Prick With A Fork

Some random thoughts on the Pricks’ first 24 hours in London…

• Whatever the depredations of 21^st century air travel, hurtling from Australia to the other side of the planet in 24 hours is a modern miracle about which we should not become completely jaded. When Mrs Prick’s ancestors made the reverse journey a couple of centuries ago, there were no welcome aboard bubbles, no hot towels, and no dead ringer for Cee Lo Green waiting at the other end with a welcome sign and a Merc. She’s not completely sure of the history but is given to understand that for some of her forebears at least, the security regime was also a bit more onerous than “please remove all laptops and other electronic equipment from your carry-ons before proceeding.”
• The advantage of being the first plane into Heathrow is that immigration and baggage formalities are a snap. The disadvantage is wandering around the city for six hours until the room is ready. (Consolation prize: Eggs benedict made with porcetta and biorhythm-resetting doppios at Cecconi’s in Mayfair. Shove that naturopathic melatonin where the artificial light machine don’t shine, double espressos –plus a long walk – is how you cure jet lag.) 
• British daytime TV is similar to that of Australia or the US, but just off-kilter enough to be forget-to-feed-yourself addictive to the under-slept and over-excited visitor.  Six episodes into a “Michael Barrymore’s Strike It Rich” marathon and we’d thought we’d discovered the catatonic “entertainment” at the heart of Infinite Jest. (And my word, hasn’t Barrymore had a colourful life?)
• British daytime TV would also appear, judging by its sponsors, to be watched in the main by those with poor credit and cash flow problems, and those with leaky bladders who do a little wee every time they laugh. Amazingly, no one has yet invented a panty liner that’s also a quick-cash payday loan facility.
• It has been nearly twenty years since the Prick last visited London, and what a beautiful town it remains. Not to go all Elizabeth Farrelly, but one forgets how starved we are for great architecture in Sydney.
• However, gracious old buildings are not all they’re cracked up to be either: Our little hotel in South Kensington is lovely but with a floorplan by Tetris. One shudders to think how much one must pay for a room that has closet space for more than three shirts.
• A morning wander through the National Portrait Gallery is by turns instructive, fascinating, and frustrating. Organised sequentially, an under-remarked consequence of the Great War remains that it caused people to forget how to paint for a good several decades. The Victorian rooms are instructive more as a reminder as to just how awesome the Victorians really were than for their somewhat improving, propagandistic canvases; give the Pricks some Tudor-era portraits any day of the week. The eyes in their copy of Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell, which puts a face to perhaps the original faceless man of politics, do as well as all of Hilary Mantel’s novels to say, this is a man whose mind was on other things.
• London weather is London weather: It is cool and it is grey, but at least two locals have told us without a hint of irony, “This is great! You really brought the weather with you!”
• American soft power has made a big push in London in the years since the last visit. It is funny seeing a big Brooks Brothers in Regent Street (yes, they were the official outfitter of the Prick’s youth, but exporting  Connecticut WASP-Anglophilia to the UK seems ironic in a coals-to-Newcastle sort of way:  they don’t call it New England for nothing, after all). Speaking of which, the boulevard is presently lined with more American flags than VE-Day, promoting the NFL of all things. Huh?
• Likewise, one cannot walk a pitching wedge’s range in this town without being promised a “real” “authentic” “American” burger. Well, we’ll be the judge of that (stay tuned!).
• Speaking of the Prick’s people, guys, I love you but please, the “manger” in Pret a Manger has nothing to do with the circumstances of Jesus’s birth, so don’t say it like it does. Also, you don’t mark yourself out as a sophisticated traveler by announcing loudly, “…and I wanna eat at least once at pretta-MAYN-jer before we go!” Ah, Paul Fussell, where are you when we need you?
• No pictures because we were both so excited about not having to carry a goddamn phone with us 24 hours a day that we left them in the room but Mrs Prick snaffled us a table at Bar Boulud for dinner to ensure our BAC (blood-animal content) levels did not drop too low before bed. Lyonnais food by way of Manhattan sophistication and Midwestern portion sizes, this is a worthwhile stop for anyone who loves their charcuterie, though take it from the Pricks, show up hungry and don’t over-order. After deep-fried pork belly, a wonderful hare terrine with a golf ball of foie gras in the middle, a platter of assorted hams, jamons, and prosciuttos, a beautiful steak tartare (lovely when presented as an integrated whole, the Prick still prefers it old-school with an egg yolk on the top and the garnishes on the side), and a slab of USDA Prime sirloin for Mrs Prick, we were ready to raise the white flag.
• This does not mean we will not pop in for a second go some time this week, perhaps for a spot of lunch at the bar. That burger with the foie gras and short ribs does sound a little hard to pass up.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is suggested that the number 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In a similar vein the Prick posits that at some point in the future, the answer to every lightning round question in pub trivia will be “Reuben.”

