Prick With A Fork

The Prick’s latest column in The Australian is up … the theme? Proper restaurants versus homogenised fast-casual crap that will be the death of us all. The conclusion?

But if the unlevel playing field is driving supply one way, there’s no reason the demand side cannot send some counter­signals to even things up. Hell, elevate it to a social media campaign and give it its own hashtag (#i’lldinewithyou, perhaps?). More effectively, we could all let our dollars do the walking and patronise, if even initially just for a month, the independent and the small making a go of it. To horrify the spirit of Karl Marx by paraphrasing him in this bourgeois campaign, perhaps the slogan can be Diners of Australia, unite! You have nothing to lose but your (restaurant) chains!

Of course  you should read the whole thing. Or better yet, go buy the damn paper!

Been a long time between drinks, but the Prick has found a new home at the national daily, The Australian. First up: What happens when a Prick is forced to maintain a modicum of health and domestic accord and has to go on a “body transformation” diet. You won’t believe what happens next!

In today’s Daily Telegraph, I have some choice words about Mike Baird and Sydney’s lockout laws — and why it is about more than just the right to party into the wee small hours.

FOR the past week Sydney has debated a question that has been burbling under the surface for months if not years: Namely, have officials from the Lord Mayor all the way up to the Premier gone too far in ­protecting us from a good time, all in the name of public safety?

It’s an important discussion. Somehow the line has become widely accepted that there is something in the air in the Sydney Basin that makes people raving, violent two-pot screamers in need of a security regime that in comparison makes boarding an El Al flight with a Yemeni passport seem pleasant.

The fact we are even having this discussion really should raise questions beyond what time bars should close.

Given that the current regime of lockouts — along with rules on what time you are no longer trusted with an actual grown-up glass and need a plastic sippy cup, and restrictions on buying a bottle of wine after 10pm — started under Barry O’Farrell and have been strengthened under Mike Baird, it is fair to ask just how “liberal” is the present NSW Liberal-National government.

Certainly the Baird government is keen to point to its record of fiscal management and is proud of fixing the state’s books, as well as holding on to that shiny AAA ­credit rating.

But most Liberal voters, it can safely be assumed, vote on more than just the state’s pocketbook.

The whole thing is here.

Also, make sure to have your say and put in a submission on the lockout review.

When Noma first announced its “pop-up” in Sydney’s new Barangaroo precinct – a vulgar monstrosity whose fatal flaw, mark my words, will ultimately be an isolation from the city no amount of Packer-financed lockout laws will cure – we were, to be sure, excited. To suggest that when reservations became available we Pricks were hitting the refresh buttons like monkeys in a cocaine addiction lab experiment would be an exaggeration, but only just. Anyway, last night was the night, and to be frank I’m still trying to figure out what I think of the whole thing.

Rene Redzepi came to town with his cast of thousands promising to do something completely different from what he does in Copenhagen, and entirely Australian – thus a heavy focus on native ingredients that we dopey locals “ignore” as well as a series of what are not referred to explicitly (but pretty clearly are) references, call-outs and to use that over-abused word “takes” on Australiana-type food. And in many of the dozen or so dishes that come out of the gleaming, lottery-dreams kitchen (through one which passes to go to the toot, and whose line chefs are more than happy to oblige an exuberant, slightly drunken high-five from across the pass) this works really, really well.

To give some examples: A “porridge” of wattleseeds wrapped in saltbush with a glorious infused oil (seaweed) underneath is a very sly reinterpretation of the Greek dolmade which Anglo-Australian culture has taken as its own. A series of bivalves gently cooked and presented on rocks covered with skins of a gel made from chicken stock and, amazingly, crocodile fat, was glorious, a classic Aussie seafood platter from another planet, next-level shit as the kids say. (Where does one get crocodile fat, anyway?) And for once the soupy “natural” wine that accompanied it really worked.

