Prick With A Fork

Over at Crikey!, Gideon Haigh gives the Prick a shout-out:

Yet Australian journalists have been mainly bystanders to the growth and maturation of the blogosphere, which for all its occasional incivility and self-indulgence also reveals remarkable depths of knowledge, from the science/technology blogs of Renai LeMay (DeLimiter) and Becky Crew (Running Ponies), to the online economics commentaries of Gruen, John Quiggin (John Quiggin), Christopher Joye (Aussie Macro Moments), Sinclair Davidson and Steve Kates (Catallaxy Files). Andrew Landeryou (VexNews) regularly reveals the superficiality of much daily state political coverage and James Morrow (Prick with a Fork) the banality of much modern food writing, while the knotty comments threads at William Bowe’s Crikey blog Poll Bludger belie assumptions that Australians are politically apathetic. Many in mainstream media now speak in high-sounding tones about building “senses of community” around their mastheads, channels and sites, having spent most of the last decade scorning somewhere it has abounded.

Cheers, mate. That’s quite a distinguished and, shall we say, diverse blogroll there. The Prick likes to think that not only does the site reveal the banality of much modern food writing (and the modern food business in general), in a perverse sort of way it revels in it as well. And welcome, Crikey! readers.

It’s a floor protector! No, it’s an entree!

Back in 1953, Isaiah Berlin tossed off a little essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox”. Riffing on a fragment of poetry by the 7^th century BC Greek Archilochus (“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”), Berlin’s was a breezy number that caught fire in the American high-middlebrow culture of the era and still smoulders six decades later. Whether it is Claudio Veliz’s masterful discussion of the difference between Latin and Anglosphere economies or a Woody Allen character who can’t enjoy sex with her husband because whenever she is in the marital bed she starts sorting her friends into hedgehogs and foxes, the phrase remains a useful shorthand and cultural shibboleth. Problems only arise, of course, when foxes try to be hedgehogs … or vice versa.

Gussied-up pub grub

Take Vivo in Palm Cove. Enviably situated in a breezy free-standing structure pretty much at the half-way mark of the town’s main drag along the beach, all deep verandas and open spaces, the place draws a crowd for a rolling series of menus that start with breakfast and keep customers coming back right through dinner, dessert, and after-dinner drinks. This would suggest the kitchen is a bit of a fox, knowing many things well, or at least would want to be. And the large dinner crowd the night we visited would also suggest that they indeed knew what they were doing, at least as far as dinner was concerned.

Scientists have similar difficulties achieving fusion

Well, to use another breezy catch phrase, “not so much”. When it comes to the main meal of the day, Vivo tries to do the old mod-Oz/Mediterranean/Asian fusion thing, but with predictably mixed (ahem) results. A “calamari salad” starter was pretty much a giant pile of fried squid rings over some greens with nothing but a squeeze of lime on the side by way of dressing: fine in a pub, I suppose, but not at a sit-down diner. Another entrée, Hervey Bay scallops with a potato foam, crispy prosciutto, and parsley pistou came closer to the mark: the flavours were all there, the parsley pistou sang of garlic and the Med (though the “foam” was more of a syrup, points I suppose for trying) and the dish could have been really great, but the poor little scallops were hard, over-cooked rubbery little discs. Get four and you could put them under a dining room chair to keep the legs from scuffing the hardwood floor.

Mains, again, disappointed. A yellowfin tuna steak, requested rare, came well-done, but at this point in the evening we were too busy to argue. Though as a minor point of ethics and etiquette, since we’re probably not even supposed to be eating the damn things anymore, if we are serving these beasts up, shouldn’t we treat them right? The fish came atop an odd bowl of vermicelli noodles in a nice dashi broth with a lot of Asian stuff on top. Was this supposed to be a high-class pho? Whatever it was, it was hard to eat – difficult as it is to saw away at a piece of overcooked protein on a solid plate, on the shifting sands of noodles and stock it is nigh well impossible – and ultimately insipid. Keeping it simpler was Mrs Prick’s linguini, which was at least straightforward and filling.

