Eating my way around Singapore

A copy of Makansutra in hand (thanks, Max!), I've spent the past week eating my way around Singapore, mostly in hawker centres and food courts. What a city for food! The dishes below are some of the best I've eaten. Forgive the iPhone photography, please, and also the lazy year or so since either of us posted on this blog. 

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Beef Kway Teow soup at Changi Beef Kway Teow Mee

A bit baffled by the hawker centre at first, I stumbled over my words as I ordered. The helpful old lady manning the counter tried to help me out: "you want stomach, or no stomach?" I wussed out and chose the "beef only" option, which ended up bearing a striking, if superficial, resemblance to pho tai. In fact, I had a Singaporean explain to me that she'd had great beef kway teow soup in Melbourne, but I'm pretty sure she was describing Mekong on Swanston St. 

The broth is light, without the deep beefiness of pho. This is exactly the sort of thing you want to eat in the Singapore heat, where it feels as if you're drinking the air: a light, refreshing, soup, all celery and basil and beef. A big bowlful was $SG 4. 

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Char Kway Teow at No. 18 Zion Road Fried Kway Teow, Zion Riverside Food Centre

Somewhat confusingly, No. 18 FKT is now located at stall #17, but it doesn't appear that anything has been lost in the move of a few metres. This place has quite the soup nazi vibe, with an old man hunched over his wok, intensely concentrating on each batch of noodles as he fries it, barely acknowledging the orders as they're passed to him. 

You have three choices: small, medium or large noodles, for $3, $4 or $5 respectively. A few people in front of people got theirs to take away, wrapped up in a piece of paper and whisked away to elsewhere. Why people eat KFC in this city, I will never understand.

The 'dude food' descriptor is a bit obnoxious, really, but if anything fits the bill it's this. A gutsy mound of fried noodles, heaving with slivers of lap cheong and briny, sweet cockles, the noodles seared so precisely that you'd swear he'd cooked them separately, doting on each strand like an adoring dad. Devouring this with my good friend, a mug of Tiger, sitting next to the river in the open air, left me in the sort of euphoric revery that is usually only sparked by tasting menus at thirty times this price. A real meal to remember.

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Chicken Rice at Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, Maxwell Road Food Centre

I walked nearly every aisle of the food centre looking for Tian Tian, but I needn't have bothered squinting at the signage: it's easily identified by the queue that snakes around the double-fronted hawker's hut, around the back of the centre and out into the open air. Locals gladly queue for half an hour or more for their plate of chicken and rice. I had to try Tian Tian, given Bourdain's raves and the three chopstick rating from Makansutra ("die, die, must try!"), but I must admit I was less excited about this than some of the other dishes on my extended SIngapore menu. While I've had good chicken rice in the past, I had never quite understood why people hold this simple dish so close to their hearts. Now I'm a believer.

I stood there queuing in the midday heat, sweating like the sunburnt Pom I almost am, genes more suited to Manchester and jeans to Melbourne, unsure of what to expect. I'm still not sure I'm able to discern the subtle qualities that distinguish a great chicken rice from the merely good, though the quality of the sauces has been quite variable at the few places I've tried here. Perhaps it's a bit like a poached egg: it's easy to tell bad from good, but to separate the great from the good requires the sort of studious devotion to a single dish that those of us with a more varied diet struggle to attain. 

Nevertheless, Tian Tian's reputation is clearly well deserved: the chicken has that gelatinous wobble, the rice that mysterious, fragrant depth of flavour and the sauces are fresh and pungent. I just might have to eat chicken rice more often so I know how good Tian Tian truly is.

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Chilli crab at Dragon Phoenix, Clark Quay

At first I wasn't sure what to make of this place, up on the sixth floor of a shopping centre/hotel complex… I was expecting to emerge from the lift to see a food court, an air-conditioned equivalent of the hawkers centres, with a big queue snaking around to the chilli crab place. Instead, a couple of chinese symbols that I guessed meant "Dragon Phoenix" were all I could see. It was an actual restaurant, with tables and a roof and the whole extravagant production. Something different!

The hosts looked like they didn't know what to make of me either, a lone, youngish white guy wandering in with my Uniqlo shopping bags and a confused look on my face. They sat me near the only other two gweilo in the place, a disgruntled looking pair in their 50s, who sat silently seething at each other through their brief and perfunctory meal.

I was expecting the sort of abrupt indifference that often characterises the service in Chinese restaurants, but the hosts bent over backwards to be friendly and explain things. I ordered a whole chilli crab and some steamed peanuts and chilli sauce to start, and I was reunited with my old companion, a mug of Tiger.

Chilli crab is not a dainty dish. It is not a delicate dish. It's a brute force, all hands on deck, sauce and shell flying everywhere, messy hands, messy face sort of a dish. I got up a rhythm that became compulsive, cracking the claws, gouging out that sweet flesh into the sour-spicy broth, scooping up the larger morsels with my chopsticks, soaking up as much as I could with a fried bun, rinse, repeat. It's an involved ritual but it's very much worth the hassle. 

Eventually I got talking to one of the old men who seemed to run the place, he seemed genuinely happy that I enjoyed the crab and didn't find it too spicy. I wandered back to my hotel, along the river, wondering why I'd never been to Singapore before.

Rumi

The first night I arrived in Melbourne, almost exactly 9 months ago, I decided to take a walk around Brunswick. I headed east from my friends' house, walked up Sydney Road for a bit, past the dual-purpose kebab stand/car washes, and then kept heading east to Lygon St, becoming increasingly hungry. By this time it was about 9pm on a Saturday and I'd been walking for about an hour. My plane had landed at six that morning and I was exhausted. 