Marron and magpie goose (is it a magpie? is it a goose? make up your mind, Creator of the Universe!) wrapped in milk skins was stunning, but we realized eating the things with our hands that we were also for a moment having that other Australian multi-culti staple dinner, taco night. An abalone “schnitzel” (schnitty!) divided the table: I can’t abide the stuff since a bad experience in Shanghai, and for my money the whole plate was overtooled, an excuse to artsy-up low tide on a plate. On the other hand, while we couldn’t find the reference point for a simple plate of sea urchin with semi-dehydrated tomatoes, tomato water and pepper berries, this was for me the dish of the night, paroxysmically good in a “sir, you’re making a scene” sort of way. A “baytime” made of peanut milk and “freekah” (hoo-kay) finished the meal, yummy but perhaps too clever by half and frankly didn’t Colin Fassnidge come up with this pun years ago? An earlier pre-dessert (“marinated fresh fruit”, as it is described on the menu) comes sprinkled with honest-to-God ants, a sly reference both to Danish uber-haute cuisine weirdness and every Australian homeowner’s horror of termites.

All in all, clever, creative, challenging and great, great fun, made the more so by the mostly Danish and uniformly excellent staff. But I worry that Redzepi has artificially limited himself with his self-imposed brief to the local, native, and Australian. There is a reason why a lot of native ingredients don’t show up on Australian dinner plates: they may look pretty but they are in fact loud and boorish, like they came from the Lara Bingle aisle of the supermarket. A finger lime G&T may be fun but you can keep your bunya nut, thanks, though we had great fun watching other diners freak out at their first bite of an early plate of “wild seasonal berries flavoured with gubine.” Don’t ask me what gubine is, either, but it tasted like a big mouthful of country acreage on a soggy day and the reactions of some of the prosperous “ribeye for me, tuna steak for the lady” types made for great mirth.

In the same vein, though, carting a hundred staffers around the world and air-freighting crocodile fat from the NT doesn’t scream “locavore”, really, and while one doesn’t expect a plate of moss grown on the lee side of a reindeer turd in Australia we would have appreciated a Danish treat. And when one is spending what is really a morally undefensible amount of money on a meal it is fair to invoke Clara Peller’s damning question, to wit, “Where’s the beef?”: We would have loved to see what Redzepi could do with either a piece of ‘roo or some of our world’s-best beef, paired with a sexy glass of red. As it stands the closest we got was a bit of liquefied Skippy (“kangaroo juice”, as it was described to us, raising many many more questions than it answered) gently embracing a lovely, simple dish of snow crab that could have been, like so many dishes, elevated by a hint more generous seasoning but which one of our table, cracking the code for the evening, identified with Proustian delight as a childhood fish finger sandwich.

So the verdict? A more cynical wag than myself might also be tempted to reference David Foster Wallace’s line about “a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again”, but that would be unfair. It was a helluva good time, the service is among the best and most genuine I’ve ever encountered in Australia (they’ve imported the entire waitstaff from Copenhagen and added a few local ring-ins) and many of the dishes really sang. I just wonder if this is the best way to showcase the obvious talent of Redzepi’s team, and I think we all left wishing there was a bit more “there” there.

Pictures follow.

Ants!

“Baytime” “Don’t you mean ‘Gaytime’?” “Hush, boy, you want to get sued?”

Snow crab, Skippy juice.

Wattle seed dolmades.

Sir, you’re making a scene.

Scallop pie.

What do you mean Simon Johnson doesn’t sell crocodile fat?

Obscenely good.

Yes, yes, yes we all know there is a housing crisis in Sydney, that no one will ever buy a house again, and that the next three generations are destined to spend their lives spack-filling holes every couple of years because one night they got drunk and threw caution to the wind and decided to hang that damned framed reproduction Tattinger print up on the wall of their rented terrace.

But if you think the property market is tough, try booking into any Sydney restaurant worth its hand-harvested truffled black sea salt on a Saturday night. Forget getting Australians into quarter-acre blocks, the Reserve Bank would have a good case to tighten up the money supply just to free up a few second-seating tables.

Take last weekend, when we suddenly found ourselves sans the Little Pricks, with the exception of Nick With a Fork, now quite the young teen and very enthusiastic for an “adult” evening out with all the semi-adult conversation we could muster. Dimmi was hopeless and phone call after phone call left us luckless both at regular favourites and want-to-tries. We may as well have rocked up to an inner-west house auction that morning with a pre-approved mortgage in the amount of exactly what the agent said the property “should go for”. Mercifully a helpful suggestion to try our luck One Penny Red in Summer Hill wound up securing us, barely, an 8:30 booking.

