Prick With A Fork

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Supermenler!

When Mrs Prick and I head out for some foodie-type event, tasting, degustation, what have you, the deal is always that if any offal shows up, I eat it. I can deal; she can’t stand the stuff. But as we got ready to head out the door one recent evening, a more disturbing codicil was added to the rulebook:

“Babe, you’re gonna have to eat my balls.”

Now hold on a second, I said: Just because we’re heading to Balmain, home to all things trendy and transgressive, and by the way the Prick is open-minded as the next fellow, well, there are limits both of physiognomy and taste at play here.

“No, I mean, look at this menu: Lamb’s testicles. I’m not going near them. If the chef serves them up, you’re eating mine.”

And thus it was with a sense of both trepidation and relief that we attended a semi-regular get-together of our little corner of the fooderati world, organised by the one and only Vanity Fare at Mezebar, Somer Sivrioglu’s casual Turkish diner downstairs from his more formal Efendy. Chefs including Darren Templeman from the much-loved Atelier were along for the ride as were the likes of Adam Moore and the brains behind Studio Neon. Fellow web-heads were in abundance as well including our mates from Local Sprouts and The Food Dept.

Yeni Raki: The original, and still the best.

But enough name-dropping, what of the food? (And for the record, we Pricks were paying our own way, as was everybody else: This was no blogger’s freebie organised by a junior PR girlie to tick the social media box on a client agreement and “generate buzz”.)

Like many other restaurants these days, Mezebar/Efendy banks on a double-barrelled approach. Downstairs things are less formal, more lounge-like, cozy with a fantastic collection of Turkish movie posters. Upstairs it’s a bit more schmick. The model makes sense, even if it is risky (though what isn’t in Sydney’s current restaurant economy?). Claude’s in Woollahra seems to be making a go of this sort of set-up; Matt Kemp’s attempt to similarly reinvent Balzac in Randwick, one of the Pricks’ favourite restaurants once upon a time, as the Montpelier Public House didn’t work out so well.

Sivrioglu’s cooking is familiar enough to be recognisable to Australians who understand that Turkish food is more than a late-night doner, but turned up and twisted enough to be sophisticated and surprising as well. Flavours and spicing are rich but judicious and never over the top; big but well-rounded flavours survived the jar of addictively hot pickled chilies we picked at as palate-cleansers between courses.

Little discs of bread served with dishes olive oil opened the batting – thankfully, neither Australia nor Turkey ever joined the EU, keeping things legal in this department – and what looked like pools of balsamic vinegar revealed pomegranate instead. Humus, again, lovely. Then some sausages with a capsicum dip: now we’re talking. A dish of liver – often controversial, and generally not the Prick’s first choice – was redolent of sumac and onions, crisp and deep and a little smoky. For this site’s money, a good contender for dish of the night. Mrs Prick doesn’t know what she missed.

And then … the lamb’s testicles. And what else could I do but what Mrs Prick asked?

May contain nuts.

Now  the trick to this sort of thing is to not think too hard about it. Just as Peter Pan told his charges that the moment they doubted their ability to fly they would crash, the moment you doubt your ability to choke down this sort of thing, well, you choke. Fortunately, I held it together long enough to take my medicine and follow it a heady draught of raki, ready to move on to richer and more savoury – in every sense of the word – dishes. Yes, some people love this sort of thing. And some people don’t feel they have to eat things on a dare, to be polite, or to show up those more demure. I am neither of these sorts of people, as it turns out.

Borek – fried filled parcels of dough – came next, served up almost like little Turkish sliders. An eggplant dolma in tomato sauce brought back memories of student dinners in Istanbul after days spent trekking through what seemed like every mosque and museum in what used to be Christendom. A hot pot of raki-infused salmon got big ticks all around. Veal koftes were stunning, an order of magnitude past the usual dried out rissoles a la Turko one usually gets, utterly tender and sweet and could have easily survived without their sauce. To finish? Baklava and Turkish coffee, of course, the latter declined because sometimes a Prick just wants to get some sleep.