I came across Hellenic Republic, a restaurant I was aware of thanks to the owner's ubiquity, and decided it would be a good place for a solo diner. I had assumed that being by myself would mean that it would be easy for the restaurant to accommodate me. Apparently I was wrong! I asked for a seat for one at the bar, and the host sort of rolled her eyes at me, looked over at the half-empty bar and seemed reluctant to let me in. I'm used to being treated a bit dismissively in restaurants; I'm from Perth. I just wasn't in the mood to put up with it that night. Instead, I walked straight out and kept walking down Lygon St towards the city.

Eventually I arrived at Rumi, a place I recognised as the object of Bourdain's near-ecstatic praise in an episode of No Reservations. The maître d’ was the opposite of Hellenic Republic: warm, friendly, happy to welcome me. I sat at the bar and proceeded to have an incredible meal of slow-roasted lamb shoulder and deep-fried cauliflower, drank a couple of beers and read a book. I was immediately sold on the place, and I've been back many times since. 

The food is the attraction. The chef, Joseph Abboud, cooks the Lebanese dishes he grew up with, but updates it and gently modernises it around the edges, bringing his classical training to bear on food that's far from French. On one of my solo visits he saw me reading The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman and we got to talking about the French Laundry and Thomas Keller. The chef is a guy who is clearly in love with his craft, and it shows in his food. 

The lamb shoulder, a staple on an ever-evolving menu, is slowly roasted on the bone for some absurd length of time, its exterior deep black, the gelatinous flesh collapsing under the weight of a fork. It's served with sirkanjabin, a sweet mint sauce that is comfortingly familiar to those of us with a family background more Manchester than Marjeyoun. 

I had a near-religious experience with the cauliflower. It's just slightly crispy fried florets, big enough to retain their earthy interior, with sweetly caramelised onions, pinenuts and raisins. Maybe it doesn't sound like much, but holy HELL is it Much. It is very much Much. This dish kicked off a cauliflower odyssey, I started eating the formerly-boring vegetable whenever I saw it on a menu, but nowhere quite hits the heights of this dish. 

Bourdain raved about the quail, and he wasn't wrong. Two skewers of quail breast and thigh, grilled and smoky on the outside, a faint pink within. They seem to be served a different way each time I go back: sometimes they're smothered in grape molasses, or perhaps pomegranate, sticky-sweet luminescent pink against the bird's charred skin. The last time we had the pleasure of eating this dish it was served with a Lebanese version of salsa verde (the name escapes me). 

It's obscenely good value, too. Order the banquet and you'll get five ample courses for $45 per head. It'll probably include the cauliflower, lamb shoulder and a version of the quail, but you'll also get pickles with labne and flat bread, addictive little puff pastry cigars stuffed with salty cheese (sigara boregi), several delicious and inventive salads (freekeh, if you're lucky), a plate of lightly-spiced school prawns that you devour in their entirety, amongst other things. 

This is, for so many reasons, my favourite restaurant in Melbourne.

Rumi

132 Lygon St
Brunswick East

Note: Claire at Melbourne Gastronome has a bunch of photos on her blog, as she is not a lazy, scared little man.

Los Amates!

Here is what happened on Wednesday:

1. KH comments on the previous post asking what we think of Los Amates, a Mexican restaurant in Fitzroy.
2. I say to Matt "we should go there"!
3. He says "Yes! Tonight?"
4. I book us a table. The girl on the phone has a devastatingly cute accent.
5. We go to there.

To start we ordered some Guacamole con totopos. Here is Matt:

I'm among friends here (hello, three readers and a spam bot), so I'll tell you what I really think: avocado is pretty much the worst. Not literally the worst; it is not as bad as soy babycino, vegan meat substitutes or fat free alternatives to mayonnaise. No, avocado is just boring, with its gelatinous texture and bland flavour. The thought of some smug yummy mummy gently smushing an avocado on her linseed rye makes me want to gag. Use butter, people.


Anyway, good guacamole manages to transcend its origins by spiking the avocado with enough salt, lime juice and occasionally other things (a little bit of tomato concasse, in this case). Los Amates serves good guacamole. What more is there to say? 

We then shared the Taquiza Platter which is a selection of three tacos. This was way too much food for two people. We could've fed at least three, maybe four from it if we had also had the Chicken Mole Tamales we were eyeing off. We chose Tacos de Cochinita Pibil (Braised shredded pork Yucatan style, marinated with achiote & spices), Tacos de Lengua (Ox tongue Mexico City style, steamed with herbs & spices) and Taco de Tinga (Chicken cooked in a tomato & chipotle salsa). Again here is Matt to talk about the actual food:

The ox tongue was my choice, and I was a bit disappointed. The slices of tongue were slightly chewy and strangely spiced. Still, not THAT bad. The other two meats were much better. The chicken in particular was outstanding, with its chipotle smoke and heat the highlight of the night. The tacos were served with two salsas, one a verde with tomatillos (bonus points there), the other a mild, sweet tasting red sauce. 


In conclusion, Los Amates was pretty good! It came to about 85 bucks, including 2 beers each and a bag of leftovers that would easily have fed a third person, but instead will give us some lunch or dinner instead. Definitely would go back again and try other dishes!

Los Amates
34 Johnston St, Fitzroy

Queso Blanco for Mamasita Inspired Corn

Mamasita is an awesome mexican restaurant in Melbourne. It is young (it opened the same night I arrived here, four months ago, which makes us soulmates) and it is great. I've never been to Mexico and so I can't say whether this is authentic or not but I also don't give two shits. It's the closest to the great mexican food we ate in the States, and that is good enough for me. If you live in Melbourne, you should go to Mamasita. If you don't live in Melbourne, you should come and visit, and go there, and take me with you. Everything we have eaten there has been excellent, but they have this corn on the menu that is so good, you will want to cancel every other dish ordered and just get repeat corn instead.

