Prick With A Fork

Pizza in this town is a bit like sushi: There’s a lot of crap around and you have to know where to look to find the good stuff. Odd, because Sydney has pretty sizeable populations of both Italians and Japanese, but there you have it. Sushi is all too often rolled up by machines in Marrickville industrial units or left for too long doing the rounds on sushi trains, the fog inside each dish’s plastic lid giving a fair indication of how many times that pair of salmon nigiri has passed “go”. Pizza’s not much better: some gems out there, but far too many places still cook their pies in those horrible conveyer belt ovens that look like nothing so much as overgrown versions of the toasters at not-quite-five-star resorts’ breakfast buffets.

Now that’s Italian!

The Prick reckons that one place that ought to be mentioned in the same breath as those aforementioned gems is Franks’ Pizza in Camperdown, just at the corner of Australia Street and Parramatta Road. On a tip from a couple of co-workers we brought the Three Little Pricks there the other night and had a blast. In a barn-like spot, they do a big, fast trade with the Camperdown locals: singles, couples, families, the lot. Plenty of expensively-distressed Deus ex Machina t-shirts on guys who’ll never mount anything more powerful than a Vespa (or their wives, who according to the latest local census data are as likely as not to be out-earning and out-performing their men on the career front).

True, Frank’s doesn’t use a wood-fired oven, but it’s a proper pizza oven nonetheless – just like in the New York pizza parlours of the Prick’s youth (it was all I could do to resist going to the counter to break a five for quarters with which to play the Zaxxon machine). The menu is pretty basic, but they’re not precious about mixing and matching as you like, and what they do they do well. A starting snack of garlic pizza had us at bon giorno: The crust was thin and crispy, the garlic redolent. My

Another satisfied customer…

Napoletana – olives and anchovies – was augmented with pepperoni and was pretty much the Platonic ideal of the pie. Everyone else was happy with their selections. And has been noted elsewhere, the prices look like they were set around the time Bob Hawke was putting away Blanche. The entire Prick family got out of there for a grand total of $63.

Frank’s will never be as “cool” as, say, Gigi’s in Newtown or Lucio in Darlinghurst. It’s unlicensed and BYO, so if you want to wash down your pies with a hand-picked Nebbiolo, it’s all you. It doesn’t hand-shave gossamer-thin prosciutto on a restored antique Benrimer. They proudly do daggy combos like “the Australian” or ham-and-pineapple.  That’s fine. We have enough – too much – cool in this town. What we need more of is places like Frank’s that don’t change to meet the times, but make the times meet them on their own terms.

The joy of returning safely back to Sydney after a weekend on the NSW Central Coast without having a run-in with a single rat-tailed local was tempered when, pulling into the Norton Plaza centre in Leichhardt to pick up a few supplies, I discovered a dozen prime parking spots blocked off:

It’s the new thing, apparently. Valet parking (by “Gieves”, no less) at $10 for the first hour, presumably just the thing for when one really can’t wait an extra second to get into Coles or the two-dollar shop. I asked guy operating the “service”, a hangdog middle-aged bloke in a rent-a-tux who sat soaking in a fug of sleazy failure of the sort one generally associates with Julia Gillard’s exes what the story was, but he only sort of grunted something about it being “every day”.

Truly a horrible idea. Now there is nothing wrong with the principle of “user pays”, or charging a premium for better service: The Pricks happily buy the exit-row seats on Singapore Airlines, for example, which is one of the best little deals in travel.

But this is entirely galling. We’re talking about a shopping centre in Leichhardt, not Woollahra. And as a rule, it is tough enough to find a place to park in Norton Plaza without some spiv locking up a big chunk of prime spots. (If someone else is doing the driving, why don’t they put the valet spots downstairs, down the back somewhere?) The Pricks easily pump a grand or more through the centre’s businesses in any given month and this is the thanks we get? Pay up or it’s that much harder to find a place to put the Prickmobile?

Indeed the entire business model seems flawed and designed to alienate customers right before Christmas (smart move, guys!). The centre’s site claims that “This convenient service aims to add value and assistance to you, our loyal shopper as well as an extra point of difference to your time at Norton Plaza [sic]”.  Which is a less-grammatical version of the typical spin we’re all used to seeing trotted out by utilities, government departments, and other agents of Satan when they try to sell the public on cuts to front-line services or new and increased fee schedules. One wonders how the centre’s tenants feel about this given that parking – or lack thereof – is so crucial to their trade. Is the centre hoping that once the entire rest of the lot is filled up, enough people will pay for premium spots? Or will they go elsewhere? Certainly the Pricks will now do more of their food shopping over at Broadway Central.