Slammin’ salmon

Besides being a helluva lot of fun, the whole evening was an excellent reminder that Turkish cuisine is far more sophisticated than most Australians credit. Without attributing too much to the power of gastronomy, this sort of cooking can even be an invitation to re-think our thoughts on Turkey, which Australians too often think of either through the boozy, sentimental prism of Gallipoli or the boozy, often violent, late-night kebab: A Eugene O’Neill play by way of the Levant. Mezebar shows there’s a lot more to it than that and stands as an invitation to discover for those who have not yet had the pleasure.  Check it out. And tell ‘em the Prick sent ya.

Back in the days before Stately Prick Manor there was Shitty Prick High-Rise and home was a crummy corner unit of glass, plasterboard, and uncleanable carpet half-way up a very dodgy development with occasionally working lifts  deep in the heart of Bondi Junction. Upstairs lived a DJ who’d never heard of headphones; the bedroom looked down over a service alley shared with a club whose empties would be poured out for recycling every night around 3. Good times.

There were consolations. Around the block was a Japanese joint, Ramen Kan, which served up all sorts of goodies and noodles and bento boxes and the like: cheap, cheerful, and excellent restorative dining for one. Five years later the place is still there, and with a few free Saturday afternoon hours to kill up the Jungo – the balance spent at the new Williams-Sonoma – it was time for a return visit.

But would it still be as good?

Interesting question. Without a doubt, what was served up was  a nice bowl of soup. Good, but not great, and certainly not as fantastic as remembered. The Prick’s tan tan ramen was spicy, in fact mostly heat, pleasantly so. But the broth wasn’t as silky and unctuous as it should have been, and the noodles were a bit too obviously out of the packet for the Prick’s liking. Nor was there a helluva lot of meat. Oh well.

The memory plays funny tricks, and food memories can be funniest of all. Things from the past can be built up to more than they were (think Proust), while subsequent experience moves the mental goalposts. Would the meal have been less anticipated had Ramen Kan not been a little bright spot during an otherwise tricky time? Would it have tasted better had Ippudo not opened up and become a regular haunt over the past several months? All up, it’s probably a wash, though as Bondi Junction eateries go, it’s something to which the locals should continue to hold fast.

In any case, the main event for the day was the new Williams-Sonoma, which along with Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, and something called West Elm, have brought a little bit of American bourgeois prosperity to the local pedestrian mall. (Given that there’s not much bourgeois prosperity left in America, one supposes it had to go somewhere, so why not Sydney?)

It’s been years since the Prick’s had a wander up that particular strip; those who know it will note that much is still the same despite the billion-dollar Westfield over the road. From the Irish backpackers to the dollar boutiques to the cops standing over some grumpy-looking derro on a bench trying to figure out if he’s worth their trouble, almost nothing has changed.

And the Prick was very, very good indeed, did not load up on sets of All-Clad, and walked out with nothing more extravagant than a few jars of curing salt (BACON!) and some nice nesting bowls. There’s a good selection of product, lots of toys and gadgets, and they don’t seem game enough to triple their prices for the Australian market like some other retailers.

But can someone explain what the hell this is all about!?

A spectre is haunting Europe. Not Communism, not radical Islam, but … olive oil. Specifically, little dishes and jugs of olive oil served on restaurant tables:

The small glass jugs filled with green or gold coloured extra virgin olive oil are familiar and traditional for restaurant goers across Europe but they will be banned from 1 January 2014 after a decision taken in an obscure Brussels committee earlier this week.

From next year olive oil “presented at a restaurant table” must be in pre-packaged, factory bottles with a tamper-proof dispensing nozzle and labelling in line with EU industrial standards.

The use of classic, refillable glass jugs or glazed terracotta dipping bowls and the choice of a restaurateur to buy olive oil from a small artisan producer or family business will be outlawed.

Further proof that big business and big government long ago decided to kiss and make up: Regulations such as these (and countless other restrictions on the processing and serving of food not just in Europe but the US and Australia and the rest of the industrialised world) serve to make the entry cost for new businesses and artisinal operations that might offer disruptively better products prohibitively high.

Unsurprisingly, Eurocrats claim the move is for the good of the citizenry:

Officials defended the ban as a protection for consumers who would know that they were getting a safe, guaranteed product with proper labelling of its origin and with tamper-proof, hygienic dispensers.

“This is to guarantee the quality and authenticity of the olive oil put at the disposal of consumers. The aim is to better inform and protect consumer. We also expect hygiene to be improved too,” said an official.