("The Corn" is actually Elotes callejeros: "Street Style" chargrilled corn with queso, chipotle mayonnaise, & lime)

Anyway. The other night we had friends over for tacos and as a starter I attempted to recreate this dish. I made Homesick Texan's chipotle mayonnaise and I also used her recipe for Queso Blanco which is a soft creamy and very mild spanish/mexican cheese:

Ingredients:
2L whole milk
1/4 cup lime juice
salt

Bring the milk to an almost boil, add the lime juice and let it simmer for 5 minutes or so. From here on, it looks pretty disgusting as the milk curdles and goes lumpy and you have flashbacks of being spewed on by baby cousins.

Pour the contents of the pot into a cheesecloth lined colander in the sink and drain for a few minutes, and sprinkle with salt.

Bundle up the cheesecloth and tie it so the cheese is all in a ball, and hang it somewhere to drain for a few hours. I left it overnight, which was fine as it is winter but obviously you wouldn't want to do it if the temperature was anything near warm.

In the morning I untied the cloth, and inside was a neat little white ball of cheese! It held together pretty well, there was quite a bit stuck in the cloth but I don't know if that is just what happens.. The cheese apparently will keep in the fridge for as long as the milk would have.

For the corn, we simply grilled it in a pan, brushed on some chipotle mayonnaise and grated the queso over. It didn't grate particularly well, as it reached room temperature it got quite soft. Next time I would make sure to grate it straight from the fridge - or even frozen might work. We ended up just sort of crumbling it over the corn, and then sprinkled some smoked paprika over and served with limes.

Not as pretty as Mamasita's but it tasted good, and having leftover chipotle mayonnaise and queso in the fridge is a good bonus!

Recipes

"If you have a good palate and oodles of patience, you can achieve amazing dishes with the right recipe. You must, however, follow the recipe". -Matt Preston.

What a load of crap.

Preston is a very good food writer, despite being prone to the occasional lapse into encyclopaedic recitation of factoids. His unfortunately-titled book Cravat-a-Licious is an enjoyable read. 

However, I couldn't disagree more with his "rule" about recipes. In Cravat-a-Licious, Preston lists a number of "rules" that he thinks ought to guide home cooks. They're mostly fairly unobjectionable, if a tad patronising. The recipe rule, however, is pretty much offensive. Preston's silly rule tells us home cooks that the fundaments of cooking are beyond our feeble grasp; that our role is merely to reassemble pre-ordained dishes as if they were flat-packed furniture.

It's also at odds with his rule #13, "cook from your heart". How can you "cook from your heart" if you're robotically, slavishly following a recipe?

I started out highly recipe-dependent and completely scared of failure in the kitchen. Cooking, for me, was something I took up as a means to an end when I first moved out of home, the end being my slightly gluttonous love of eating. I soon found that I loved cooking for its own sake, but it took a while to learn when and how to veer away from the strictures of recipes, to substitute and improvise and even create dishes of my own: ie., to actually cook properly. 

Preston's rule tells us not to bother, that we're better being fearful of food and dutifully following a recipe, measuring out 125 grams of flour here and 15ml of olive oil there. He does backtrack a bit with rule #34: "if you are a good cook you don't have to follow a recipe word for word". What a generous concession to the abilities of home cooks.

As I said at the start, I like Matt Preston. I didn't watch Masterchef, but I do think he's a good writer. I just find his attitude towards home cooks a bit patronising and dismissive, which is surprising from someone who often seems to value rustic "authenticity" over fiddly fine-dining.

Melbourne

Hello internet! It has been a while.

Since we last posted, we've moved to Melbourne! Well, I've moved to Melbourne (I'm Matt; hi). Soda is moving in a few days.

I think this blog will continue, but will be less about things we've cooked and eaten in Perth, and more about things we've cooked and eaten in Melbourne. Makes sense, really.

I've already started to eat my way around this city. The highlights of January were Cumulus, Inc., Rumi (twice), Cafe Vue, MoVida, Auction Rooms (a million times), the bratwurst and borek shops at the Queen Vic Market and Gigibaba.

Expect to see the same shoddy iPhone photography and tediously overworked prose you've become wearily accustomed to, only this time applied to the restaurants of a whole new city! A city with a million food bloggers who have already blogged about every last cafe, milk bar, soup stand, izakaya and laneway pop-up restaurant!

I'm not quite sure what I'll contribute by adding my voice to the thronging virtual masses of Melburnians yelling across each other about the latest developments in Andrew McConnell's career (dude is KING of this city, apparently). I'll give it a go anyway. Also we will keep cooking things and posting about things we cook, in another startlingly original contribution to the weblog genre.

Hope you'll still be interested in reading!

Tacos!

Oh hello here are some tacos we ate in chronological order, in California 2009.

El Coyote, LA & Danny's Deli, Venice Beach

Kogi Korean Taco Truck* & LA Farmers Market

 

Taqueria Castillo in SF & Nopalito, SF*

 

Pancho Villa, SF & somewhere on Market St, SF

 

Market St, SF & Baja Fresh in a Service Station on the drive back from SF to LA

*Special written super praises may follow for Kogi & Nopalito, easily the kings of 2009 Taco Adventures!

The French Laundry

Yountville is almost creepily scenic. Imagine Margaret River if it wasn't full of franchises. So, imagine Bridgetown, only without a highway down the middle. It also feels a bit like Disneyland, except instead of Mickey Mouse the central character that the town revolves around is Thomas Keller.

Keller has three restaurants in this small, one-street town. The Michelin one-star Bouchon, the casual family-style Ad Hoc, and the world-beating reason we'd driven an hour and a bit north of San Francisco, the French Laundry. He also has the spin-off Bouchon Bakery, a little shop front that started off purely to supply the restaurants, but is now open to the public. They still deliver bread down the street in a little branded delivery bicycle, a twee touch that would make me retch and wince in disbelief if it was in an Audrey Tatou movie.

Keller has a lot going on, but the focus is very much the French Laundry.


We wandered up the main street from the little converted train we were staying in, hoping to stumble across The Restaurant, when we came across a farm. Rows and rows of cabbages, herbs, lettuces of all kinds, a giant persimmon tree, a greenhouse.




