So just as the declaration, “Nah, I’m going take it easy, no big night for me!” almost surely winds up with one locked in a nightclub toilet with four of one’s closest friends at 3am (or so I’m told), I suspect that my announcement that there won’t be much blogging over the next few days due to work and travel commitments should only be taken as a harbinger of some seriously manic David Foster Wallace-style epic posting to come.

But just in case, a few things to whet your appetite from the world of food …

• For restaurant-loving Sydneysiders, the frankly bizarre news that the economy is (allegedly) going great guns must stand in contrast to today’s report that Justin North’s various Westfield ventures have gone into administration. Sadly, I’m not surprised: I love the little providore shop that he’s opened on the fifth floor of the CBD Westfield, but I think it was something of an own-goal closing Becasse and trying a number of different concepts including Charlie & Co and Quarter 21 out in the same, essentially food-court, space. New York’s Time-Warner Center it ain’t.
• Lovers of freedom and foie gras, meanwhile, have their own cause to mourn as California’s ban on the delicacy creeps ever closer to entering into force. The peace-love-and-mung-bean set have been out in force on this one, threatening all forms of death and mayhem on those who dare to defy their peculiar prohibition. I’d spend more time ruminating about the petty, dictatorial mindset of those who would tell other people what to eat or drink but I am too busy mourning the fact that I will now likely never taste Thomas Keller’s torchon de foie gras at French Laundry.
• Finally, it’s not all bad news: in Paris, food truck culture is taking off, if slowly, accoring to the New York Times. As a great fan of Michael Steinberger’s Au Revoir to All That, I think this is just the thing to inject a bit more life into French food culture, which rested on its laurels for too long. I’m not being facetious when I suspect that the introduction of tacos-on-wheels will have positive ramifications that percolate far up the Paris food chain.

Now then, off to Canberra, en famille!