Prick With A Fork

One of the consolations of the otherwise stygian food court in the Pitt Street Westfield is Justin North’s Quarter Twenty One produce shop, tucked back in the corner by the restaurant of the same name and, of course, the flagship Becasse. Not only do they make a damn fine wagyu lasagne, they always have fascinating little bits and bobs, and if you work in the area it’s worth stopping in reasonably frequently.

The other day for example I picked up a little five-point rack of suckling pig, and kept it around for the right moment – which I found last night, when I put it in the sous-vide for half an hour at 58 degrees before throwing it together with some of the Quarter Twenty One confit porkbelly (a fantastic little cheat of a pre-made ingredient). Add a few scallops with prosciutto and a pumpkin and smoky bacon puree, et voila:

I called the dish “Three Little Pigs”. Not bad for a Wednesday night if I do say so myself, especially paired with a little Coonawarra chardonnay.

If further evidence were needed that Fairfax has made its own trouble by hiring a newsroom that writes solely for its mates, have a look at the Sunday Sun-Herald’s coverage of an effort to ban body-building stimulant, DMAA, used by (ick!) weightlifters and (double-ick!) miners which included both a news story and a lead editorial in the weekend paper:

There should be nothing wrong with young men working hard on their fitness. They spend hours in the gym improving their physique and decidedly avoiding the great Australian epidemic, obesity.

But there are worrying aspects to what for some young men has become an obsessive desire to achieve a powerful, muscular body shape…

Theirs is a legitimate, if fairly marginal, sport.

That health authorities regard DMAA on the same level as heroin, cocaine and crystal meth must suggest to users it’s a drug that should be avoided.

And so on and so forth in that vein. Yet just a few months ago, in late May and early June, the Herald was all but leading a campaign to legalise, or at least “start a conversation” on legalising, other drugs.

At the time the paper gave loads of space to the likes of former NSW Department of Public Prosecutions chief-turned-legalisation campaigner Nick Cowdery and also heavily promoted the Australia21 campaign to end drug prohibition. The Herald did not go quite so far as to nail its colours to the mast of legalisation, but with a nod and wink editorialised that “change is not impossible”.

Now given a choice, the Prick is against bans of all stripes and sees the law as a blunt and ineffective weapon against bad behaviour, at least as it is defined by the moral middle classes. But if, as one can reasonably make the case, the so-called War on Drugs has been an incalculable human disaster from go to whoa, how can one then turn around and say a bunch of weightlifters should be denied their particular poison?

Surely there can’t be that much of a difference between the hip users of prohibited substances inner-city journos may be sympathetic to on the one hand and body-building stimulant-loving proles they turn their noses up at on the other. Can there?

When a hipster restaurant smushes together odd parts of an animal, it’s called “nose to tail eating” and praised for its sustainability.

When McDonalds smushes together odd parts of an animal and calls it a “McNugget”, it’s destroying the planet.

Ah, so where were in the Mudgee Chronicles? That’s right – a crummy lunch at Blue Wren. Nevermind, the view was gorgeous, the company sublime, and the boot of the Prickmobile was by then filled with boxes and boxes of the local produce. With our palates pretty much deadened by the day’s tasting, it was time to head out into the country – the real country, none of this twee weekend warrior wine-tasting nonsense – and that could only mean one thing: the Lue Hotel, a fantastic old pub next to what is billed as “Australia’s Premier Off-Road Motorbike Playground”. The beer is cold, the service is friendly; it’s like going back to another time. Specifically, to a time before the internet, when humorous cat-memes and dirty jokes were shared on public bulletin boards instead of the internet:

I CAN HAS … oh, nevermind.

Gold. Palates cleansed, and pottery bought (lovely stuff, well done Mrs Prick!), it was back to town, where we learned the hard way that Mudgee is not a sleepy little burg and businesses aren’t just hanging out waiting for tourist dollars from the Big Smoke to drop into their lap. Quite the opposite: It is quite busy after dark on a Saturday, even a cold one in late June. Getting a table at one of the several decent diners in town is not as easy as you’d think – though what seems to be a local habit of not formally acknowledging the possibility of two seatings for dinner makes things worse.

We were, however, lucky enough to get seated as walk-ins in the front lounge at Sajo’s, where a new chef has been making waves: every local we looked to for a dinner recommendation put the place at the top of their list, so no wonder we couldn’t get a table over the phone. They’ve done a good job with the fit-out, keeping a great tile floor in the front bar where fresh-faced local youth were teeing off a Mudgee Saturday night, and splashing lots of rich colours and lush fabrics around the place generally. Very un-middle of NSW, if you know what I mean, though there would continue to be little reminders of geography throughout the night: A gin martini, for example, is not a half-gin, half-Martini & Rossi vermouth. Fortunately I was restrained from going behind the bar to show them how it’s done by Mrs Prick and her folks who joined us for the weekend, which is just as well as before we knew it a table had freed up in the dining room and we were sitting with the grown-ups by 8pm.