Then we looked a bit closer and realised...

That's not just a farm, that's the farm, the French Laundry's kitchen garden. We turned around and there it was, the culinary mecca.

A few hours later, we were inside, and ready to eat.

I'd love to describe each dish we ate, but I'm afraid I'd bore you. The menu is a nine course degustation plus assorted canapes, with a choice between an omnivorous menu and a vegetarian menu. Each menu gives a choice between two alternatives on several courses, giving you the chance to taste even more than the allotted number of dishes if you're willing to share (we did, although sometimes reluctantly).

We ate the signature salmon cornets, a foie gras terrine with hazelnuts and brioche, a dumpling with tripe and black truffles, two different fish dishes. Tiny rolls from the Bouchon Bakery were served with a French butter and one from Vermont that comes from a dairy farm with four cows. Soda raved about her tiny rack and saddle of rabbit. We had incredible lamb from Elsyian Fields Farm, the saddle wrapped in its own fat and cooked sous vide, tasting much more strongly gamey than the lamb we eat at home and the more subtle roast we had a few nights earlier at Chez Panisse.

There was a composed cheese course, a pre-dessert that took its cues from the Dark and Stormy cocktail  featuring a ginger beer foam and ginger tuile, a bakewell tart and chocolate cake (that of course didn't look like bakewell tart and chocolate cake), some mignardises including a sublime salted caramel truffle.

You can see some fairly average photos of these incredible dishes on my Picasa, but I really need to rave about two courses in particular: Oysters and Pearls, and the "Caesar Salad".

I almost wish I hadn't eaten Oysters and Pearls, because now that I have there's no turning back. Oysters and Pearls set the bar so high, I'm not sure any other restaurant will be able clear it. This is a dish with aims so far beyond sustenance that it deserves its own category as a pleasure-delivery vehicle: to call it it "food" feels woefully inadequate.

Oysters and Pearls consists of lightly poached oysters, all briny and sweet, in a delicately chive-scented sabayon studded with tapioca pearls. On top goes a hunking great wodge of unspeakably good caviar. That's it. It builds and builds, subtle at first, but then the delicate, salty roe start to work their magic, popping in the mouth, the tapioca spheres a textural echo of the caviar. The oysters themselves tip it over the top into pure hedonism.

I have to eat this again someday. Perhaps, someday, Per Se. Until then, I'll just have to dream about it.

Oysters and Pearls, as you'll have gathered, was a very good way to begin a meal. Things got better from there.

I have no hesitation in naming the French Laundry's "Caesar Salad" as the greatest single dish I've ever had the pleasure of eating. The dish bears very little relation to any Caesar salad you or I have seen before, instead using classic Caesar dressing as a jumping off point for a dish that is based around Keller's famous butter-poached lobster tail.

On the base of the plate is a generous but inadequate mound of Caesar dressing (I would drink two litre cartons of "Caesar Chill" if it existed), with bottarga playing the role of anchovy. Bottarga is sun-dried mullet roe, and shares a similar salty, intense, umami-laden deliciousness with anchovies, one of my favourite foods. The bottarga gives the dressing a light orange hue, which mirrors the butter-poached lobster tail perched on top.

Sitting next the lobster is a rectangular piece of cos lettuce ('romaine', to the Americans), caramelised on the outside and giving an extra nod to the salad that gives this dish its name. Perched atop it all at a jaunty angle is a little garlic crisp, a delicate tuile with the muted taste of roasted garlic.

Over the top, a waiter shaves another few flakes of bottarga tableside. Wow. From the first forkful, I went into a glassy-eyed stupour, something S tends to refer to as my "polenta face" after first encountering it over a plate of crab and polenta at Icebergs in Sydney a few years ago. The lobster is tender and moist, tasting of the sea, its natural fattiness reinforced by the beurre monte (butter emulsified with water) in which it was poached.

The lobster, in a nice fusion of the classic and modern techniques, is poached in a vat controlled by an immersion circulator, but isn't vacuum sealed first, so it's halfway between a sous-vide poach and a traditional poach. A nice summation of where the kitchen sits on the modern-traditional spectrum, I think.

We even got invited to view the kitchen and meet the Chef de Cuisine, Tim Hollingsworth, a man who represented America at the last Bocuse d'Or culinary Olympics. The kitchen is shockingly small, with six stations managing to turn out food of such precision and quality, with two menus that are really more like four given the choices available, plus canapes, every night. Oh and the menu changes every day. These are cooks at the top of their game, at the top of the world, and I'm incredibly glad I got to eat their food.


The French Laundry
 6640 Washington St
Yountville, CA 94599

The Bazaar by Jose Andres (Restaurant - Los Angeles)

Alriiiiight!

Jose Andres is possibly the best known and most accomplished Spanish chef in America. He introduced the US to the whole small plates thing in the '90s and has been at the forefront of introducing molecular/techno-emotional/modern/whatever cooking to America, too. He apprenticed under Ferran Adria in the late-'80s, he's a TV star in Spain, has an English-language show on PBS called Made in Spain and is a certified Friend of Bourdain. He also owns a restaurant called Oyamel in Washington DC that opened my eyes to how brilliant Mexican food can be. What a guy.

Photo: Luis Magán

The Bazaar in Los Angeles brings together the traditional and modern sides of Andres' cooking, with the menu split down the middle between traditional tapas and inventive small plates that are mostly in the key of Spanish.

It's a massive restaurant, with a huge bar, two tapas sections (Rojo and Blanca) that serve the same menu with different decor, and a "patisserie" that serves dessert to restaurant customers and others wandering in. The restaurant has a  fun, Alice in Wonderland atmosphere, although the indifference of some of our fellow diners astounded me. The table next to us was filed with two jaded early-40s power couples who had apparently been to the restaurant before, yet seemed not to care for the food. They played with their BlackBerries the whole time, and seemed to be disinterested in the food and each other. Why would you bother?