It will also be interesting to see how the Leichhardt locals, who cloak their right-wing Tory aspirationalism in a green-tinged egalitarianism, respond. If Norton Plaza’s managers run into trouble, they’ll need to re-brand this not as a convenience but as a push to “nudge” drivers out of their cars and onto bikes.

The Prick has always liked the Little Creatures range of beers, but that emotion is quickly turning to love. Via The Punch:

“In what looked like escalating into a Grocon Mark II dispute, unionists blockaded the Little Creatures brewery in South Geelong on and off for more than a month until last week in breach of a Supreme Court injunction.

“Unionists from the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) have been in dispute with Western Australian contracting firm TFG Group over the use of non-union contract workers at the Little Creatures brewery.

“The unions object to the employment of non-union labour on individual contracts, and are demanding that TFG employ local workers from Geelong on an enterprise bargaining agreement.

“The new brewery represents a $60 million investment from Lion, Little Creatures’ parent company, and TFG has been hired to administer the fit-out of specialist brewing equipment. According to Little Creatures, 95% of TFG’s contractors are Victorians, and the brewery will offer significant opportunities for local jobs upon its completion.

“The CFMEU and AMWU claim that TFG has engaged its labourers in sham contracts to avoid paying entitlements normally afforded to regular employees, such as sick and holiday leave, superannuation, and redundancy payments.

“But if unionists were really worried that TFG was engaged in sham contracting, they only need to refer the matter to the building and construction industry watchdog. No such action has occurred.

“This dispute is not about workers’ rights or sham contracting. According to Leela Sutton from Lions, the workers have indicated satisfaction with their conditions and do not wish to be represented by the union. This dispute is about growing membership through intimidation and boosting membership fees.”

Given the corruption and thuggishness inherent in the Australian union movement, and particularly the power-hungry, reform-loathing dinosaurs at the CFMEU, it is not hard to take sides in this one. Remember, these are the same brave tough guys who punch horses to get their way.

In short, it’s time for a buy-cott.

Much more fun than a boycott, this involves doing with rather than doing without. The Prick first encountered the notion when Danish producers were being boycotted because of cartoons of Mohammed, and as a result discovered delicious Lurpak butter which has been the house butter of choice for over six years now.

Soet’s all go out and buy a case of Little Creatures to kick off the weekend and tell the CFMEU where to get off. The pilsner is particularly nice on a hot day.

We’re not sure if this is such a great idea. More probably, it just seemed like a great idea at the time:

Image shamelessly stolen from the Prick’s talented Brooklyn-based brother, who comments, “Guaranteed someone is going to go home at 4 in the morning and drink this, and definitely not even notice.”

The billboard is right.

It seems fairly amazing that as we close out 2012 it has become necessary to defend, of all things, plates. Yet here we are. The Prick is sure he is not the only one to have noticed, but dishes – you know, proper plates and bowls – are becoming increasingly rare things in restaurants these days as chefs swap their ceramics for everything from slate to salt bricks to (the topic of today’s rant) wooden planks.

This weekend, seeking a bit of a respite as we tidied up from our annual Thanksgiving Turkey-Fry (more about which later), Mrs Prick and I wandered over to the nearby Booth Street Bistro in Annandale for a bit of lunch and a cleansing ale. It was lovely (though whether by omission or design there were no croutons in Mrs Prick’s Caesar Salad – #firstworldproblems and all that, but it could’ve used the crunch), we got away for around $50, and it is on the short-list for a weeknight dinner and a proper review sometime soon.

But this is how the steak came to the table:

Steak alla Rustica, Booth Street Bistro

Did they miss a step or get frantic at the pass? Forget putting it on a plate, just bring ‘em out the whole damn board!

Yes, I know, chefs call it “innovation”. But is it really innovation, or just a bourgeois flirtation with Mao’s doctrine of constant revolution and rustication? Smash the revisionist plates of capitalism! Celebrate the humble wooden dishware of the peasantry! Criticise Lin Biao and Confucius!

Alright, maybe not that last one.