Any port in a storm, right?

Set up in a renovated Queen Anne post office building, a busy night at One Penny Red (it’s named after a stamp, apparently) feels like a party at the house of a prosperous mate who managed not to run out of gas half-way through his renovation. The joint is packed and buzzing with casually but well-turned out 30 and 40-something professionals who once upon a time would have been described as being in fair round belly with good capon lin’d – except this crowd has personal trainers to keep the capon from sticking. Out of an Uber and into an entry hall full of people waiting for their tables, chatting away over G&Ts and sparklings and smartly kept from obstreperousness by passing plates of salt cod croquettes brought (yum).

All a bit Woollahra of the inner-west, if you catch my drift. And that’s not a bad thing, either.

Once seated we are tempted by but ultimately pass on the “trust the chef” option: We love the “just feed me” thing that so many restaurants are doing these days, on a first visit we’d rather wander the back streets and make our own discoveries rather than take the tour bus that will take us all to the same hot spots.

Massive grilled king prawns are nice but don’t hold a candle to a zingy snapper crudo with hints of cucumber, lime and chili. A rabbit, pork and veal terrine knocks it out of the park (“Dad, you think we could make something like this at home?” asks Nick; in my enthusiasm I promise a weekend project involving a pig’s head). The plate, or plank to be more accurate, travels with a gang of crunchy little pickled carrots and radishes and other bits and bobs. Double the portion – or don’t share it with two companions – and add a glass of wine and you’d have a handy weeknight supper.

(While we’re on the subject of wines, there’s a helluva little list going with interesting and esoteric offerings from around the world as well as Australia. We grab a hard-to-find Premier Cru Clos des Loyeres at a reasonably sane mark-up for something of which there are only 130 cases in the world extant; our waiter in a moment of enthusiasm accidentally tops up our neighbour’s glass of shiraz with the stuff bottle but makes good with a couple of generous pours of Riesling to wash down our starter – all is forgiven.)

Mains – or “larger plates” as they are called, in keeping with current fashion – follow in their turn. A spatchcock carved up all cheffily and arranged on a parsnip puree is raised to some new height by Brussels sprouts done in duck fat which are very much worth fork-fencing over.

Duck two ways goes above and beyond the height of mid-1990s sophistication suggested by the name, even if it is let down by a breast that is just a bit too under for even our comfort, while a 650g ribeye is simple perfection. The “crispy spiced salt potatoes”, meanwhile, are the best damn spud in town this side of the Prick’s pommes puree, crunchy and fluffy Atkins-slayers

We are hit by a pang of menu envy as another group rears back in awe: their 2.5kg glazed beef shin rocks up, looking like the world’s biggest lamb shank with a Flintstone’s bone poking out the top, to many ooh’s and aah’s.

That’s the thing about OPR: the menu at first glance doesn’t sound massively adventurous, reading like the sort of stuff any reasonably serious amateur could do with a free afternoon on his hands. But it’s all done so well you can see they’re on a winner because it’s special enough to make it a night out, but approachable enough to make it a semi-regular destination.

Dessert? Banana fritters, lovely, apparently their signature, but  the house made ice creams – particularly the malt number – are the real winners winners, even for those of us without much of a sweet tooth. A 15-year-old Madeira on the table doesn’t hurt either.

We’ll be back. It’s a Prick’s birthday soon; one of those beef shins would look great with a birthday candle sticking out the marrow.

That’d be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Anyway, been a long time between drinks around here but in the interests of keeping this going, I posted this on my personal Facebook and people seemed to like it so thought I’d share with anyone hanging around this place. The idea was a nice Saturday roast using lamb shoulder – something I’ve not cooked with before, funnily enough – after picking up a couple down at Vic’s at Pyrmont. What follows turned out pretty well, though I wish I’d had some lamb stock handy to make a bit of a winey jus to class things up a bit.

With that I give you … Lamb Shoulder Experiment.

1. Get around five or six good-sized waxy potatoes (kestrel, desiree, whatever’s handy), peel and slice reasonably thinly (a mandolin is perfect for this) into a large bowl. Do the same with three or four yellow onions. Toss this together with just some salt and pepper and as much fresh thyme as you can be bothered destemming, and shingle this into the bottom of a big roasting pan. This will be the ba…sis for your pommes boulangere.