Anyway, other than some questionable customers, the Bazaar is an incredible restaurant. I'm not usually a fan of long blog posts that walk you through a meal dish by dish, but... here's a long blog post that walks you through a meal dish by dish. Sorry about that.

Olives: Modern

"Olives, modern and traditional" is a kind of thesis statement for the restaurant, uniting the "modern" and "traditional" halves of the tapas-based menu. The modern olive is Ferran Adria's spherified olive, pure olive liquid bound in itself with sodium alginate and calcium chloride like a raviolo without the pasta. If you've got a few olives and a stash of chemicals, you could make them at home!

The modern "olives" are ladled from a jar and set next to a tin of more orthodox green olives, stuffed with orange zest, piquillo pepper and superlative anchovy. You're instructed to eat the traditional olive first to get a sense of the texture and then to try the modern version.

Olives: Traditional

The spherified olive must be one of the most famous and defining dishes of this decade. I thought I was prepared for them, but they still shocked me. They flood your mouth with olive juice with a bang, and it's so completely strange that it forces you to focus on the flavour of olive, something that you're so accustomed to that it usually wouldn't be remarked upon. That's what's great about these modern techniques, cliched though spherification has become. This isn't flashy manipulation for its own sake, it's just a modern technique used to draw attention to a fantastic ingredient.

Shrimp cocktail

"Just a shrimp cocktail (yeah right)" is 3 large prawns, each skewered on a plastic syringe of sorts. You bite the prawn and squeeze the end of the skewer to fill your mouth with the shrimp cocktail "sauce", a spicy tomato water. Yes, it's actually called "Just a shrimp cocktail (yeah right)", but I can forgive that kind of tweeness when the result is this tasty and surprising.

On the 'traditional tapas' side, "papas canarias" was a surprisingly humble revelation. It's a simple dish of potatoes served in the salt they were cooked in. They're roasted 'til wrinkled and served with a Mexican mojo verde as a dipping sauce. The tangy sauce is somewhat reminiscent of an Italian salsa verde, all acidic zing and herbs. The potatoes themselves were incredible, with a concentrated, almost sweet earthiness, and somehow the salt dusting and the acidic salsa completely balanced one another. We're planning to start growing some potatoes just so that we can try and recreate this incredible dish. One of the very best dishes we ate in the US, and so basic!

We tried a few other traditional tapas, including rich, gelatinous braised beef cheeks and a rustic salad of egg, tuna belly, carrot and peas with pristine olive oil called "The Ultimate Spanish Tapa". They were fantastic, but it's the more inventive end of things that really sticks in the memory.

"Philly Cheesesteak"

"Philly cheesesteak" is a re-constructed ode to a low-brow American classic. Andres' version consists of wagyu carpaccio atop cruncy, hollow "air bread", filled with warm cheese foam. Delicious and fun, although the strong cheese slightly overshadowed the thin wagyu slices. If I'm paying for wagyu, I want to taste wagyu.

"Miso linguine"

This linguine isn't linguine at all. Instead, it's "miso linguine", made by pouring a shallow miso broth gelled with agar agar and then cutting the set jelly into ribbons. The strands of "linguine" melt in your mouth and reform the broth. It's served with smoke trout roe.

Cotton candy foie gras

This dish, cotton candy foie gras, plays off the tradition of serving foie gras with sweet accompaniments (or at least a sweet wine) to cut the fattiness. Here the cube of liver is seasoned and then wrapped in cotton candy that has been lightly accented with vanilla. I love the idea of presenting one of the ultimate fine dining ingredients in a way that is more reminiscent of a circus. I suppose that sums up the Bazaar, in a way.

The important point is that almost all of these dishes are extremely satisfying. All the whimsy and fancy technique just enhances the experience, it isn't a crutch or a smokescreen to disguise substandard food.

After our tapas feast, we moved through to the patisserie for dessert. It was a nice change of pace and a cunning strategy to turn tables faster for the restaurant. I'm fine with that when it's done this well.

We wandered around looking at the cases of mignardises, the open pastry kitchen, the massive stacks of candles that look like macarons, the art and arty objects. All for sale, all a fun multicoloured jumble.

Dessert itself was ever-so-slightly disappointing. My "nitro floating island" was flash frozen meringue atop caramelized bananas and vanilla. Very tasty and inventive, but featuring too much meringue perched on top of not enough sauce. A minor quibble with a great meal.

The Bazaar is surprisingly cheap for those of us from Perth who are used to cowering in fear at the sight of a tapas menu. I think (from memory) we spent around $125 per head for food, and we ate a lot of food (as you can see) and took a few things home from the patisserie.

A good start to our trip.


The Bazaar by Jose Andres
465 S La Cienaga Boulevard
Los Angeles CA USA

Coming up: The French Laundry!

Fruit and vegetables in Perth

We have a lot of good quality produce in WA. Fantastic lamb, great seafood, even our own rapidly developing truffle industry.

Eating my way around California, though, has opened my eyes to the sheer range of ingredients we can't buy.

There's the range of fruit and vegetables used in Central and South American cuisine: jicama, hominy, fresh tomatillos. Limes are perplexingly expensive, despite our citrus-friendly climate and large South-East Asian migrant population. There's a whole bunch of ingredients starting with 'p' that you'll struggle to find: plantains, persimmons, pomegranate.

We've got a temperate, Mediterranean climate in Perth and the south-west of WA that can support everything from citrus to wine, and the interest in food is rapidly growing, but our choices are still fairly constrained.

I don't think I realised the limits we face until I visited San Francisco, in particular the farmers' market at the Ferry Building. The Ferry Building is a bit of a food mecca, and every Saturday it's surrounded by a massive market. There are dozens upon dozens of vegetable and fruit stalls, with so much specialisation. There's the berry guy, the potato guy. There's a mushroom shop with all kinds of fungi, including fresh porcini and chanterelles, as well as domestic and imported truffles. I saw a leek farmer advising a customer as to which of his leek varieties would be best suited for various modes of preparation. Have you ever seen any kind of leek in Perth other than... leeks?