What to eat? Good question: Sajo’s dinner menu is a happy exercise in city food at country prices. With three courses for $55 (!!!) we decided to put together our own little degustations, and though they’d never heard of anyone ordering two starters and a main before, what the hell? Some highlights:

Duck parfait, duck rillette: Lovely stuff, though the rillette could have done with some more seasoning.

Harvey Bay scallop mousse tortellini … carrot purees often annoy me for some reason, but not this one.

Lovely, but the table was divided as to whether the carrot was a step too far, presentation-wise

Beautiful Barra: Great piece of fish, but perhaps sitting on a king-sized bed of accompaniments where a queen would have done just fine.

Moo!

Sajo’s Brulee: Had to be quick with the camera – this was almost a shot of an empty dish!

This was good stuff, and it’s clear the chef knows what he’s doing. There are no molecular flourishes or modernist foams (though I did spot a “soil” on the menu), just big, happy flavours, nice presentations (if a little sloppy on some of the mains), served by a bright and friendly staff. Even washing it all down with plenty of local wine and tacking a few desserts on to the bill, we got away for well under $500 bucks for the four of us. It was such a good night out that I almost hesitate to mention this, but it’s too good not to share and we’ve been chuckling about it for weeks. At one point, topping up our wines, the waitress rhapsodised about the chef, his cooking, and what he’s done for the menu. The mother-in-law, making conversation, queried his working style.

“Is he a yeller?”, she asked, wondering if he was a fly-off-the-handle shouty type.

“No,” replied the earnest young server, thinking for a moment. “Actually, I think he’s of Italian extraction.”

Much is being made of this report that Barack Obama, at a campaign stop at an Ohio sports bar, asked for Fox News to be turned off. Thin skin and all that, but to me this was the telling bit:

While at Ziggy’s, which has a wi-fi network with the password “DRINKBEER,” the president enjoyed a few brews. According to the pool, his beverages of choice were Miller Lite and Bud Lite.

Further proof that the Left’s desire for a classless society too easily descends to a society without class.

Normally I don’t like to hear of a restaurant shutting down, but in this case I’ll make an exception:

It’s not just financial reasons behind the latest Sydney restaurant closure, but “inconsiderate, greedy” diners, “intolerable” customers and “fast-food junkies”.

 News that Surry Hills restaurant Wafu is soon closing its doors swept the city’s food scene yesterday, after chef Yukako Ichikawa gave a scathing review of some of Sydney’s wasteful diners.

 Frankly, given her attitude, it’s a wonder Wafu had any customers at all.

Ichikawa’s restaurant has a notorious set of rules to cut food waste, with customers expected to eat everything on their plate and bring their own containers for leftovers and takeaway orders.

The Japanese eatery is often described as Sydney’s most exclusive restaurant because only members, which include those who attend an “orientation”, can make bookings.

An “orientation”? To get into a restaurant? This brings new meaning to the phrase, “door bitch”.

“First, many potential customers, and even some members, have entered Wafu without doggie containers,” she wrote on the Wafu website.

Word is she wouldn’t even make an exception for Barack Obama.

“Further, I found it distressing when, after eating, with obvious self-satisfaction, people said, ‘SO FULL!’.

This woman is in the wrong business. It’s called “hospitality” for a reason.

“Perhaps this was meant as a compliment, but to me it meant that the utterer had deliberately damaged their body by wasting food through over-eating.

“It meant also that the utterer did not understand Wafu’s ways, and had not bothered to make the effort or take time to find out what these are.

Stupid utterers!

“Wafu is viable, as a business, if I continue to accept inconsiderate, greedy people.

“But I couldn’t do it. Wafu has always been, and will remain, more to me than simply just another business.”

To paraphrase Mark Twain, I did not attend the closing night, but I sent a nice note saying I approved of it.

Last night I spent the evening at a friend’s house tasting a number of artisanal vodkas, all in the interest of science, commerce, and a project I hope to be able to tell you about soon. I know, it’s a hard life.

I can’t say much more right now that’s not commercial-in-confidence, but one thing I came away with was a new understanding of vodka, and by extension, my own capacity to taste. I was struck by how different a product I’d always thought of as tasteless and medicinal could carry so many different flavours and aromas and essences, depending on the distiller and his recipe and even the water he used. Some were ethereal and perfumed, others funky and spicy, though there were themes (acetone and, oddly, flamed orange peel were common denominators). Some had an overpowering aroma, others you had to tilt precisely in the glass to get any nose at all. One even had the bright crispness of chenin blanc. And so on.

Anyway, the point of this isn’t to talk about vodka. Without turning into a hippy-dippy Slow Food-type or three-martini Dostoevsky, this post is just to share the probably obvious (but oft-forgotten) realisation that it is worthwhile slowing down from time to time and realising that there’s a lot that I – we – do not take the full measure of, simply because the winds of time pressure and preconceived notions blow the other way. To the extent I can, it’s made me want to tap the brakes more regularly to appreciate what’s going on with what I am engaging with. Someone else created that drink, that meal, that book, that building, and  dammit, they deserve that respect. Or to put it in more selfish, Prick-like terms, getting the most out of things necessitates focusing on what those things are.