Of course. But the real question is, why do people tolerate this sort of thing? For as long as the Prick can remember the EU has been a figure of (slightly sinister) fun as never a week goes by without a report of some Brussels interdict or other providing editors with a bit of slow-news-day fodder. The old saying about freedom not being lost all at once but rather by degrees looms large, and if a jug of olive oil on a table – arguably, one of the most ancient and enduring symbols of European civilisation and gastronomy – can be made illegal, anything can.

But as with every other silly rule to come down the pike, it is easier for most to go along than it is to kick against the pricks, as it were. In her brilliant book Iron Curtain, Anne Applebaum writes about how during the Cold War, Eastern Bloc governments were able to gain a grudging complicity from their subjects by ever-so-slowly shrinking the sphere of what was permissible, and that people who just wanted to get on with their lives and feed their families had to make accomodations.

The modern day EU is not a Stalinist state – it is more Huxley than Orwell, for now at least – but it does seem to operate on very much the same totalitarian lines, albeit softer ones, whereby everything is the government’s business and woe to he or she who acts otherwise.

And like the old Stalinist bureaucracies of the East, the EU is now collapsing under the weight of its own penury and idiocy.

The sooner the better.

When the hoardings went up and the press releases went out announcing that Jones the Grocer was coming to Pitt Street, there were minor hosannas sung in Stately Prick Manor. The Pricks both work within a 9-iron of the big CBD Westfield, and as such our local shopping options for the evening meal are pretty limited: the David Jones Food Hall on one end of the spectrum, the stygian Woolies under Town Hall at the other. Finally, some competition, and a place to get a decent lasagne to heat up for dinner after the long-promised Thomas Dux failed to materialise.

Alas, not so much. What emerged from months of delayed construction was not so much a gourmet grocery (though a bit of cheese and olive oil is on sale for when one gets an insatiable mid-afternoon morbier craving) as an actual restaurant, complete with open kitchen, combi ovens, deep fryers, and more burners than Apollo 12. Well, OK, we figured. People and business move on and what’s in a name anyway? Stuck back working late at our respective salt mines one recent evening the Pricks gave it a go.

On the Wednesday night we visited the place was about half-full, doing one seating. Service was well-intentioned but hard to come by; the kitchen should put more carrots in the staff meals as the front of house crew was suffering an epidemic of selective blindness and reduced peripheral vision.

Shroomin’…

And the food? Lovely, fine, nothing innovative but good nonetheless. Ten or eleven hours gabbling into a phone fighting battles of one sort or another doesn’t exactly build an appetite for a plate of fussy foams or spheres anyway. A mushroom pasta was hearty and well-balanced, and the kitchen nailed a pile of thrice-fried chips with an addictively umami homemade-style ketchup.

A beef-two-ways affair was misconceived, however, and more poorly balanced than a towel-filled washing machine on spin cycle: A giant short rib right out of the Flintstones lorded it over a little afterthought of a medallion of filet which, uncharacteristically for the cut, came back a winner in the flavour (ahem) stakes. The rib itself wasn’t quite sure where it was going. Not a melting, fall-apart, slow-braised short rib one gets at, say, Barrafina, nor a steak-y low-and-slow sous-vide number of the sort found at (to take one recent experience) Momofuku, it was the Bob Cunis of cuts: neither one thing nor the other.

Meet the Flintstones!

Despite all this, the Pricks will probably go back as it works as a sort of high-end cafeteria for a bite and a break on late-night work nights. They serve a number of good wines by the glass, including a Prick favourite, Shelmerdine. There’s also a reasonably sophisticated kids’ menu coming at in at a very reasonable $15 a plate, and on occasions we have to swing back through the CBD with the Little Pricks this will be a very live option for dinner.

Really, though, the food is not the place’s problem. The biggest issue with Jones the Not-So-Grocer is its location, opening as it does off of the fifth floor food court of the Pitt Street Westfield. This is not a recipe for success: Sydney is not Singapore or Doha, where the Joneses have also lately set up shop. This local Jones is also operating out of the same real estate that saw off Justin North’s Quarter Twenty-One (and its wonderful, much-missed little food shop) as well as his fine diner, the relocated Becasse. Despite the best efforts of the property developers’ mafia, Sydneysiders – to their great credit – have in the main refused to embrace higher-end shopping mall dining. Urban Australians are not suburban Americans and won’t go gently into that good night of strolling arm-in-arm with one’s date past a shuttered Nordstrom’s to have big night out at the local P.F. Chang’s.