What stunned me, though, is that it's not an isolated thing. Another market, a few miles away, had probably the second biggest range of produce I've ever seen (after the Ferry Building market, of course). Even corner grocery stores had a staggering range.

There's just a lot more choice. In Perth we can usually buy maybe three different kinds of chilli (long red, long green, and short 'Thai' varieties), with the occasional habanero if you're lucky. The array of chillis and capsicums (all "peppers" in the confusing American nomenclature) contained every degree of heat, colour and size you can imagine.

Why do we have relatively few fruit and veg choices? Is it a quarantine thing? Is there really not enough Perth food enthusiasts to support small producers? Is Perth too far from agricultural regions now that the city market garden is more or less a thing of the past? Do we just have lower expectations, or less competition?

I don't want to overstate things. As I said at the top of this rant, we have a lot of good quality produce in WA. I just wish we had more of it.

COMING UP: Photos and breathlessly enthusiastic praise for the French Laundry, the Bazaar, and other restaurants I can't stop thinking about!

California!

Hello internet!

We're off to California for a couple of weeks, so no posts from us for a while.

We're going to plenty of restaurants including The Bazaar by Jose Andres, Chez Panisse (home of Pol Pot in a muumuu), Ad Hoc and... THE FRENCH LAUNDRY. I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about when we get home. We will also eat our weight in tacos.

Vamanos!

Change of address

Hello!
The address of this blog has changed to http://www.palace-foods.com

The RSS feed and all of that stuff should still work, and any links to http://palacefoods.blogspot.com or individual pages should work too, but please let me know if you have any problems.

Thanks!

Restaurant Amuse (East Perth)

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling of being out of place in restaurants more expensive than Red Rooster.

Childhood special occasions were celebrated in suburban Chinese restaurants, and throughout my early twenties a meal that cost more than $20 was an unimaginable luxury. I've always loved food, but spending a substantial sum of money on a meal always felt like something that other, richer people did, like listening to classical music or voting for the Liberal Party.

Since finishing uni a few years ago I've made up for lost time by eating in as many restaurants as possible, but I still feel like an imposter waiting to be found out. I start to panic and feel as if everyone in the restaurant has figured me out. Can they see the small rip in my jacket, did they hear my car backfire as it limped around the corner? Can they tell that I don't know the difference between sauvignon and savagnin?

Restaurant Amusé puts me at ease.

I think that's because Amusé (I'm going to drop the slightly poncy 'é' now) is all about the food. That sounds like it should be a given at a restaurant, particularly a 'fine dining' restaurant, but it's not. This is not the sort of place you come to be seen (gross!) or to gaze at the river. Amuse is stuck in the armpit of East Perth, and the exterior looks more like a suburban accountant's office than a fine dining restaurant.

Once you're inside, Amuse couldn't be more welcoming.  The dining room is mostly chocolate and beige with the occasional unfortunate splash of bad art on the walls, and the service is attentive and precise yet warm and friendly. The front of house staff are led by Carolynne Troy, wife of chef Hadleigh Troy.

I was stunned on our second visit that all the waiters welcomed us back... they remembered us! A few months later it happened again, despite all three occasions being booked under different names! How do you teach that? They never remembered me at the Red Rooster drive-through window.

Amuse serves a nine-ish course degustation menu for $115 with no a la carte menu. It builds from an amuse bouche (duh), through a number of small savoury courses, culminating in a couple of meat-centric dishes. There is a vegetarian tasting menu too, if you must. After a palate cleanser the degustation finishes with a couple of desserts and petit fours. It's a marathon, but you won't feel as if you'll need to roll out of there.

Matching wine courses cost an additional $65. Get the matching wines, it's worth it. I particularly appreciated the sommelier's descriptions of the wines and her rationale for choosing each wine. I'm not a wine guy. I know next to nothing about the subject, except for the fact that I like drinking it. This makes me keen to learn more, but I'm also wary of wine speak that is too jargony or assumes a high level of knowledge. The sommelier's descriptions are refreshingly bullshit-free.

The degustation isn't a tasting menu composed of slimmed down a la carte plates. The degustation-only format means that the menu is conceived of as a complete experience. Recurring themes emerge, different treatments of the same ingredients are explored, similar techniques are brought to bear on very different ingredients.

"Smoke, tomato and ash" could have been disastrous, with an astringent smoky smear, sprinkling of ash and tomato sorbet. It packed big, bold flavours, and was a pungent start to the meal. Like almost everything here, though, it was well balanced. It's an intriguing dish, and one that makes you sit up and take notice.

Two variations (on separate menus) on a coddled egg were not quite as successful. Coddled egg with marron was too texturally one-note. The slippery marron pieces covered in the unctuous yolk needed some crunch. "Chicken or the egg?" delivered some texture and salty balance in the form of fried chicken skin pieces, but it was still too much for me and could have benefited from some acid to cut the richness of the egg.

The egg dishes were the only slight stutters in three near-perfect meals eaten at Amuse (two degustations and a three-course classic French meal for Bastille Day).

The kitchen's skill at cooking seafood is nearly as impressive as the creativity underpinning the more complex dishes. A lone mussel in a refined bouillabaisse was the briniest, plumpest mussel I've ever eaten!

The meat dishes are even better.

Two slivers of blushing pink squab breast were accompanied by a spring roll of shredded squab meat and a line of granulated coffee and cocoa that hinted at sweetness. On another menu, quail got a similar treatment, with a tiny confit quail drumstick rivalling the squab breast for sheer deliciousness.

"Beef, bacon, butter" was a cube of medium-rare wagyu with a breaded parcel of molten Cafe de Paris butter that pleasantly exploded with the impact of a knife. It was precisely targeted to the pleasure centre of my brain. The next day I got a text message from my friend Nat that just said 'beef'. I understood. The uniform medium rare (and the fact that diners are given no choice about the degree of doneness) suggests that the meat is cooked sous vide, but it's so well seared on the outside that you're not left craving a simple grilled piece of meat.