Yet boards and planks are becoming the new normal. A chicken burger at the discreet Atrio on the 7^th floor of the Westfield comes on a narrow paddle that jars with its high-modern surrounds and makes things difficult when the meal loses its structural integrity.

Predictable hilarity ensued.

Such a neo-primitive presentation felt at odds with Atrio’s soaring space, which calls to mind New York’s Lever House, or perhaps an Ayn Rand novel.

Howard Roark is sipping coffee behind a pillar.

The Pontius Pilate Award for Worst Use of Boards, though, would have to go to the Well & Co Café in Norton Street: It doesn’t take a genius to imagine happens to pancakes and syrup when they’re on something flat, without a rim.

The boards-versus-plates debate goes deeper than presentation. The question is really a proxy for the difference between mere culture (what you get when a few dozen homo sapiens live together for a time) and proper civilisation (which is what happens when they go on to build the Sistine Chapel and invent the 747). Boards are to plates what lighting a fire is to turning on the air conditioner: One is simple, primitive, comforting in a sort of Saurian base-of-the-brainstem kind of a way. The other is only possible because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

And just as it is a lot trickier to make hot air cold, it is also a lot more complicated to make a plate than it is to hew off a piece of tree. Thus civilisation and ceramics go hand in hand: a capital-r Romantic like Rousseau would have loved eating off a board, the better to get in touch with his noble savage. John Stuart Mill, it can pretty safely be assumed, would have been a plate man all the way.

(Note that there are exceptions to this rule. Sailing is far preferable to stink-boating, even if the latter involves internal combustion, one of the high-water marks of Western Civilisation. Anyone can steer a motorboat but sailing a yacht takes skill, which trumps all.)

I can see why chefs like boards. Rustic and simple is appealing when everyone feels they’re supposed to be austere, even if they are paying $35 a main for the privilege. Boards are fine for cheese or charcuterie, but when it comes to the main meal, the Prick agrees with the billboard. Insist upon plates. They really do make every meal a special meal.

Winner, winner, all sorts of dinners!

It’s here! Volume One of Philip Howard’s The Square cookbook is finally here! And even if the Prick’s excitement is tempered by knowing it would have arrived a lot sooner if he hadn’t farted around on whether to even buy the damn thing for the past three weeks, it’s here! After an hour or so’s flipping through its pages last night, even without trying out a single solitary recipe in the Stately Prick Manor Test Kitchens, this may be – in fact, forget it, it is – the winner of the inaugural Prick With a Fork Cookbook of the Year award for 2012.

Chef Howard, congratulations, you’ve just won the first-ever Pricky Award. PWAF readers, go out and buy this book. Or leave this post open on every web browser in the house until your partner gets the hint and gets an order in by Christmas (you’ll also be helping our traffic numbers in the process).

I’ll take that, thanks!

And here is why: In its organisation, its writing, and its recipes, The Square: Volume I is the best high-end – Howard’s got two Michelin stars to his name – cookbook this site has come across in a long, long time. Because first and foremost, the stuff between the book’s covers looks (and again, it needs to be put through its paces to be sure) utterly achievable. I know I am not the first reviewer to point this out, but with Howard’s recipes, one does not need an army of prep chefs and $50,000 worth of PacoJets and other high-tech frippery.

Nor are the dishes in The Square austere head-scratchers accompanied by photos of a piece of protein calling in lonely desperation across negative space to a few blobs of sauce somewhere down and across the page like something out of Joan Miro’s blue period. In The Square, the photos include actual bowls, plates, and dishes. And the food looks satistfying.

Thankfully, the book’s photography is better than the Prick’s!

This is not a work on the order of, say, the Mugaritz cookbook. Or anything else of that ilk. Because while one may get it together to make a dish or two from such a book, even if one were to undertake something like Andoni Aduriz’s “An Essay On Salads” (!), you’d likely be more hungry after you ate it than when you started. Not a danger with The Square, many of whose dishes come far enough down the ladder to flirt with – how infra dig! – “comfort food”. There’s plenty of pasta, which I know we’re all supposed to avoid in the interest of, for men at least, forestalling the day when one finally has to make camp with the Harry High-pantses of this world or decide that at heart one is in fact a Larry Low-pants. Who cares. A “lightly curried gratin of lobster with hand-rolled macaroni, cauliflower, leeks, and apples”? Yes, please!