While no one wants to see a restaurateur get into trouble, it would not be surprising to eventually see the hoarding back up and the concept re-tooled. There are literally thousands of high-disposable-income office workers even just a lift-ride away who’d be far more likely to pick up some nice produce or pre-prepared gourmet food than sit down for a $36 plate of short rib. If the Joneses need any further hints as to what a new iteration of this outlet should look like, they should look no further than their name.

“For years we have been told that technology was making us richer, but we eat less and drink less than we did 100 years ago, so where is the improvement. I remember when nearly everyone had three cooked meals a day and a substantial tea with cakes and scones and butter and jam. Perhaps people lived less long, but at least there was some purpose in their lives.” –Auberon Waugh, The Way of the World

Via Will Type For Food. More posts shortly, work being the curse of the food-blogging classes and all that.

No, no there isn’t:

A 105-year-old Texas woman who worked a life of physical labor and mothered seven children revealed the secret to her longevity: bacon.

“I love bacon, I eat it everyday,” Pearl Cantrell told NBC affiliate KRBC when asked the secret to living so long. “I don’t feel as old as I am, that’s all I can say,” Cantrell added.

Cantrell, who lives in central Texas and still dances, also told KRBC that her 105th birthday party was a three-day affair with more than 200 guests.

And the science apparently backs her up. So go out and eat some bacon today! You don’t want to be known as a bacon denier, do you?

UPDATE: Over on Instapundit, a reader comments, “When looking for the causes of unrest in Mideast, do not overlook bacon deficiency among the principals. No bacon, no peace.”

This site would add that religious injunctions against coming home after a stressful day, mixing a martini, and patting a dog probably don’t help much either.

Bun Fight!

This side of Kim Kardashian, are there any buns more obsessed over than David Chang’s? The Prick left Manhattan long before the Momofuku founder served up his first steamed-bread-and-pork sandwich, but even from ten thousand miles away it was been impossible not to notice the dozens of magazine articles, the thousands of blog posts, hell, even the Martha Stewart episode, all singing the dish’s praises.

Thus when the Pricks rocked up to the Star City Casino – a venue whose refurbishment is the old PR man’s mantra that “you can’t polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter” reified – on a recent evening to check out Chang’s local, Momofuku Seiōbo, we were full of questions. Would the dishes translate from New York to Sydney?

Would this be an awful, expensive, jumped-up chain restaurant, South Korea’s answer to Nobu?

Is there real talent behind the Chang brand, or is he just another bad-boy chef, an Asian Anthony Bourdain who says “fuck” a lot?

And were we really about to drop a number of hundreds of dollars on a meal based on the reputation of a couple of bites of glorified ham sandwich? I mean, sure we went on May Day, but that’s a lot of cash to spend just to stick it up the socialists.

Tucked in a discrete corner of the casino complex, Seiōbo is small: A few tables and a big bar surrounding a large, quietly humming open kitchen which gives way to glimpses of a larger area given over to prep space, pantries, and larders. The kitchen crew looks positively collegiate with its chinos, sneakers, and untucked button-down shirts. With their well-trimmed beards, coiffed hair, and expensive heavy-framed hipster-nerd glasses the team looks like they just stepped off the set of a movie being filmed at some $40,000 American liberal arts college where sheep graze in the quad and the professors drop mushrooms with their students. This may be a reflection of Chang’s somewhat unlikely upbringing as the son of Korean immigrants to the US who gave their son a very preppy upbringing of golf tournaments, Georgetown Prep, and an undergraduate degree from Trinity College in Connecticut. In all sorts of ways this New England spirit shows through: hell, this is a guy who quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, knowledgably, in his cookbook to explain his philosophy of cuisine.