Now this, I like!

So it was with some trepidation that we went back for breakfast a couple of days later. It turns out that Vivo, despite its more foxy intentions, is more of a hedgehog, and what this particular hedgehog knows well – really well – is breakfast. So well that we went there three, maybe four times, over the course of the week. I could eat their “baked beans encôtte” every morning: eggs baked in Vivo’s own house-made cannellini beans, chorizo, all finished under the salamander with a heaping of gruyere. The sausage omelette – more of a frittata – will keep you going all day. Hotcakes: similarly great, though they skimp on the syrup and you have to go back to the kitchen to get more. They also make a killer bloody that includes a dash of port, something I may have to consider in my own recipe.

To make a long story short, when you’re in Palm Cove, be a fox, not a hedgehog. Start your day at Vivo, but get to know everywhere else in town well.

Yeah, so regulars around here will note that we’ve overhauled the appearance of the site, changing themes a bit: I wasn’t thrilled with the long slabs of text between posts, and figured something along these lines would let you pick and choose what you wanted to check out. Let me know what you think.

So Mr and Mrs Prick returned from points north this evening literally just as the power went out in the Inner-West: Of course, the hippy-dippy Tibetan prayer flag house on the corner was well-equipped with candles that lit the place up from down the road. Likewise, and not at all surprisingly, local Greens MP Cate Faehrmann found the lights-out experience delightful.

A salutary reminder to all to get your emergency/survival/disaster kits in order: why should the Luddites, progress-haters, and techno-phobes have all the fun?

Mr and Mrs Prick are hitting the road for a bit, so posting may be sporadic over the next few days. But what posts there are will be delicious.

Also, a word about comments: The Prick is something of a free-speech absolutist, and will only knock something back if it’s really beyond the pale or out-and-out defamatory. To date no one has been banned or blocked, though a report has come in that a loyal reader has lately had trouble getting through. If any other regulars are having the same difficulty, apologies in advance, but let me know and I shall investigate.

In comments elsewhere in these parts, readers are alerted to a coming bacon crisis likely to afflict the US and Europe far worse than Wayne Swine’s putative bacon tax.

So far no mention of the crisis spreading to Australia, but gastronomically, this could be the equivalent of the fallout cloud threatening the continent in On the Beach.  

And, to be fair, a lot of other critics and food bloggers as well. Colman Andrews nails it here:

Now that anyone can paraphrase menus, offer opinions on dishes and reach an audience in the process, I think those of us who have spent our careers doing the same – if presumably with a little more background knowledge and experience than the average Yelper – will have to up the ante. We have to write better and more intelligently. We have to address issues raised by the style and attitude of restaurants, by their hiring and sourcing practices, their cultural implications. And we should ask of chefs and restaurateurs what Goethe once said theatre critics should ask of playwrights: what are they attempting to do? Have they done it and done it well? And was it worth doing?

Food is a paradigm and a prism through which any number of ideas can be filtered, examined, and explored, and an industry with a helluva lot of interesting characters. There are only so many synonyms for “delicious” out there and a limit to the glib run-throughs of flavour-of-the-week menus readers can take.

A well-travelled mate once told the Prick that the Koreans are the Australians of Asia: they love their beer, they love their barbeque, and they love a joke. All true, but in many ways they’ve got it over us humble Aussies as well. No way we could ever produce anything as fantastically epic as “Gangnam Style”. And, given the current state of our border protection policy, were we in Seoul’s parlous position half the North Korean military would be holed up in council housing in Bankstown and Frankston by now, tinkering with nukes in the lounge room while explaining to the nice ladies who’d just dropped around with jumpers from the Uniting Church Knitting Collective that the tubes of Uranium-235 were just a quaint expression of their culture.

Up and at ’em … with shochu!

