Prick With A Fork

One of the enduringly nice things about being an American living in Sydney is the way in which Australian friends and colleagues return from a first trip to the US completely besotted with the place. The reality they encounter is uniformly and utterly different to the ideas they have been fed through pop culture and the local media, both of which give Australians an even more distorted view of America than Americans get of Australia through the Crocodile Dundee franchise and that ridiculous episode of The Simpsons.

Prick With a Fatwa: The Bacon-Infused Manhattan

Thus when Australians do brave the racist, gun-loving, morbidly obese dystopia they have been told to expect (it continually amazes that despite getting rid of almost all their sub-editors, Fairfax still manages to keep US correspondent Nick O’Malley’s draft references to “AmeriKKKa” from slipping into print) they come home amazed. Upon their return the Prick generally hears reactions which range from “God, your people are friendly – not only did nobody shoot me but when I asked a stranger for directions he took the day off work to show me around his hometown!” to “Ohmigod! Freedom! I bought a carton of smokes, a case of Schlitz, a chicken fried steak, and still came away with change for a twenty! WHERE DO I SIGN UP!?”

The fact that there is a slow but building American food renaissance happening in Australia is not hurting soft power relations, either. Take Hartsyard, the new-ish American (as opposed to “New American”, but there is a bit of that in the mix too as we shall see) restaurant in Enmore Road, Newtown, where a number of bloggerati and twitterini organised by the great connector Karen Lateo and including the folk behind providore-and-ideas site Conjurup Food and blogs including Taste Explorer, Scoff and Quaff, and Local Sprouts gathered recently to celebrate free-range duck impresario Beth McMillan (of Burrawong Gaian fame) and her visit to Sydney for the appallingly-punctuated but otherwise lovely delicious. Produce Awards 2013.

Peppers Roulette: Are you feeling lucky, punk?

The deal with Hartsyard is that it promises down-home American country food: Real fried chicken, oyster po’ boys, pulled pork, all the virile box-tickers beloved of bored local food columnists. This it delivers, and delivers well. But in the mix are some startlingly sophisticated dishes both in presentation and technique which elevate Llewellyn and Hartsyard well above the over-swelled ranks of the brioche sliders brigades.

Our meal starts as any American meal damn well should, i.e., with a proper drink. In the Prick’s case, a bacon-infused bourbon Manhattan (complete with a little candied bacon garnish), which may simultaneously be the greatest innovation in cocktail making since Dr Wallbanger emerged from his lab, the most American drink imaginable short of moonshine, and given their various prohibitions, the most non-sharia compliant drink ever conceived. Christopher Hitchens, when asked to describe Las Vegas, famously summed it up in one word: Un-Islamic. So too this Manhattan, which couldn’t have been any more so if it had a terrier swimming in it. Stunning.

Then, food: A plate of pickled peppers – say that ten times fast – with the promise, or threat, that one of the mix might just be an outlier ready blow the roof of the lucky eater’s palate off. Fun, and a little daring, with flecks of feta and a cool apple gelée standing guard to calm any fires. Fried oyster po’ boys are lovely (if slightly out of kilter bun-to-filling wise), as are bags of popcorn with fried shrimp and an “I’ll just have a glass of this, thanks” dipping sauce.

Foie-tastic duck jaffles…

But these are just introit before more complex and sophisticated dishes which leave the dude food in the dust. A dish of octopus, a contender for dish-of-the-night, comes suddenly out of left field and promotes a debate about cooking technique (sous-vide? brined? Chef, settle the bet!). It’s a perfect balance of tastes and textures – warming chilli, cooling sauce, tender flesh, crunchy garnishes – which also show that Llewellyn is a guy who can use tricks like ersatz sands for flavour, not just effect.

Likewise, a plate of ricotta gnudi  – didn’t see that coming! – is unexpected, and light, and a little intermezzo before duck rillette jaffles, topped with shaved foie gras and garnished with freeze-dried rhubarb turn up. Is it necessary to say anything more? Here conversation dies: eyes roll into the backs of skulls as knuckles rap out little paradiddles of approbation across the table.

Is fried. Is good.