Hands up everyone here who found a two-foot-tall serious chef’s cookbook under the tree this past Christmas, all filled photos that could hang in MONA and printed on paper as lush as Dean Martin laughing at Frank Sinatra punching somebody?

Wow, all three of you.

Now, just about a month on from the Nativity, how many of you have actually taken the thing into the kitchen?

Yeah, the Prick’s got a big stack on the coffee table too. You know, for inspiration.

But here’s the thing with these gorgeous, expensive cookbooks: If they aren’t cooked from, what are they for?

A cynic would argue these works are nothing more than a marketing ploy where the customer has to pay for the advertising: Buy the cookbook, look at the pictures, come in for a meal, or at least increase the “buzz” around the name. The Prick is no economist but restaurants are notoriously tight-margined and a best-seller surely helps pays the bills or at least drive foot traffic for a lot of chefs in the same way celebrity endorsements are where the gravy is for, say, athletes.

But stepping back from the business side of things these illuminated manuscripts are – or should be – at heart about getting a cook from A to B to finished dish, even if said cook does not have an army of commis chefs tending stocks and chopping onions from first light. This may not be every day food. But if you care about eating and see it as more than just a way of fuelling up, it’s not a bad idea to have a go at this high calibre cooking from time to time (even if one winds up using a few cheats and shortcuts to make up for the aforementioned lack of kitchen hands).

Thus on a recent Sunday afternoon the Prick decided to give recipes from a couple of signature books a go. One from a new acquisition, the Sepia cookbook (thanks Mrs Prick!), which promises that the reader might be able to recreate at least some of the delights of Martin Benn’s much-hatted, much feted Sydney restaurant, the other from Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure, which was the sous-vide book to end all sous-vide books before we all had benchtop immersion circulators and cabinets full of molecular powders.

First up: Chef Benn’s “Spanner crab and buckwheat risotto with grain mustard and tarragon butter, shellfish essence.”

Despite the name this is a simpler dish than it sounds and doesn’t require esoterica like carbonised bamboo powder (found in the carbonised bamboo powder aisle of your local supermarket) or Japanese binchotan charcoal. Though there were a couple of cheats: For one thing, as this was being made for two rather than eight, there was little chance that we were going to make a litre or so of shellfish stock, and instead substituted a really tasty “sustainable” crab stock instead.

It should also be noted that the picked fresh spanner crab meat was deleted in favour of langoustines: There were some gorgeous ones in the markets that morning, and as the Prick generally enjoys his day job he did not need to spend his Sunday denuding crustacea to make Monday’s ordeals seem more pleasant.

Everything else, from the tomato powder (you don’t need a dehydrator, just an oven you can sit on about 70 degrees for the day) to the obscenely great “grain mustard and tarragon butter” (really, really whip the butter, the longer the better, and use what’s leftover on grilled fish and loved ones for the remainder of the week) was done as per Chef’s orders. This is what we were aiming for:

The target, as set by Chef Martin Benn

The results were … well, really bloody amazing if a Prick does say so himself … at least taste-wise.

The presentation however – and entirely through the Prick’s own maxima culpa – wound up being nothing short of disastrous. In the enthusiasm of the moment, the laws of thermodynamics were forgotten and a quenelle of room-temperature compound butter perched artfully on a tight mound of steaming-hot buckwheat melted and fell away like the French army in 1941.

But if the cooking cops were strictly enforcing the rules of heat transfer in the Stately Prick Manor test kitchens, they were turning a blind eye to the statute books on chemistry. Despite fiercely precise measurements of all ingredients involved, right down to the exactly four damn grams of lecithin, there was no way a stable foam was forming, and even to call what resulted a sauce would be considered charitable.

And the Prick didn’t help matters either, perching a poor langoustine’s head on top of the whole affair as garnish. In hindsight, there are too many other things in this world that are fecklessly parlous in a late-‘70s sort of way that we should be doubly wary of the gastro-decorative traps of the era. Oh, and the tomato powder was made but forgotten in the heat of battle, though a lovely gazpacho which got us through the week was a happy by-product.