A pair of St Germain-and-sodas, a refreshing, low-alcohol revelation of an elderflower drink hit the bar as we consider the scene. Then the food begins. First the “snacks”: Sparkling sake (who knew?) is poured to wash down lovely little cannoli, or cigars, of smoked eel. These are quickly followed by the infamous pork buns, smaller than expected, lovely and sweet, dominated by hoisin, reminiscent of long Saturday lunches at basement Chinatown Cantonese joints in Mott Street, Manhattan. Lovely, great, but also smart to get them out of the way quick.

It’s hard to resist going through a bit of a laundry list of what came next, but it all deserves a mention.

The parson’s nose knows…

A dish of little fried potatoes and parsons’ noses – chicken clackers I believe is the less polite description – is yummy, a little trashy in a happy way and classed up by a generous dollop of trout roe. More bird and less spud would have balanced it perfectly, though a “Love and PIF” aligoté from Burgundy stands out as a fascinating pairing that could have done with a bit more tannin to cut against the fat.

Then spanner crab, then a dish of lamb – the first off-note of the night. With its flourish of thinly-sliced radishes arranged like the NSW Government’s waratah logo, we choose to ignore the miscue. Like high school English teachers who tell their class that the blue curtains in a novel represent the protagonist’s depression and struggle to carry on (when in fact the author simply meant that the curtains were blue), we decide that this is Chang’s, or perhaps Chang’s local head Ben Greeno’s, way of taking the piss out of chefs who think running a radish through a mandolin and scattering the results over a plate is the best way to make something look cheffy and soignée.

Marron: One of several “dish of the night” contenders

The pacing, it should be noted, is expert and represents part of the joy of this sort of occasional treat. Here the diner is a small but necessary player in the performance art that is the meal, and at Seiōbo it is all there to see. This is not one of those degustations that is a watch-checking slog. It is more like a piece of music, with early notes and themes and being picked up, built upon, referenced, and informing later movements. It is, without making too big a deal of it, a little bit of transcendence no different than contemplating at a Dutch master or listening to a Brandenburg Concerto that serves as a reminder that in spite of all the bullshit of life, there is a better way.

Soon we see cauliflower being plated up: Is that bottarga they’re grating over the top? No, it’s smoked egg yolk, a cracker (as it were) of a dish. Short of Morton’s creamed spinach, this might be the Prick’s new favourite way to take vegetables. Marron from Western Australia – a nice nod to local produce – is as sweet and tender as can be, Mrs Prick’s favourite course of the night, accentuated by a seaweed butter that again provides a counterpoint of bass.

And then the short rib, done for a spectacularly long time (48 hours, suggests the Momofuku Cookbook – “Dude,” as Chang himself might say, “of course I bought the fucking book!”) off stage sous-vide and deep fried, served with a steak knife that’s a reference more to the cow than an actual necessity with this ridiculously tender, when thusly treated, cut of the beast. A smoky daikon puree – those funky bass lines again –  A little bowl of goat’s curd dressed simply with a bit of mint oil sits somewhere between cream cheese and sour cream and works perfectly to settle down and cleanse the palate.

Get some pork on your … fingers.

Not every course worked, nor should they have. With thirteen courses and nearly as many wine pours if every plate was pleasing, it’d be a sure sign that something was wrong. (Prick by name, prick by nature perhaps, but this site believes there’s nothing wrong with a menu making enemies.) The mandarin dessert is spectacular, a grown-up’s orange creamsicle, making up for the frankly odd, dry, and just out of place Jerusalem artichoke and sunflower seed number (huh?).

And all is forgiven with the final course, a plate of pork pulled off a massive glazed shoulder of pig that had been sitting like El Dorado’s, glowing and taunting us from its pride of place in the middle of the kitchen. No forks, no spoons, no chopsticks, just joyous feeding of our own and each others’ faces.

So no, after all this it is fair to say that Chang with his pork buns is no one-hit wonder. He is more like a musician whose popular numbers cede to deeper, more nuanced, more sophisticated works. Momofuku, and Chang, are much more Bob Dylan than Boots Randolph.

A few days before our meal, Seiōbo was named one of only two Sydney restaurants still standing in the (faintly ridiculous) Top 100 World Restaurants list for 2013. While such lists are on one level silly – is a meal at the supposedly fortieth-greatest restaurant in the world going to be only half the experience of a session at the twentieth? of course not – the movements from year to year tell cautionary tales, especially about the danger of over-exposure and reliance on signature dishes.