Other dishes arrive: A plate of fried chicken, great, almost as good as the Prick makes (which is as good a review as anyone’s going to get in these parts), complete with a biscuit and a country gravy thick and rich enough to void a life insurance policy. Pork, too, pulled but really done a number of ways and topped with a maple bacon, fantastic but almost too much at this point in the evening. This is not a build-your-own-degustation place.

Our gang still has room for dessert, giving the kitchen the chance to once again prove not only that this ain’t no disco, it’s not just fancied-up hipster fried food shack either. Chocolate ganache, dehydrated mousse, sorrel sorbet, crispy quinoa, pomegranate? Yes please, and only one of a number we sampled (including a slab of tiramisu the size of a paving brick, helpfully and ironically garnished with a cursive tiramisu on the plate, as if we were in some Norton Street pasta joint).

Dessert goes a bit beyond the down-home pecan pie

A stunning night and one that bears repeating, next time with the Little Pricks perhaps. Llewellyn and Hart have a great formula going here and it is no surprise it is often booked out. Pairing high-end bistro food that veers into fine dining territory with classic comfort food works, largely because he knows where to keep them separate: More involved dishes are what they are and show great produce and great technique used to great result, but simple classics are left, largely, as they are, and as they should be. It’s a lesson more chefs should learn.

Although set in the United States, this piece by Mark Oppenheimer – who, as the religion columnist for the New York Times, one would expect to be about as right-on as one can get this side of an Occupy! encampment – is a great dissection of a parenting style the Prick suspects many readers will recognise, i.e., that of the modern-day, left-wing Puritan:

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This story pretty much sums up everything that’s wrong with the Sydney food scene at present:

East Sydney’s re-emergence as a dining hub will be boosted when former Marque head chef Pasi Petanen opens a restaurant in the Cafe Pacifico site on Riley Street at the end of the month …

It’ll operate a set menu, and Petanen is already planning a tribute to Cafe Pacifico’s Mexican past with his version of tacos, made with rye. He’s also working on another playful new dish.

”I’m calling it pho-tato,” he says.

Can’t wait.

Black gold … Australian “T” … truffles, that is …

Remember when truffles were a big deal? Sure, they’re still a big deal, but they’re not a big-big deal anymore, if you know what I mean. This year’s truffle season – and how great the foresight and how deep the patience of those clever folk who a dozen or so years ago decided to seed their properties – seems to have produced a bumper crop, to the point where they are now selling hunks of vac-sacked Perigords in Harris Farms for twenty bucks a throw. Not chump change, but not the heavy freight demanded in the old days when the only truffles one could get in this country demanded business class airfare from Italy as part of their appearance riders either. I tell you what, kids these days don’t know how easy they’ve got it.

Take the Little Pricks for example.  We found out that young Nick With a Fork had a bit of a win with his selective schools exam just before the weekend, and as such there was barely a second thought given to adding some celebratory truffle to the big Saturday morning produce shop: Hell, given the private school fees he’s just saved us, we could take him to Sepia every week of the academic year and still come out ahead. Thinly shaved, the truffle would go well with the weekend’s big cooking project, duck ravioli.

Now ravioli, indeed filled pasta in general,  is one of those things a lot of people find to be too fiddly, too much of a pain, and too much of a risk – all that work can turn into a pot of boiling water and crap if you’re not careful – to be worth the effort. Nonsense: As a wise man once said, “If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.”

And as the Prick might say, “If you’ve never had a dinner go completely tits-up, you’re not cooking enough.”

As these things go, duck ravioli is comparatively easy. We started out by putting a flock of duck Marylands which had been cured with salt and herbs overnight Friday in the sous-vide for about 12 hours at 76 degrees, bagged in pairs with a couple of tablespoons of duck fat (a few are sitting in the fridge for a nice winter weeknight’s dinner).

The next day, we got our hands dirty:

“Did you wash your hands?” “Yes!” “Well, wash them again!”

The key here is to shred the duck reasonably finely: Big hunks will interfere with the pasta, and could even poke holes in the dough. To the meat we added a tub of ricotta, a little salt, thyme, and chives. Then it was time to make the pasta.

Some cooks like to make nice round discs, but in a concession to trying to teach children how to do this and the fact that the Pope was not joining us for dinner thus throttling back the need for spectacularly uniform presentation, we used the tried-and-true “fold” method, sealing with egg wash, trimming, and then carefully squeezing out the air:

Content creation

(For anyone playing along at home, that pasta dough was five eggs and 500 grams of 00 flour, kneaded and allowed to rest before being run through the machine to the second-thinnest setting.)