Thus what resulted was speaking visually a mess – “yesterday’s sandcastle at today’s low tide” would be a polite, artsy name for the results:

Whoops.

Still, with the lights dimmed (and a 2009 Grace Kayagatake from Japan in the glass), all was not lost. The buckwheat was a revelation and played brightly against the dark, earthy shellfish stock which infused and which barely poached the langoustine tails. The brackish wouldn’t-foam still remained a bracing, salty kiss. And that butter … you get the picture. And in fact with some re-tooling, and better luck with the lecithin, this could evolve into, to use a horrifying phrase, the Prick’s “take” on a Sepia classic.

Thomas Keller’s masterwork Under Pressure also got an airing on the day. A far simpler dish – essentially a somewhat deconstructed take on an octopus, chorizo and potato salad (called-for green almonds were not to be had and thus deleted) with a bright salsa verde with all the herbs in the garden, the results were far happier, visually-speaking:

Eight tentacles up for octopus!

The key to this dish is the octopus, which gets five hours in the water bath at 77C (or 170F in the old money) with an herb sachet, as well as using a good chorizo. Oh, and a bright salsa verde with a big handful of basil and smaller doses of fresh tarragon, cilantro and parsley, al quickly blanched and shocked, and whizzed with olive oil, toasted ground cumin and coriander seeds, and finished with a squeeze of lemon and minced capers. And kipfler potatoes, just boiled and then peeled and cut into discs.

Sydneysiders and those with a good fish market nearby can get sashimi-grade tentacles already trimmed and ready to go, saving time if not money and making this a relatively easy dish that can be fancied up on a plate or tossed together in a salad, as indeed were the leftovers which were happily consumed desk-side by Mrs Prick the following day to the furrowed brows of jealous co-workers.

Revolving restaurants, friends. What does the phrase mean to you?

The horror show slop served to foreign tourists and hopeless suitors atop that Sydney Tower space needle building downtown?

The running gag about Hank’s Look-Around café in The Larry Sanders Show?

Or do you think about food that, if you’re lucky, exists one step in quality above the served at an American ex-urban steam table dinner theatre? You know, the sort of place where diners gum at their flaccid cauliflower and “mixed vegetables” while the Hartford Community Players hack out Death of a Salesman and the local paper’s food columnist quietly mutters “Eureka!” as he reaches for his pad to note his upcoming review’s opening zinger, “This chicken Kiev is liked, but it is not well-liked”?

It has been a while since we’ve met in this space: The Prick has been away a bit, seen a few things, refocused a few priorities, and of course is as open-minded as always, if not more so. And thus while it is still the firm belief of this house that anything west of the Summer Hill Wine Shop is pretty much all just sea monsters on a map, the Prick can also report that contrary to previous opinion – wait for it – revolving restaurants can also be good, damned good.

Or at least one can be. Take O Bar & Dining, atop the Australia Square building in what the Sydney Morning Herald robotically calls “the top end of town”. The structure was built in 1967, which is all you need to know about why they decided to crown it with fine diner on bearings. And while it has had its ups and downs for the past several years the space has been the domain of English chef Michael Moore. Moore still owns it, but he recently made the move of installing fellow Englishman Darren Templeman to run the kitchen as executive chef.

Templeman is one of Sydney’s great yet until now unfairly under-recognised talents. Those in the know will have visited his Atelier Restaurant when it still stood in Glebe or attended one of his private dinners over the past year where he would do things like follow a dirtily sexy, off-to-confession sea urchin chawanmushi with a proper canard a la presse, done according to the ancient rite, and just leave everyone’s heads and taste buds spinning for days. His is a great “High Anglican” cooking of the sort you find in Michelin restaurants in London and around the world, French-influenced but not dominated, and somehow it’s all changed planes in Kyoto on the way to Oz.

Don’t come the raw trout with me! Or, actually, do.

Now Templeman is running a much bigger show as the Executive Chef at O Bar and Dining. He’s making a damn fine fist of it too, if the buzz that hits diners even before they step off the lift is any judge. On a school night just before Christmas, the joint was positively jumping, with private parties galore and a bar scene of good looking youngsters that would have made Justin Hemmes scratching his head in wonderment: You mean not every establishment in Sydney needs a ‘roided-up Tongan at the door to show people who’s boss?