The playfulness doesn't let up with dessert. "Carrot cake" is a completely deconstructed plate of crumbs, salt, dehydrated carrot shavings and smooth carrot sorbet that slowly melts in your mouth to reveal a sweet, pure carrot flavour. "Jaffa" is a similarly deconstructed play on chocolate and orange, tasting just like the lollies, which is no bad thing.

I wish I'd taken photos, but my restaurant anxiety prevents me from being comfortable taking out a camera. I'll get over that.

There is very little that's 'safe' about this place; no crowd-pleasing classics or 'signature dishes' to fall back on. If you rave about a particular dish to your friends they won't be able to try it. The menu changes completely each month in line with the seasons and the chef's whims.

We don't see a lot of this kind of boldness in Perth, but I wish we did. I love it.

Restaurant Amuse
Unit 1, 64 Bronte Street
EAST PERTH WA 6004
08 9325 4900

Georgia Style Braised Pork Shoulder (& other Top Chef recipes)

Last week's episode of Top Chef was Restaurant Wars and to celebrate (geez we are so lame?) we had some friends over and set the mild challenge of each cooking something that had been featured on Top Chef over the last 6 seasons. For the record, the recipes on Top Chef vary pretty greatly from easy to ridiculously complicated, and 'this is a michelin star quality dish' to making-Tom-Collichio-spit-food-into-the-desert, so this didn't actually mean much more than there being a massive range of recipes to choose from and an excuse to say dumb stuff like "flavour profile" and "execute the dish".

First up Nat brought Season 5 Jamie's Red Curry Carrot Soup with Raita and Smoked Paprika Oil. It was delicious! Once more a Jamie soup (with flavoured oil) is a win (see also Chilled Corn Soup that I am hoping will get another run this summer).

Then the television took over our lives for 50 minutes. We all hated on Toby Young, and were relieved with the decision made by judges at the end. Also Padma rolled her eyes a few times.

Main course: Georgia Style Braised Pork Shoulder, from (everyone's favourite) Kevin of current season.

This was from an episode where they had to cook at an air force base, for a bunch of air force officers, hence the recipe says it serves 125 people. I cooked a quarter of the amount, and we had amazing pulled pork sandwiches the next night for dinner so in the end it probably served about 6-8 full sized meals.

It all seems like a lot of mustard, but it worked really well. Kevin wins again!

We served the pork with Mustard Potato Salad, the dressing for which Matt made up because somehow I couldn't locate Eli's recipe, although now I have very easily. What's up with that? Was the internet playing tricks on me? Maybe. But the made from scratch mayonnaise that Matt created was probably better than Eli's anyway. To be fair they had to work with what they had in the airforce base kitchen (lots of cans) so I suppose he is forgiven for all the ingredients involved. But keep egg out of my potato salad please.

Again, more mustard? Yes, more mustard. I made the addition of some finely sliced up apple for colour and lightness which worked obviously because apple and pork are friends. There was going back for seconds. Hooray.

For dessert Helen made (DJ?) Hubert Keller's Gingered Bittersweet Chocolate Mousse with Toasted Pistachio! Firstly, bonus points for cooking from Top Chef Masters. Secondly this too was delicious.  Apparently there were slight changes (less cream, more ginger?) to the recipe but I don't see why it would be done any other way, it was awesome.

Cured Salmon, Blood Orange and Fennel Salad

Goddamn summer. When the temperature gets above 30 degrees or so, a lot of the things that I like to cook and eat stop being quite so attractive. No more long, slow braises, no more soft polenta spiked with handfuls of butter and Grana Padano.

The last few summers I've tried to force myself to try new things and be as excited about warm-weather cooking as I am about dishes that need to sit in the oven for four hours. That's a struggle.

The main problem? Salad is boring.

OK, so obviously salad can be just as inventive, exciting and memorable as any other kind of dish. It just usually isn't.

Cured fish has those intense, concentrated flavours, so it makes a completely non-boring base for a salad. The citrus in this salad also helps lighten things up and keep it refreshingly acidic.

It's extremely basic to prepare. Curing salmon or trout is all kinds of easy. Do it!

Cured Salmon, Blood Orange and Fennel Salad

Ingredients

500g salmon fillets (around two small fillets), pinbones removed

50g seat salt flakes

50g white sugar

One lemon, zest removed

One blood orange, zest removed

30ml gin or vodka or limoncello or something along those lines

Fennel bulb, with lots of herby fennel tops (you might need two bulbs worth of herby bits)

Method

1) Combine the salt, sugar, zest and a handful of herby fennel tops in a bowl.

2) Place your salmon fillets in a plastic or glass container (I use a square Pyrex baking dish) and cover all over with the salt-sugar mixture.

3) Wrap with plastic and weigh down. I loosely wrap the Pyrex bowl, then place a small plate on top and stick a couple of beers on top of that. Works for me. Soon your dry cure will turn to a liquid brine as it sucks the moisture out of the fish.

4) Leave your salmon in the fridge for about 36-48 hours, until it's reasonably firm and cured through. Every 12 hours or so, take it out of the fridge and flip the fillets, making sure they're covered in the brine.

5) Slice all the pith off your blood orange and cut it into thin wedges (supremes). Arrange on a plate.

6) Shave thin slices of your fennel bulb with a vege peeler or mandolin. Arrange on top of the blood orange and squeeze a little bit of lemon juice top stop them browning.

7) Top with slices of your salmon and some more fennel tops. Finish with a little drip of good olive oil.

I guess summer is not that bad.

Slow-braised octopus

When it's cooked well, octopus is meaty and savoury and briny. When it's cooked poorly, it's rubbery and fibrous and unappetising. 