And before we knew it, wa-hey!

Wa-hey!

The sauce? Something simple: Jerusalem artichokes sautéed down with a good slug of madeira, and left to simmer with some brown chicken stock before being blitzed and doped up with chives and cream and seasoning.

And, of course, truffles:

Duck, cream, and truffles: Perfect together

Oh, we also knocked up a quick crudo of snapper, preserved lemon, and herbs. But this was mostly to teach the boys, who’d been asking, the meaning of “ironically”. As in, “Even though dad thinks they’re kinda wanky, he’s put some thin discs of radish on our starter … ironically!”

Yes, I know the forks are on the wrong side. I haven’t taught the Little Pricks proper front of house yet.

The thing is, they actually worked, too.

Successful chefs, like successful politicians, generally possess healthy egos. Nothing wrong with that.

But is there a chef with a more monumental, Rudd-like self-regard than Sydney’s Mark Best? The latest edition of the otherwise brilliant Fool magazine asked 100 chefs and food writers to name “the world’s most underrated chef.”

No points for guessing Best’s answer:

Best is not a horrible chef but the Pricks have never understood the hype around his semi-eponymous Marque; our sole visit a few years back was fiddly and unsatisfying and suggested that despite his self-regard (“our nations [sic] most relentlessly progressive restaurant”, he touts on his website) the man has a lot to learn about the “hospitality” side of the hospitality business. A bit of humility wouldn’t go astray, either.

With apologies in advance for coming across all Elizabeth Farrelly, it is safe to say that preserving our built heritage is not something we do particularly well in Australia and certainly barely at all in New South Wales. Much of Sydney’s CBD is an eyesore: George Street south of Park is a slum, Harry Seidler’s wavy balconies are a cliché in concrete, and of course this is the city that almost tore down the Queen Victoria Building to put up a car park.

And the harbour? That magnificent feature is about to absorb its latest insult in the form of a “high rollers” casino built by the notorious vulgarian James Packer for his just as vulgar clients, ex-Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army cadres-turned-baccarat addicted tycoons flown in by the private planeload.

Which is why it is so wonderful to find structures that manage to survive the march of “progress” while remaining relevant in this post-modern world.

Take Lochiel House, a vintage 1825 farmhouse on the side of Bell’s Line of Road in the foothills of the Blue Mountains which has somehow survived the wrecking ball for nearly two centuries. We Pricks took a drive out there on a recent soggy Saturday afternoon: A long way to go for lunch, perhaps, but word on the place has been good since the husband-and-wife team of Wayne and Jess Jenkins took it over a year or so ago. Happy welcomes, a table by the fire, and a glass of wine were immediately preferable to sitting around Stately Prick Manor for what seemed like the 37^th consecutive day of rain, obsessively checking for leaks and waiting for a dove to come back with an olive branch.

See that char on the scallops? Lots of chefs are too scared to go for that. But that’s what makes them good.

First off, scallops: elegant, perfectly cooked, with a bit of pork for oomph, a little salmon roe for pop, and some chorizo sand and apple to make the whole thing soignée. A beautiful plate, almost too restrained despite its many elements but in the context of a bigger meal with building flavours it hits just the right note. Mrs Prick meanwhile had her heart set on a cauliflower soufflé but it was not to be, settling – but not really, because it hit the spot – for a butternut soup, poured at the table over a bowl of garnishes.

Then, an interregnum. Having ordered nose-to-tail pork platters we are hit with a tinge of menu envy watching  our neighbours polish off the cleverest beef-three-ways we have seen in a while (a matte black plate carrying a cottage pie, what looks to be some very precious morsels of hangar steak, and a beef marrow bone, it looks like a bit of Flintstones by way of Heston Blumenthal and we briefly consider asking the kitchen to get one on for our dessert).

Just ducky!