Think about it: “What is the name of Julia Gillard’s cavoodle?”

Be the first to yell “Reuben!” and you win the meat tray.

“Name the Flemish painter who had a thing for curvy chicks…”

Again: “Rubens!”

And when the emcee asks for the name of “the absolute, undisputed king of sandwiches, the one before whom everything else between two pieces of bread bows in supplication,” say it loud and proud:

“THE REUBEN!”

Is this Sydney’s greatest Reuben …

Now Sydney has of late seen some fairly unfortunate food trends take hold, but one that is to the entirely unalloyed good is the town’s discovery and embrace of the Reuben, that wonderful combination of corned beef and sauerkraut and cheese and Russian dressing on rye. Yes, what is offer covers the spectrum, from the lousy, corporatized food-court Reubens on offer at Reuben & Moore to the really quite excellent numbers dished up at Elizabeth Street’s Momo Brasserie.

And of course the hipsters have long been in on the act with their ironic “take” (or should that be “fake”?) on the Reuben at Reuben Hills in the Slurry –  an area the Prick loves, but which, as discussed, can be just a little bit ridiculous.

Those in the know however have for some time sought out an itinerant operation known as the Ruby & Rach Deli, run by a Briton named Tony Gibson who, having fetched up in Australia, has lately been cooking some of the best New York Jewish deli cuisine this side of Katz’s Deli at events and on the weekend markets circuit.

Happily, Tony has found a permanent-for-the-moment home, upstairs in the otherwise unprepossessing upstairs of the Strattons Hotel at the corner of Castlereagh and Liverpool in the city, the sort of pub one would more likely associate with nachos than naches. There he is turning out not just Reubens but a variety of other sandwiches, matzoh ball soup, and in a nod to the Manhattan-Montreal axis, not one but two varieties of poutine (almost) every day of the week. 

… and is this Sydney’s greatest Reuben-maker?

(While we’re on the subject of poutine, since as any journalist knows anything that comes in threes is a trend, does this mean that on the back of Hartsyard’s and the, ahem, Stuffed Beaver’s takes on the dish, Sydney is about to be swept by cheese curds and gravy?)

The Prick, being a creature of habit, has no idea how the rest of the menu is, because he cannot go past a Reuben that’s made with 9+ wagyu that has been brined and sous-vided and where the rendered fat is used to grill the bread. Ruby & Rach’s Reubens are simply the best in town, and anyone who likes this sort of thing should forget eating at their desk, take a proper lunch and give this a go.  

Oh, and apparently Tony’s also doing a New York-style breakfast. Proper lox are involved. This Prick might just plotz.

The “great man” theory of history may have gone the way of slide rules and corporal punishment in the nation’s classrooms but that does not mean it is entirely without merit. Individuals are often – usually – more important and more profitably studied than historical forces gazed at through an unfocused haze of anonymous Hegelian inevitability. Was the collapse of the Soviet Union foreordained? Perhaps, but the tale is pretty dreary without its Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II.

