great cheese search engine. Sensibly, the number of people permitted into the cheese room was limited. The café space was bustling and the food smelt good. Although the appearance of La Fromagerie and Daylesford Organic are very different (earthy, rustic modern vs stark modern), I’d say the clientele is fairly similar.
La Fromagerie London

Borough Market

I’ve heard far too many people rave about Borough Market. It seems to be a writer’s duty to mention it with enthusiasm (if the number of mentions in articles, interviews and live talks is anything to go by). While living in London about six years ago (as the market’s popularity was on the rise, thanks in no small part to Jamie Oliver), I went to Borough Market twice. It was not impressive for someone used to Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market.

I had resolved to give the place a third chance. So many years had passed and people were still enthusing. Maybe something had changed. I went.
Borough Market views
Six years ago I found Borough Market to have a disproportionate number of takeaway food stalls and not enough produce for real people. Sure, you could buy Austrian jams for wildly inflated prices (perhaps three times the retail price in Austria) and organic chocolate truffles for a cool GBP 100 (A$250) per kg (if memory serves me right), but this wasn’t a market for the everyman/woman.
Borough Market French cheesemonger
I was so happy to see a number of well-stocked cheesemongers with knowledgeable, engaging staff offering liberal tastings. The same could be said for some of the charcuterers. The initial impression was of a more accessible, interesting market than previously. However, it still lacks the feeling of lively competition and practical purpose that makes real everyday markets atmospheric. There are relatively few vegetable stalls or butchers (quite a lot of cryovac produce too). (If my impression is wrong, please correct me.) There are quite a few boutique producers but many show a too-strong tendency to head down the cute-expensive path. At least I found some absolutely delicious fudge from Burnt Sugar — if you have the chance, try their ginger or sea salt varieties!
Burnt Sugar fudge
You still get the feeling at this market that cooked food dominates. There is a real thronging of people to buy lunch or snacks, and searching the internet reveals more comments about ready-to-eat food than produce at Borough Market. The atmosphere at this market is good and on a warm day is vibrant. But despite the pleasant experience with the cheesemongers (and I’m sure there are other gems in the market), I don’t feel it’s a place for people who love food and cooking without trendy pretence – it seems very much a reflection of food-as-lifestyle.
Borough Market crowd

Supermarkets

British supermarkets differ greatly from Australian ones. Ready-meals take up whole refrigerator aisles. Environmentally suspect packaged portions dominate in lines that Australians would expect to find loose at the deli counter. Conversely, the quality of unpackaged meat at the butcher’s counter is miles ahead of that in Australia. Dairy sections have an excellent range of cheeses. The quality of in-house bakery lines is generally better too, and there is more diversity and quality in the cakes and patisserie lines sold. (Let’s face it, in-house bakery/patisserie lines in Australian supermarkets are mostly aimed about one millimetre above garbage.) British supermarkets have a greater range of baking ingredients and, increasingly, the quality of fruit and veg should shame the Australian giants, Coles and Woolworths/Safeway (and the price difference between the two countries for fresh produce is much, much smaller than it was a decade ago). Before you think I’m on a love-in with Sainsbury and Tesco, I assure you that the presence of more basic multicuisine ingredients (from tofu to kaffir lime leaves) in Australian supermarkets and the generally more friendly and efficient service (yes, even if your Safeway only has seemingly-vapid sixteen-year-olds on the tills) is enough for me to embrace Coles and Safeway.
Sainsbury baguette and flower holder
An interesting development at Sainsbury and M&S (and, presumably, Tesco and Waitrose) was the greatly increased detail in labelling. The bag for the potatoes showed the variety, which farmer/producer grew them and where. The same was the case for the bacon I bought. This is impressive, catering to the burgeoning demand for information on provenance. In Australia this is still primarily a point of discussion about meat, if at all. Imagine asking your supermarket assistant where the bacon was from! Australians aren’t yet (hopefully never) as scared of food as the British seem to be – in Britain there is more reason, given the BSE and foot-and-mouth scares, the presence of salmonella in poultry, a very strong animal rights lobby, and (broadly) a loss of understanding of food during the twentieth century. If enthusiasm for this kind of labelling were to rise in Australia, it would require a radical change in the food industry, challenging large, faceless producers and suppliers and introducing a public accountability that the supermarkets and many others would be distinctly uncomfortable with.
Detailed food labels 1
Detailed food labels 2
Detailed food labels 3

Dodgy food

Of course, you can’t expect everything on the British food scene to change overnight (or in a decade, say). There are still patisseries in Soho serving outrageously priced little choux pastries filled with chocolate cream. The cream is that cheap-bastard favourite: crème pâtissière with lots of cornflour and little (if any) egg. GBP 4.00 (A$10.00). The establishment (like so many others everywhere) is in most of the guidebooks and presumably survives on past glory and the gullibility of guidebook readers (I’m sure we’ve all fallen for these places many a time).

And on a starkly different wavelength, Harrods is now an outlet for Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
Krispy Kreme at Harrods

Goodbye

The Tube
I came over all warm and fuzzy as the beautifully calming Voice on The Tube announced ‘This … is Waterloo.’ She’s new since last I was there. Much nicer than the ‘Pleasemindthegapbetweenthetrainandtheplatform’ man. My Eurostar train awaited.

– DM
[This is the second article about travel. Others: chocolate in London, Paris.]