But this is still a serious dining restaurant with table cloths (remember those?) and its panorama – it takes about 90 minutes to get around; no, you can’t speed it up or slow it down or otherwise work the controls, we already asked – means that this will still be something of an “occasion” place for a lot of diners.

Happily, the food lives up to the ever-changing view, in turns bright, punchy, and surprising in an oh-I-never-noticed-that-was-there-before sort of way. A veneer of virtuousness also sits above the whole thing. Moore has a “healthy eating philosophy” which informs but does not annoy the menu and even throws up a few twists that make one think that if adopted elsewhere in one’s life, the coroner might not need to write “Cause of Death: Bearnaise” on the final paperwork.

Thus a little jar of potted shrimp with pickles opens the batting nicely; washed down with Hendricks and cucumber it is both a stimulant for the palate and a cleanser of the day just past. A couple of different raw fish platters are next, each with different dressings but a cobia with finger limes, coriander, truss tomatoes and avocado oil wins the day, rolling the palate through a variety of sweet, sharp and savoury sensations all in one go.

Hemingway could have gotten twenty pages out of the psychic arm wrestle we had with the menu over mains (incidentally the steaks are some of the nicest meat at some of the relatively most reasonable prices you’ll find in town at this sort of place). Just as one of us decided we wanted fish the other would want meat and, well, we weren’t having two different bottles of wine and going to work the next day, and so it went, but finally amity was restored with the decision to go not different, but same-same.

Canard a trois…

We were glad we did, both of us ordering the duck three ways (pink breast, confit leg, and a glorious peppery little duck sausage made out the back filled with more spare parts than a botched IKEA assembly job). It took us back to the old days at Atelier. Figs that had just been kissed by the plancha brought a hint of smoke to the dish and an “almond tahina” (there’s that sensible eating thing again) was as creamy as any classical puree and despite the description did not taste as if it should have been served in the rectory after the 10am interfaith guitar mass.

There was no doubt we would finish on the soufflé, and it did not disappoint – even if we did have to dive to another tables to get spoons to eat the things with – washed down with a special “sour” from the bar. O Bar and Dining, like its view, is changing, slowly but perceptibly, and my God it is hard to avoid a “great heights” metaphor here. Suffice it so say that the Prick would never endorse going to a “view” restaurant in any other town, but here in Sydney, we’re special, right?

Oh, and apparently they’re rebooting the bar menu as well, so one can call in for drinks and nibbles as well as sitting down for the whole box-and-dice.  Either way have fun, and tell ‘em the Prick sent ya.

Today in the Telegraph, the tale of how Maggie the Iron Terrier was lost and found … by Twitter.

Pictures of food. Pictures of our dinners. Pictures of stuff we cooked. Are we still doing that?

Well, yeah, we are. Or at least this Prick is, because this was pretty damn good:

What you’re looking at is a plate of venison loin, done for about 45 minutes at 53.5 degrees and seared, with baby beetroot, watercress, pickled cabbage and the greatest where-have-you-been-all-my-life condiment we’ve encountered in a while, smoked mayonnaise.

The recipe comes from Colin Fassnidge’s Four Kitchens cookbook, which has become something of a Stately Prick Manor favourite of late. It’s not one of those manifesto cookbooks that promises the road to enlightenment, nor is it a big glossy Christmas coffee table number never meant to be cooked from. Recipes are short and concise, the food isn’t fiddly in an assemble-with-tweezers kinda way, and it assumes the reader is a reasonably competent home cook who knows what he is doing and is excited by the prospect of making vats of porky “hock stock” to use in various dishes or smoking a sandwich spread and incorporating it into what becomes a somewhat fancy-pants dish. (Especially when paired with an old bottle of Tannat that had spent years under the stairs just waiting for his chance to come out and play and enliven a Monday night.)

So take the Prick’s advice and buy this book. Use it for ideas and techniques as much as the recipes. The ham-and-cheese croquettes on p. 19 sound simple as hell but are alone worth the price of admission, so ridiculously good that afterwards you’ll try really hard to stay up and talk about how good they were but just wind up rolling over for a snooze like you always do.