Likewise in Sydney we tend to look at food trends – which are every bit as interesting as any history or politics because what we eat, we become – as impersonal tides sloshing back and forth. Thus today fine dining is out, “fun” finger-licking food is in, and we are all just borne along the anonymous current, ready to take our orders from the weekly “Good Living” and the latest dispatches of the freebie bloggers.

To which the Prick says, bullshit. People – individuals – drive what is on our plates as much as they do our politics or anything else.

A couple of days before we went to est….

Think of it this way: If some future group of high schoolers studying the History of Australian Gastronomy as an elective wants to study the way we eat now, the teacher would do far better to assign writing one paper on restaurant/nightlife impresario Justin Hemmes than a dozen essays imagining what it would have been like to be an Irish barmaid/Tongan bouncer/English chef-in-exile in 2013 and analysing their experiences through materialist perspectives of race, power, and class.

Hemmes is one of the great paradoxes of Sydney, and his effect on the town dominated discussion on a recent evening as we Pricks first hurriedly skoll a martini at Ash Street Cellars – the Mozart we were hearing at Angel Place required no fortification, but the presence of an experimental concerto on the program made an infusion of Hendrick’s the better part of valour – before finishing up the night with dinner at est. to celebrate Mrs Prick’s birthday.

The conclusion we came to was that because of the size of Sydney, and the footprint of his empire, Hemmes and his Merivale Group have all sorts of distorting effects: Yes, he gives us nice things, but he is also the reason we can’t have nice things.

…a gang of obnoxious food-bloggers made asses of themselves in Adelaide…

Certainly Ash Street Cellars – and that whole little multi-culti pleasure strip it sits in like the international pavilions of an adult-focused, upper-middle-class Disney theme park – is great. And est., well, it is hard to find fault with Hemmes and chef Peter Doyle’s “big event” room, even if the Herald did just knock it down to two stars.

Concert over, we hurry down George Street for our reservation and upstairs past the thrum of Establishment to one of the most serene rooms in town: startlingly under-booked on a Thursday night, we are fawned over in a spectacularly non-obsequious manner. It is just a little dim, very calm, but not stuffy or overly formal; while est. is a known quantity for bringing out-of-town corporates for a feed, on our night it is mostly celebrating couples and one happy group of friends. High-end chilled, in other words.

Glasses of Ruinart and a dozen plump, tight, briny little Sydney Rocks from the South Coast, some of the best we’ve had, tee us off as we go the four-course menu: Neither of us can hack a full degustation on a school night, and this way we get to try different things.

…giving this whole venture a bad name, and making the Prick self-conscious about the iPhone…

A tortellini of foie gras is dressed at table with a gorgeous, tourmaline-brown game consommé that makes the dumpling all but extraneous; a tiny drop of remaining unclarified fat on the surface gives the eye a focal point with which to find its depth and a spoonful hits the tongue like a gorgeously written 5,000 word argument that is the last word proving that classical French technique will always, always be tops.

A second course – scallops with a number of garnishes and a sort of foie gras mousse for me, a poultry-thon of quail breast and confit chicken wing with egg yolk for Mrs Prick – is just as artful, and more substantial. These are real plates of food, not just a few dots and smears on the plate. Doyle could sell that mousse in takeaway cups and I’d pay $50 for it on a lunch break, while the various elements in Mrs Prick’s dish stand apart yet play together. A smokiness in the wing (why was there only one!?) suggests a multiple treatment of brines, smokes, and low-temperature fats, while the egg yolk is the best treatment of chicken fruit we’ve seen this side of Gumshara. As close to perfect a plate as we get all night.

…and resulting in even worse photos than usual…

The third course – main mains, one might say – keeps us both on song with our half-bottle of Cote Rotie (school night and all that, though there may have been a cheeky half of something else beforehand).  A duck breast and a saddle of venison come with a variety of accompaniments – little pickles here, little fried fingers of semolina there and bits of bobs of produce that one simply will not find at Harris Farms – to allow mixing and remixing of flavours and fun.