Which would have been a mistake as the kitchen sends out a plate of what the menu describes (slightly burying the lead) as “local pine mushrooms, brioche, herb oil and duck hearts and eggs”. Well then, what a clever dish: On their own the egg, bread, and mushrooms almost make it a country breakfast, but the hearts – little numbers on rosemary skewers – take things to another level. The yolk creates a bit of sauce, the herb oil kicks that sauce practically into béarnaise territory, the dense hearts turn out to be immensely flavourful, it’s a bit much for Mrs Prick (who, as previously discussed, is not a huge offal fan, but gamely gave it a go) but for the Prick’s money it was dish of the day.

And the pork? Great, fun, four or five dishes in one, we have a hard time deciding which is our favourite bit – the explosive croquette of pork trotter, the slices of tete de cochon, and so on,  before deciding that the humble hash of tail and potato hash is send-us-home-with-a-bowl good. Even the carrots are good, especially the little shredded ones, lightly pickled to cut through the richness on the plate.

Everything but the squeal…

All up a helluva satisfying meal (a real, not beefy dessert, was also involved), and with enough else on the menu to have the Pricks already planning a return visit. The farmhouse setting with Jess playing hostess and Wayne serving up the food is gemutlich and warm in all good senses of the word, it’s visiting mates with a cosy place in the country without the awkwardness of lying in bed Sunday morning needing to pee and wondering what time the rest of the house gets up.

It is also a fine example of how things don’t need to be wrecked to stay up to date. Lochiel House has lived through a number of owners and incarnations as a restaurant. Mrs Prick grew up down the road and remembers celebration dinners there under its old regime when the menu was all steaks and Wellingtons and “important” pastas, which were the fashion of the time. Today it is turning out what might be called country-mod-Oz, not super-high-end fine dining with lots of foams and spheres and gratuitous discs of radishes, but not the lobotomised burger-and-burrito nonsense that keeps too much of Sydney in thrall either. It’s technique, flavour, humour, everything but the squeal and not much time for vegetarians and if city folk need a reference point and an elevator pitch it’s a bit Colin Fassnidge’s 4Fourteen by way of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

But you don’t need an elevator pitch, you need a free afternoon. I hear the weather’s lovely this weekend, just right for a drive. Tell ‘em the Prick sent you.

(Warning: Rant follows. If that’s not your cup of tea, perhaps the Prick can offer you a nice recipe or review or tales of meat?)

Since 2001 Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been like a case of herpes, always flaring up to stand in the way of a good time and impossible to get rid of. Acquired by New York City voters (including, shamefully, this one) after 9/11 like some social disease picked up in a long-regretted post-attacks hookup, Bloomberg has in the last decade become the personification of the elite, technocratic ideal that people are idiots, marketing departments pull the strings, and that only the heavy hand of the state stands between us and a corpulent, corporatized brave new world that looks like WALL-E without the cool spaceships or romantic robots.

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South Australia is known for many great things – food, wine, OK there’s two – but its reputation as, if not Australia’s murder capital, its creepy murder capital, is something the state would sooner we all forget.

Which is why it strikes the Prick as odd that Tourism SA has launched a new $6 million campaign to promote the state’s Barossa wine region built around a farily eerie TV spot which features Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand“:

Take a little walk to the edge of town
Go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms,
like a bird of doom
As it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires,
in the humming wires
Hey man, you know
you’re never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge,
past the mills, past the stacks
On a gathering storm comes
a tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with
a red right hand.

As these things go, this is right up there with every bank or cruise line that’s ever used Iggy Pop’s heroin anthem “Lust for Life” to sell home loans and holidays.

So yesterday at lunch I went to the local fishmonger looking for something new to cook and was put onto something called coral trout. “What should I do with this,” I asked.

The reply was emphatic: “Steam it.”

Putting the call out to Twitter, the advice – thanks, tweeps – was the same: “Steam it.”

So steaming it was to be, and wa-hey, that worked out well. I give you … Coral Trout a la Prick:

Not the most hyper-stylised photo, but it was damn tasty (Mrs Prick loved it) and worth a go for anyone looking for some easy and, yes, healthy weeknight cooking. Here’s how:

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Liberty is a precious and mercurial thing: In one place it is giveth, in another taketh away. In the US last week the Supreme Court struck down the “Defence of Marriage Act”, a bit of legacy legislation signed into law by that great defender of marriage Bill Clinton. People danced and celebrated in the streets at the prospect of gays and lesbians finally being able to legally marry the loves of their lives. Barack Obama called it (bizarrely as, if anything, the Supreme Court exists to temper populism) a “victory for democracy”.