Tetsuya’s, after years on the list and with its ocean trout confit such a staple that it now makes the guide books, fell out of the top 100 this year.

Quay fell a number of spots too, though it remained on the list. This is the same Quay whose ridiculously over the top custard snow egg was featured on MasterChef Australia a couple of years ago, a dissonant bit of brand placement that saw one of the top restaurants in the world take a starring role in the denouement of a cooking show pitched to housewives and sponsored by a big supermarket chain. Last year a friend took his partner to Quay for his fortieth; they said the seafood courses particularly were miraculous, but that they knew the shine was well and truly off the place when they saw a local NRL star and his WAG ask a waiter to take an iPhone happy snap of the two of them posing with … you guessed it … their snow egg.

This is the danger of success, and something of which Chang and the Momofuku team are surely well aware. As restaurateurs duplicate themselves they need to increase their market, capturing customers by reputation – and accessible signature dishes – while still remaining true to the founder’s vision. It’s a fine line for a place like Seiōbo and chefs like Chang and Greeno, and a quick perusal of online chatter finds that while bloggers uniformly love the place, customers who may not be used to this sort of thing (one complaint is frustrated that the menu comes at the end, another somehow missed the point of the final plate of pig) are divided, to say the least.

Let them kvetch, and long may Chang and Company keep experimenting. Those who don’t like it can drop some money on the slots upstairs, or maybe go for a round or six of macarons at Adriano Zumbo’s pastry-chain across the hall. The Pricks wouldn’t change a thing.

Except maybe that Jerusalem artichoke dish.

Apologies for the infrequency of posts; the Pricks have been otherwise occupied the past couple of days.

Lots of stuff on deck, including a visit to Momofuku Seibo, over the coming days. Spoiler alert: Yeah, we liked it.

Normally a bit of weeknight pasta-for-one when Mrs Prick is interstate is not that interesting, but for a few reasons this Calamarata alla Boscaiolo, picked up from a recipe by Del Posto’s Mark Ladner in the current Lucky Peach, rates a mention. It’s just a simple dish of porcinis, tuna, tomato, and chili paste from Calabrese, but a very good, quick meal in a pinch. And, keeping with the issue’s “Apocalypse” theme, none of the ingredients go off; it’s the sort of thing a well-stocked pantry can always provide. Anyway, key points:

Bachelor-night Batterie de Cuisine

• Etymology is endless fascinating, as is what happens to recipes on the boat from the old country. Thus this is a boscaiola, but without the cream or bacon that makes the dish a staple of Anglo-Italian joints (just as proper carbonara does not swim in a sea of dairy). Boscaiola apparently refers to “woodsman’s pasta”, so the Prick suspects this version is closer to the original, authentic mark – though your traditional Italian “woodsman” probably would not have had jars of really lovely tuna from the Med in his larder, either.
• Calabrian chili paste is a revelation, I should have added more, and will next time. The sweet, jarred Italian tuna called for (as opposed to the sharper tinned stuff harvest God knows how and where) also makes a big difference. Sadly the Sicilian tomato paste (“solid like clay” in Ladner’s description) was nowhere to be found, though I did fry the hell out of the regular stuff, as called for – it almost felt like starting a Thai curry, and added a great bit of depth.

My cherry tomato amour …

• Chef only calls for “just enough water to cook the pasta”, not the “gallons” of water most chefs call for. This is the only time the Prick went off-piste with this recipe:  After a discussion the other day with Canadian blogatrice Canard Enchante about the differences between home and commercial kitchens, it is clear that even with a good Smeg range there aren’t enough BTUs coming out of a suburban gas hookup to bring a smaller amount of liquid back to the boil in anything close to an acceptable time.
• Tinned cherry tomatoes are actually preferable to the usual San Marzano plums for quick pastas; they hold their shape better and add a bit of definition.

Dinner is served.

• I should take food pictures with something better than this crappy Samsung phone.

Lovely words, in 140 characters or less, about the Prick from Jonathan Lethlean of The Australian:

A prick of a post…. Is this the most readable food blog in Australia? Going to Gowings wp.me/p25w1i-VI via @wordpressdotcom

— John Lethlean (@JohnandNecia) April 28, 2013