To finish? Well, everyone says the soufflé is the go, and thus it is, light, perfectly executed, though so light – and yes, light is the point – as to almost be too rarefied. A little glass of Chateau d’Yquem – hey, it’s a birthday, right? – and perhaps a gratuitous Calvados for the Prick, and it is time to leave, feeling very full and fat and happy indeed.

At least until it is time to rejoin the throng of Hemmes’ other guests and find a cab home along the thudding vulgarity of George Street.

Which brings us back to the problem with a guy like Hemmes. From his castle he sallies forth to build beachheads in ever more suburbs from Potts Point to Surry Hills, giving us Sydneysiders just enough of what he – or we – think we want to keep us happy, but with a hefty if often unseen price.

…plus, we were a little pissed.

His big bars in town are magnets for punchy bogans and open-collared “junior managers” looking to pick up or pick a fight (not that Hemmes’ bouncers are much better behaved). But each time they act up every bluenose from Barry O’Farrell on down gets his knickers in a twist and calls for ever more restrictions on bars, higher prices on booze, and the spread of plastic sippy-cup drinking because none of us can be trusted with glass.

(The moral hazard created when New South Wales’s constabulary will issue tickets for punching peoples’ lights out on the street and magistrates find themselves hard-pressed to give a year inside for a near-fatal stomping assault is never raised in these debates, but never mind.)

Hemmes’s more boutique offerings have their own flow-on effects. The Prick begrudges no one their success in this life, but the Merivale Group’s massive capitalisation means millions can be spent fitting out a Chinese restaurant or a Mexican fast-food joint, raising the bar for independents who feel the need to spend money on appearance – rather than food – to keep up.

This also means that the publicity-industrial complex that forces constant “innovation” is sated, but that more and more money again is put into paying PRs and designers than chefs and suppliers.

Is it any wonder that the tides are pushing restaurateurs – and their customers – toward high-volume burgers and burritos and away from sitting down for a few hours with a knife and a fork?

Great man, indeed.

We Pricks have been fans of Barossa great Torbreck for years, and used to go to their winemaker dinners back when Matt Kemp was still running the old Balzac in Randwick. But we have also been aware that there have been some troubles behind the scenes. This open letter from now-ex winemaker Dave Powell making the rounds shines a sad light on the current state of affairs:

Continue reading →

Thomas Kelly’s death last year at the business end of a bogan’s fist was a tragedy of epic proportions. And as too often happens with tragedies, the event was latched upon by opportunists of various stripes and held up as proof that Sydneysiders have too much freedom, that we should all be tucked up in bed by midnight (never mind Kelly was killed around ten pm), and that Australia’s extortionate booze taxes aren’t extortionate enough to prevent the scourge of binge drinking.

As details of his death emerge in court hearings, however, certain facts point to other cultural culprits. Like piss-weak policing:

CCTV reveals Loveridge walked around Kings Cross between 10.05pm and 10.50pm  and ran into football associate David Nofoaluma and said:  ‘‘I swear I am  going to bash someone tonight.’’

Over the next 45 minutes, he attacked three more men with unprovoked blows to  the head, and was given an infringement notice by police for behaving  offensively.

A ticket? For “behaving offensively”? As opposed to hauling him downtown and charging him with multiple aggravated assaults? Back in the Prick’s hometown of New York they have zero tolerance for this sort of thing and in similar circumstances Mr Loveridge would have spent his full 72 hours in the Tombs before possibly getting bailed or just as possibly being sent off straightaway for a holiday on Riker’s Island. And Thomas Kelly might possibly still be alive, because going out and getting punchy would simply not be seen as a viable entertainment for helots such as Loveridge.

If Sydney wants a nightlife culture that all can enjoy without fear of being set upon by some violent loser with a chip on his shoulder and a case of Vodka Cruisers under his belt, then don’t shut the bars or make us all drink out of sippy cups.