But neither is this dumbed-down cooking by a chef looking to give the housewives something to complement an afternoon TV spot. I’m looking forward to smoking some venison and matching it with some chestnut puree and salt-baked beetroot as per his suggestion, as well as making some terrines from these pages. If enough Sydney Airport Quarantine officers can be paid off to get the shopping list through (kidding!) I just may be able to organise Howard’s “Pot-au-feu of foie gras and morels with a duck and foie gras club sandwich.”

If there’s anything to regret about the book, it is that some of the very local ingredients (pigeons and chickens from Bresse; various local fish) are unavailable in Australia.

Nevermind. Howard’s writing style is also one this site would love to see adopted more widely. Each recipe starts with an overview, a couple of paragraphs detailing what to focus on, a breakdown of key components, and notes on timing. Both restaurants and dinner party hosts like a dish where as many elements can be prepared ahead to come together at the last minute, and most of these recipes tick that box.

So congratulations Chef, and come on down. I look forward to posting some reports of efforts from your pages.

The tempest over Pete Wells’ review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square continues unabated. Via commenter Dr Duck, the Prick notes Mary Elizabeth Williams’ take over at Salon. She’s got it right, and it may be time to admit that the Prick revelled perhaps a little too gleefully in Wells’ attack, allowing himself to get caught up in what Williams calls “the clever, self-satisfied knowledge among readers that we are not the sort of people who sully our palates with endless bread sticks or something our proprietor calls, without any shame, Donkey Sauce.”

As Williams points out: Continue reading →

No link available yet – and anyway, you guys are the sort of classy AB1-demographic types who still go out and pay folding money for quality reading material – but if you pick up the latest edition of the Spectator Australia, you’ll find the Prick’s thoughts on why Australians should stop mucking around with Halloween and instead embrace the American tradition of Thanksgiving:

“Thanksgiving would transplant far better to Australia than Halloween. Even Halloween’s
backers must admit that all that ooglyboogly
Day of the Dead stuff is a hard sell in a country as relentlessly secular as Australia. Utterly ecumenical Thanksgiving, on the other hand, would fit in nicely. The idea is no more complicated than the name implies: be grateful for what you have. And all that’s
required is to front up for a meal.

Plus, it falls at the end of November. A big problem with Christmas in Australia is that by 25 December, it’s too damn hot and after presents the options are limited: stay inside, crank up the aircon and go the traditional roast, or do a Christmas lunch in the sun where everyone gets uncomfortable, sun-struck and drunk too fast. As one who
believes that, at heart, God has a great and vicious sense of humour, the stress of Christmas shopping has surely been arranged as our own self-inflicted punishment for bringing the money changers into the temple and commercialising His son’s birthday.”

Lots of other good stuff in the mag, too.

If the past is a different country (they do things differently there) then the same thing could be said about couples, or “partnerships”, to use the unsentimental argot of 21^st century Australia. Each pairing-off is a little nation-state of the heart. Some are oppressive dictatorships; others are Amsterdam. Each has its own customs, dialects, shibboleths, (emotional) currencies, defensible borders, subjects when offspring are involved (who then grow up to fight their own wars of independence), and of course, creation myths. These creation myths – or “how we met” stories – are also as important for couples just as they are for nations. They define the past and point to  the future: Say what you will about the United States with its drone warfare, TSA goons, and eavesdropping federales,  in the heart of every American beats the phrase, “land of the free and home of the brave.”

Likewise the sovereign nation of Prickistan. Continue reading →

To hear the Fairfax press (and plenty of other Western media outlets) tell it, Palestinian rocket strikes on Israeli suburbs are just legitimate, routine affairs – really, nothing more than just a slightly extreme way for a local government to register its disapproval of Israel.

No, what’s really outrageous is the Israel’s response. Not only did the IDF target terrorists like Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari responsible for the rocket attacks, they had the audacity to go and tweet about it:

“In so doing, in fewer than 140 characters, Israel opened an aggressive new social media front in a long war, sparking fears of an escalation of conflict in the Middle East…”

By way of balance, the Herald does note, in the very-very-very last paragraph of the story, that “By Thursday night, at least 145 rockets from Gaza had struck Israel’s south over the previous 24 hours, including one that struck a home in the city of Kiryat Malachi, killing three people, according to an Israeli police spokesman.”

But that’s nothing compared to the tweets.