So picking up a couple of bits and bobs for dinner tonight (spaghetti amatriciana for the Prick, and a big warm bowl of boscaiola for Mrs Prick, presently en route home from parts north) at the local Harris Farms, I saw packages of fresh just-flown-in-from-France morel mushrooms. Not cheap, but hey, fresh morels!

Two thoughts come to mind: One, it’s amazing how far Sydney food culture has come in ten years. When I landed here in 2001, I was fortunate enough to live (albeit in a tiny bedsit under a nursing home) in Woollahra, and could if I saved my pennies pick up a bit of nice cheese at Jones the Grocer or Simon Johnson. But the local Coles? Forget it – it was like going back to the 1950s, in a bad way. Fast forward to 2012, and our local supermarkets now flog roquefort cheese, duck breasts, and salmon roe.

But secondly, and down to business now, were I to pick up some morels, what would I do with them? Risotto? An awesome accompaniment to a great piece of beef? Thoughts, suggestions and tips welcome in comments.

Everything that is wrong with the Sydney Morning Herald’s food coverage, and its head critic Terry “14/20” Durack, can be summed up thusly: They did a roundup of the ten (allegedly) best burgers in Sydney for their glossy ad vehicle the (sydney) magazine [sic] and included a vegetarian patty. That, and they gave a gong to mockney fauxtalian Jamie Oliver. Maybe, just maybe, some of their parent company’s woes can be sheeted home to this sort of parochialism masquerading as an ersatz cosmopolitanism.

In my book, burgers should be fat and the chef should be confident enough in his meat to allow them to be ordered medium-rare. I also don’t get the Aussie obsession with beetroot and fried eggs. Day to day, I remain pretty partial to the $20 burger-and-beer special at Glass Bar.

The rich are different from you and me, as Fitzgerald apocryphally observed to Hemingway (who reportedly shot back, “yes, they have more money”). They also have, all too often, appallingly bad taste. Like their cousins down at the very bottom end of the ladder, they dress and behave as they wish, because they don’t have to show up for a job like normal people and they probably wouldn’t want to either. Where once this phenomenon manifested itself in harmless eccentricities like “go to hell pants”, one sad side effect of the democratisation of wealth has been the ruination of any number of luxury brands from Bentley (once the understated option for those who thought Rollers too flashy, they’re now nothing but six-figure pimpmobiles for the high-living lowlife) to Burberry. And brand execs are at a loss for what to do about it. The customer always right, and to suggest otherwise can, if one is not careful, quickly become the fastest ticket to being tagged “racist” one can think of short of asking, “Why does Michelle Obama seem so angry all the time?”

Thus operating on the theory that if you can’t beat them join them, the PR whores winemakers at Penfolds are getting in on the act. Let’s go to the Daily Mail, shall we?

The world’s most expensive bottle of wine has gone on sale for a staggering £109,000 [~ $168,000] – making the cost of just one small 150ml glass of this rare tipple a bank-breaking £21,000.

Australian winery Penfolds has released 12 special bottles of the 2004 Block 42’ Cabernet Sauvignon – a rare single-vineyard wine which is only released in stellar vintages.

The Block 42 vines were transported from France to Australia in the 1830s and are now located in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, northeast of Adelaide.

Well, OK, so far so good – though it is hard to imagine that the stuff could be that good (the regular edition normally sells with a hefty, but not crippling, mid-three figure price tag). But the fact is,this bottling could taste like cat’s piss mixed with Red Dye #5 and no one would be the wiser: Unlike the regular Block 42 release, this is not stuff to be drunk, nor even to be collected (like, say, great Burgundies or Bordeaux or Penfolds’ own classic Grange). No, it is to be displayed in vulgarians’ lounge rooms as proof reified of their culture and sophistication, all the while reinforcing the luxury-status-Penfolds connection in the heads of those who otherwise might call fruity lexia “a bloody ripper of a drop!”:

The ampoule is designed to provide the ideal environment for the wine – and even the most cavalier of millionaires cannot just whip the top off the bottle and quaff the contents.

Penfolds’ chief winemaker Peter Gago said that if any buyer wished to drink the exclusive wine, an expert would travel to wherever the buyer was in the world and open and decant the ampoule using bespoke equipment in a special ceremony.

You’ve heard of “footballers’ wives”? This stuff ought to be called footballers’ wine. It’s not the world’s most expensive wine, it’s the world’s most expensive wine bottle. One would expect that had this been released a few years ago, the anti-hero of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo would have picked up a bottle. Penfolds ought to stick to juice; fifteen or twenty years ago when it was affordable their Bin 389 made a callow Prick put away the childish beers and spirits of youth and take up a long-running affair with the grape. Tabloid marketing gimmicks like this make this older and wiser Prick less than enthusiastic about eventually pulling the corks on some of the little Penfolds back-catalogue he has shepherded together over the years. But I think I’ll get over it.

“This’ll look great next to the signed Shane Warne cricket bat!”