Crack down — hard — on the violent losers. And not just with the occasional high-profile weekend police blitz.

Having nearly suffered an unfortunate case of head-explosion trying to sort out his Senate preferences on the NSW ballot paper, the Prick has decided what politics is missing is not another crazy single-issue party, but a crazy multi-issue party.

Ladies and gentlemen, join the Prick as we launch the Foie-tine Australia Party, or FAP for short.

Our manifesto is simple.

• We are PRO foie gras, PRO martinis, and PRO anyone who shows up with another sack of ice.
• We are AGAINST your neighbour’s sub-woofer, particularly if you weren’t invited to the party.
• We welcome boat people, especially when they invite us out for a sail.
• And our policy on carbon is simple: It belongs firmly encrusted on the outside of a ribeye, where God intended.

So come along. Join the fun.

FAP with us.

For a foie-tastic Australia.

This message authorised by Prick With a Fork, Inner-West Sydney.

UPDATE: Apparently the New Windsor has a new name as well. The preferred nomenclature is The Windsor on Park, and contrary to the below, they even have a proper website.

* * *

Many years ago, when the Prick was just a prick and home was Sydney’s east, he was part of a little collective of journos, authors, bloggers, and other reprobates who would hang around the Mill Hill Hotel under the official-sounding moniker, The Bondi Junction Institute for Advanced Studies.

The group even had a little wood-and-brass plaque made up which sat on the bar when we were in session, or rather did until some bastard stole it. Of our number was a gent called Pat Sheil, a man who went on to great things and is now making a third quixotic tilt for the seat of Wentworth in this Saturday’s election, but who at the time quite enjoyed regaling us with stories of his career at ACP’s Picture magazine.

One such yarn went as follows, and was (re)-reported in The Australian recently:

Sheil’s other claim to fame was a strange and wonderful meeting with his employer, Kerry Packer in a lift at ACP’s Park Street headquarters.

Suitably refreshed late on a Friday afternoon, Sheil was heading off to a photo shoot and took the lift down from The Picture’s offices. He was bearing a fake octopus the art department had knocked up, a stuffed goat and had a stripper in tow who was wearing a pair of cut off shorts that looked like two postage stamps roughly attached by twine. The lift stopped at the second floor and Kerry Packer stepped in.

Unsure of how to proceed, Sheil did the only thing he could do and introduced himself to his boss. 

“Mr Packer. Pat Sheil. Picture magazine.”

Packer looked Sheil and the stripper up and down.

“Carry on,” the magnate replied before alighting at the first floor. 

This stroll down memory lane comes by way of a visit to another pub (this time for a lunch, not an ill-advised weeknight session of the Institute), specifically, the New Windsor Hotel at the corner of Park and Castlereagh streets.

Now the New Windsor has never been much on the Prick’s radar but it is a legendary old ACP watering hole and as such, in that funny way the mind works, it brought back memories as hard and fast as a truckload of goodies from the Marcel Proust Madeleine Pty Ltd.

This photo is what you’d call a “brandade snap”. Ha! Get it?

Those who work in the area know that the New Windsor has been under renovation for ages but lately the hoardings have come down and the joint is back in business with a refurbished bistro upstairs and ex-Onde, ex-Berowra Waters Inn chef Laif Etournaud on the pans.  It is still a CBD pub downstairs with an eternally-ironic “VIP Lounge” and a carpet straight out of the CityRail pattern book but upstairs there are nods to something bigger, with brass borders on the table and an open kitchen that is clearly equipped to deal with more than a couple of guys slinging burgers.

But what about the food? Well, it’s good. Very good, especially for the space and market. And good value, too, as it hits a sweet spot between the Westfield food court, cafes, and more proletarian pubs on the one hand and expense account CBD restaurants like Glass or Gowings on the other.