I've stumbled across a technique for cooking octopus that results in perfectly tender tentacles with a lot of that deep-sea flavour. Result: this is going to be the summer of octopus. I got the technique from a column by Harold McGee, the author of the legendary On Food and Cooking. 

Basically this method just involves slowly cooking the octopus in its own delicious juices for 4 or 5 hours. Warning: your house will be filled with a strong octopus smell after the first hour or so of cooking. It's not unpleasant, but it is quite strong.

Slow-braised octopus, McGee style
Ingredients:
Whole adult octopus or octopuses.
 
Method:
1) Preheat your oven to 95c, and bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.

2) Cut the tentacles away from the body of the octopus. Discard the body. 

3) Once your water is at a rolling boil, blanch the tentacles for 30 seconds. Do this in a few batches, so that the temperature doesn't drop too much.

4) Remove the tentacles from the blanching water with a slotted spoon or a pasta spoon, and place in a pot with a tight-fitting lid that can go in the oven. I use an enameled cast iron casserole. Don't add anything else to the pot, not even salt (otherwise it will get too salty as the natural 'sauce' reduces).
 

5) Place your covered pot of blanched tentacles in the pre-heated oven and cook for 4-5 hours, until very tender. 
 

6) Allow the tentacles to cool in their liquid.  

That's it! You've now got beautifully tender, yet still meaty, octopus tentacles. You can just season these and serve them warm, or allow them to cool completely and serve them in a salad. McGee suggests straining and reducing the braising liquid and serving the tentacles with this natural sauce.
 
I like to allow them to cool, cut them into chunks and then dress them like a salad. You can then either serve the tentacle pieces as a salad, or as part of an antipasto platter, or thread them on the skewers and quickly barbeque them. The BBQ method is probably my favourite.
 
Barbequed octopus skewers 
Ingredients  
-Two octopuses, prepared as per the recipe above and allowed to cool to room temperature
-Juice of one lemon  
-Handful of mint leaves, roughly chopped  
-Good quality extra virgin olive oil
-One long red chilli, chopped (deseeded if you must)
-Red wine vinegar (optional)
-Sea salt
 
Method
1) Add the olive oil to the lemon juice, roughly 2 parts olive oil to one part lemon juice. Stir vigorously until emulsified. This is a bit more acidic than a standard vinaigrette, but the octopus benefits from aggressive seasoning. I like to add a dash of red wine vinegar too, but you don't have to.

2) Pour the vinaigrette over the octopus, adding the mint and chilli and a few generous pinches of sea salt.

3) Toss well, then taste to check your seasoning.

4) Thread onto skewers.

5) Heat on a hot BBQ or pan for about 30-60 seconds, just enough to slightly crisp the outside and warm the tentacle pieces through.

6) Pour over any left over dressing.

Like I said, this is going to be the summer of octopus.

Small Bars and the Town of Vincent

What does the Town of Vincent have against small bars?

Small bars have started to spring up in the couple of years since the license came into effect, but very few have been in the Town of Vincent. The council has approved a few (like The Cabin in Mt Hawthorn and Double Lucky in Leederville), but they've also knocked back several for spurious reasons.

The council's stubborn recalcitrance has become a bit of an obsession of mine, and I've developed the deeply nerdy habit of scouring the council's minutes looking for something to piss me off. This is not normal behaviour, I know, but I just can't help myself.

One of the worst cases I've found relates to a small bar that was proposed for Oxford St. The applicant wanted to open a small wine bar catering for up to 80 patrons, focusing on up-market wine and food.

The council received a petition in favour of the application, signed by 104 people. It also received a petition opposing the application, signed by eight people. Eight. The council refused the application.

Bear in mind that the building had already operated as a cafe. It's on Oxford St, near the Re Store, there's a lot of traffic. The Leederville Hotel is a few hundred metres away, as is Leederville Oval. TAFE is over the road. This isn't the middle of suburbia, it's a busy inner-city suburb. The place was going to be a small wine bar, not a rowdy pub.

Then there's another case, relating to a place just a few metres away on the corner of Oxford and Richmond Streets. This bar, Bar Rosso, was intended to be "a premium wine bar and cocktail venue with associated gourmet food". Again, not a rowdy pub. Fifteen people signed a petition against the application. It was refused, too.

I must admit that neither of these bars sound like places I'd be particularly interested in, but that's not really the point.

Why did the council refuse these applications, and a whole bunch of others? Two reasons. First of all, parking. Second, the objections of a few local cranks.

Parking

On the issue of parking: uh, what? Shouldn't people be discouraged from driving their cars to a bar?

Why does everything need to be planned around the car? David Byrne said it best: "the policy of infinite accommodation to the car needs to stop and be reversed if our cities are to survive as more than clumps of offices and parking garages."

Also, several of the proposed bars have already operated as cafes or restaurants or pool halls. Presumably people drove to those. Why does the council require more parking for a bar than for a cafe? While we're at it, where is the parking for all the big pubs (the Queens, the Leederville) that already exist?

Not in my immaculately manicured backyard

My personal favourite objection came from the guy who thought that one of the wine bars mentioned above might lure young people from the TAFE over the road (I'm not making this up, it's here). Yes, your typical 19-year old TAFE student will definitely go buy an expensive glass of Bordeaux instead of getting a jug from the Leedy a few hundred metres away.

The other objections generally amount to the time-honoured cry of "not in my backyard", to which I would reply: you live in an inner city suburb. You probably moved here because it's more "vibrant", more alive than far-off suburbia. Why try to suffocate the little glimmer of activity that is trying to poke its way to the surface?

I've never voted in local council elections. It seems a bit pointless, and I can never tell what the candidates actually stand for (it's always "the community" and "small business" and "sunshine" and "motherhood"). Maybe I should vote next time.

Anyway, apologies for the slightly off-topic rant, normal service will resume shortly. I've got an awesome recipe for slow-braised octopus that I want to share.