It should also be noted that the Koreans have an awesome cuisine which has been ignored for far too long by the fooderati: it’s bold, spicy stuff that grabs you and doesn’t let go. Nor is it just bibimbap, as great as that may be. This may be an early call, but I’m tipping Korean food as one of the big food trends of 2013. Those looking to get in early on this (“I was eating bulgogi before bulgogi was cool, man!”) could do a lot worse than head out to Campsie for a feed at Se Joung.

I’m not quite sure how we got it into our head to make the trip out west to Campsie last weekend, except that Nick With a Fork had been talking up Korean food for a while: His best mate at school is from the peninsula and often shares goodies from his lunch bag including dried anchovies, which are apparently very popular around the old school yard. Much that there is to dislike about his present place of education (it was only in a spirit of extreme magnanimity that I did not call in the Daily Telegraph when the school librarian, a supposed custodian of knowledge, tried to force the lad to omit a reference to “In God We Trust” from his recent talk about the United States), the diverse student body is raising up some very cosmopolitan palates. In any case the boy hopped on Urbanspoon and decided Se Joung was the place for us.

Korean pancake: Hold the syrup

Not that the place necessarily agreed, at least at first. Walking in up the back steps from the car park, we got roughly the same looks as the Alpha Delta Phi boys did when they wandered into the all-black roadhouse to see Otis Day and the Knights. The entire clientele was Korean, save for a nervous-looking Anglo boyfriend getting the business from his new squeeze’s family. The late middle aged matriarch sat us, reluctantly, as if worried we might at any moment ask for soy sauce or ketchup or both. But they dutifully gave us a table and soon hit us with a bunch of little salads and condiments including a sort of pickled potato dish, bean sprouts, and mustardy, pickled greens. Also, for the Prick, a small bottle of shochu, a mild Korean firewater that sits somewhere between decent sake and cheap vodka on the palatability scale. Well, when in Campsie …

Anyway: Starters, to start. Some lovely deep-fried dumplings (none of this pan-searing for the Koreans; as noted above, when it comes to food, these people don’t mess around). Some really tender slices of pork belly, more of a platter than a plate. And a gorgeous dish, again I have no idea what any of this is called and there’s no menu on-line to speak of, which sat somewhere between a pancake and an omelette and was filled with spring onions and fish, complemented by a lovely Asian take on an agrodolce sauce on the side.

We’ll slip an extra whole heap of meat on the barbie for ya …

Then the main event: Barbeque, on a four-burner mounted in the middle of the table: serious stuff. First off, beef short ribs, which were butterflied and then snipped into strips. For those of us used to thinking of short ribs as a low-and-slow cut of meat, this was a revelation. In five minutes we were munching on nearly gelatinous – in a very pleasant sort of way – little morsels of the stuff. Next, a big platter of cuttlefish which was gone in sixty seconds (another thing about Korean food: you wind up eating far more than you ever thought possible), served with a heaping pile of kim chi. The middlemost of the Little Pricks especially loved this, and by this stage the ice had melted and we were getting approving nods and smiles all around. Finally, a big plate of spicy pork, again all done on the grill, and again, great stuff. We will be back, and if you can, you should go.

And while the Prick was raised to believe that there’s nothing tackier than talking about money, the five of us hearty eaters walked out the door for just $117, including the soju. At that price, it’s practically like finding money on the street.

So it was quite a busy Monday morning at Stately Prick Manor. Mrs Prick put in a 5:30am wake-up call and was out the door not long after, swooping off in a Silver Service towards targets unknown with a big box of documents and LTC Kilgore’s thousand-yard stare: in my imagination, she had the driver crank up Ride of the Valkyries a couple hundred metres from her destination, given the nature of her mission as I’d been elliptically given to understand it. Then it was kids, breakfast, cleaning, fish markets, and cooking – all before 10am. Why? It’s a long story that I can’t tell just yet, but folk were coming by the house to check out the place and, more specifically, see how the Prick is on the pans. The brief was for something quick with as much do-ahead as possible done before show-time.

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