(Incidentally it is only fair to note that Thang Ngo, who runs the innovative Noodlies food and culture blog, came along for this reverie – as well as some in-depth working through of questions relating dining, writing, and whether the perfect ramen is possible in this vale of tears, answers to which are all, I’m afraid, covered by Chatham House rules. Sorry.)

Beauty is in the eye of the steak-holder

Only a couple of menu prices start with a “2”, and even those just barely. The New Windsor does not have much in the way of a website and so it is hard to tell if there’s more on offer at dinner time. But at lunch at least the focus appears to be on doing a few items – fish, steak, half a roast chook – and doing them well. Happily for a CBD pub diner an elegant handful of starters is also on offer, underlining the room’s status as a cut above the beer-and-schnitty lunchtime set.

Cod brandade comes with thin crisps of bread; yummy, but (don’t judge) as a matter of personal preference the Prick likes his brandade in more of a fritter arrangement, and possibly encased in a zucchini flower. Never mind.

Steak, on the other hand, works out to be the best way one could spend $19 on a lunch hour. A proper but not overwhelming slab of sirloin comes well cooked and with a great crust on it. More importantly, when ordered rare it comes properly rare, a rich reddish-purple all the way through and chopped into thick slices which reveal the grain and guide where one should cut next.  Barramundi is also good, very competent, and with a hint of citrus, is pleasant, but when the Prick returns (and this could become a regular midday haunt) the steak will be the go-to order. The roast chicken may get a look-in when – if – winter returns.

Oddly for its location the place was practically deserted on a Wednesday afternoon, but it is early days. Give it a few weeks for word to filter through the ACP and other local grapevines and it will be heaving with fake octopi, strippers, and the ghost of Kerry Packer.

The Prick’s kinda place.

There are many reasons to buy April Bloomfield’s wonderful cookbook A Girl and Her Pig, and not all of them have to do with the fact that its original cover provoked a fatwa by militant vegetarians. Not only is the writing lovely, but the recipes are damn good in a very hearty, satisfying, un-fussy way. It’s not the sort of book that demands immersion circulators, or will ever ask you to smear something artfully with the back of a spoon.

One of our favourite recipes from the book is Bloomfield’s recipe for a smoked haddock chowder (though you could use smoked cod or barramundi or any other firm white-fleshed fish) and given that the papers say there is not going to be another close to brisk evening in Sydney for the next seven years or so we gave it another burl last night:

There’s a few tricks involved but the key is really letting the fish steep in the milk and cream in which you boil the potatoes, which ensures that the flavour really comes through the soup. Good fish stock is also helpful, and there are decent ones on the market now so one need not fiddle around with this on a weeknight.

At Stately Prick Manor, we also add a bit of Spanish pimenton, which adds a pleasing background heat and smoke – not overpowering smoke, mind you, but still enough so that if Tanya Plibersek found out about it she’d try and smack a warning label on the bowl. Northern hemisphere denizens getting ready for winter would do well to keep this recipe in their back pocket.

Speaking of the northern hemisphere, it is worth noting that chowder is a fairly ancient, or at least antique, concept, with obscure origins along the north-eastern coast of North America. The theory runs that Breton fisherman in Canada threw the scraps of the day’s catch into a cooking pot, or chaudière. From there it became chowder, and the famous CHOW-DAH! we think of as the staple food of Bostonians.

So go on! Say it! Say chowder!

It is the job of the publicist to create “buzz” and to that end there has been no greater advance since moveable type than the invention, if that is the word, of Twitter.

Thus Monday evening, as the great and the good of the local food scene gathered for the Sydney Morning Herald’s annual Good Food Guide gala – a.k.a. the Festival of the Hats – the Prick’s Twitter stream overflowed with tweets and re-tweets declaring that these would be the Most Controversial Good Food Awards Ever!

Were they? Well, not really, though clearly a publicist or three got the “social media” KPI ticked on their performance agreement.