Stay with me, the Prick is going somewhere with this, promise.  Because even as America’s wedding-industrial complex was gearing up to serve its newest and most fabulous clientele, Obama’s Food and Drug Administration was amping up its war against that great public health threat, mimolette cheese, the latest in a long series of cack-handed government attempts to tell people what they can and can’t eat or drink – i.e., what they can do with their own bodies. Yet save for a few groups here and there, the move has prompted little opposition much less organised protest.

Raw beef. Raw egg. YOLO!

Which brings us back to freedom, and how people and politicians who claim to like it cannot be selective. Those who think it is wrong for the government to tell you who you can or cannot marry but think it is perfectly fine for the state to tell you what you can or cannot eat have some splainin’  to do.

Not that Australia is immune to this – no sir. While here the gay marriage debate burbles along in the background where it will sooner or later come to a positive conclusion, the war on food continues unabated.

It has gone largely unremarked given the other news out of Canberra, but a couple of weeks ago the ACT’s Chief Health Officer (yes, there is such a position to serve the Territory’s quarter-million or so public servants) came out and gave a thumping denunciation of … raw eggs.

“If you serve raw egg products in your restaurant”, Dr Paul Kelly told a public hearing, “then you’re dicing with death.”

Yes, that’s right, dicing with death.

Thank you very much Dr Kelly, but I’ll take my chances, and if they ever try to force Sydney chefs to mix their aiolis with pasteurised Praise or abandon any hope of ever serving  a proper Caesar salad again (as you are clearly trying to do in Canberra), this is one Prick who will take to the streets.

Because risks are part of life. Getting to dinner is generally far more dangerous than the meal itself. The other night a trip to Elizabeth Street’s Fix St James involved a taxi ride with a driver who not only smelled like someone opened a spice bazaar in the men’s room of the Port Authority Bus Terminal but also could not defog his windows in the midst of a torrential downpour.

Raw eggs? I’d already diced with death by the time I got to the door and was more than happy to order up a main-course plate of steak tartare – raw beef topped with a raw egg yolk, so take that Dr Kelly! – just to wind down.

“Nah mate I’m not one of those guys who takes pictures of their food just wanted to remember the wine ya know mate?”

It was a good call, classic, with no inappropriate attempts to bring “innovation” to a dish that needs none. A Prick favourite, it’s just the sort of thing to rhapsodise over the next time some hippy starts talking to you about raw food. And this was rhapsody-worthy: The beef was hand-chopped, properly seasoned, with a thick and creamy yellow yolk ready to burst forth perched on top.

While we’re on the subject of beef, a Coorong hanger steak was similarly perfect, a tricky cut to get right, and heartbreaking when done wrong as the cut is so rare, this walked a lovely line between texture and tenderness. Not sure the mountain of rocket like Jill DuPleix’s hair was necessary, but nevermind.

Other dishes (and not many photos today; we were with Mrs Prick work people and thus discretion was the better part of blogging) worked similarly well. Mrs Prick, a great lover of cauliflower, is still talking about the soup two days later.

Duck confit? Nailed it. Likewise a sirloin was, reputedly, excellent. Someone had the smoked eel soufflé and raved; that’s definitely a “next time” dish. As are a number of others, from the brandade to the bone marrow. All of this was washed down with some lovely wines off the restaurant’s extensive and interesting list: a bit of Macon-Villages here, a little Nebbiolo there, and for once served in the proper glasses (a small but big deal if you know what I mean).

Having walked past the restaurant a million times (it looks like a café from the front but is deceptively deep), Fix is destined to become a regular haunt of the Pricks. We are already plotting return trips to attack their chateaubriand, and their Armagnac “flights”. But even without going that high up the tree, Fix turns out solid, hearty “modern classics” (if that’s not a contradiction) and does so really, really well. It stands athwart the trends that buck Sydney dining to and fro yelling, “Stop!” This is unreservedly a good thing. Apparently they also do regular wine dinners and, the place is a stone’s throw from both Pricks’ offices for lunch, which is perhaps even better. If dangerous.

But hey, with freedom comes responsibility, right?