Peter Doyle’s est – the subject of a coming post – dropped from three hats to two, as did Mark Best’s Marque, an overdue demotion for someone this site has long considered over-praised.

Momofuku Seibo quite deservedly picked up three hats, as did Guillaume at Bennelong. This was likely as much for the food as it was to tweak the Sydney Opera House Trust’s bizarre decision not to renew the fine diner’s lease in favour of yet another middle-brow bistro: Yawn, and in any case, isn’t that what the Opera Bar is for?

Of course, the whole concept of the “hat” is to a certain degree nonsense, an impressionistic device built on an illusion of precision. What subjectivity causes Restaurant Atelier (disclosure: mates), a sandstone jewelbox of genius on Glebe Point Road, to fall at the post with a 14.5 and not receive the extra half-measure making it a chapeau-worthy 15?

Where does that last half-point go, or come from? It would not be hard to think of plenty of other, similar examples.

Likewise why does Oscillate Wildly, whose Karl Firla-led team lately gave the Pricks the best meal they’ve had in Sydney this side of Momofuku, only rate one star – the same accolade afforded to plenty of very good, really enjoyable, perfectly deserving, but nowhere near as innovative places around town?

Sure, “all life is high school”, but it would be paranoid and childish to interpret this as nothing more than a petty Fairfax snub to a place often, and accurately, lauded by local and national News Limited critics.

Wouldn’t it?

Such cases feed into the big question hanging over the awards. Not that there are restaurants that have been undeservedly elevated, though rumours persist that the right retainers paid to the right PRs can get the right reviewers in the door, but rather that many deserving chefs have not gotten their gongs.

Certainly Sydney’s perhaps most high-profile restaurant awards (in the absence of Michelin stars the “hat” conceit remains a strong monopoly) should not be a progressive primary school’s sports day where everyone gets a prize. But so long as the results are determined and published with the sort of secrecy and infallibility usually reserved for the Vatican (and handed out with all the pomp and piss of a minor medieval Pope), clouds will linger and the faithful drift away.

To put it another way, bring on the reformation.

Far be it from the Prick to play morality police or tell other people how to act in public much give advice on how to run blog. But surely even in this permissive age it is still considered outré to lick, or pretend to lick, a gentleman’s nipple in a restaurant, even a pub-restaurant – and then go on to publish said nipple-lingus on the internet.

Yet here we are.

Additionally the ostentatious holding up of rating cards at the end of a meal at the table, as if one were a reality TV host (now there’s something to aspire to!) ought to be the sort of thing to merit exclusion from polite society. It certainly got one Adelaide restaurant off-side, and rightly so:

To the 20 food bloggers who held up laminated score cards during our busy service, we appreciate your custom but, leave the cards at home.

— press* food & wine (@pressfoodwine) August 25, 2013

Twitter more or less exploded after the above tweet, and it has been suggested that the offending bloggers were part of a collective called “SupperClub”, a site that seems to be less about the food than the outrageousness of its members who hold major tickets on themselves while coming across as sort of a wannabe Bullingdon Club for cashed-up bogans.

Boorishness is never pleasant, but its consequences are generally confined to those within earshot. (This site famously ruined Terry Durack’s dinner because we got too boisterous at Mrs Prick’s birthday dinner last year. Again, sorry, Terry.)

But the sort of thing described by Press* Food and Wine, and pushed on sites like SupperClub, is far worse, because it tars every amateur scribe and snapper who likes to write about food online with the same obnoxious brush. If there is any good thing to come of the above tweet and the reaction, it is that there appears to be a broad sentiment that this sort of thing needs to be ring-fenced lest it spread and cause good bloggers to throw up their hands and give up the game or cause restaurateurs to feel even more ambivalent about the activity.

There aren’t many rules to stick by when food-blogging, and what guidelines there are should not be hard to stick to. Write honestly (and well).

Photograph discreetly.

And don’t be a jerk.

Even if one is a bit of a Prick.