Gene therapy

Had lunch at Soul Mama at the St Kilda Baths on Sunday afternoon. It bills itself as a "global vegetarian cafe", and I was quite impressed with the range of flavours of food available. Good view out over the bay as well.

As I was staring outside admiring the view, I noticed the Soul Mama logo on the window (in reverse, of course, since it was facing outside for everyone not in the restaurant to see, not inside so that patrons could read where they were). I couldn't help but notice... in the modern font that "Mama" was written in, it really looked like "GMGM" when viewed backwards. Is that wrong?

Culinary capers at the birthday bonanza

Can't believe it's been a week and half since birthday weekend, and I still haven't had the chance to write anything. Well, unfortunately, I won't be adding much more today.

My two major birthday meals this year were at Circa and Taxi. If you're gonna do it, may as well do it in style...

Did the degustation menu at Circa with matched wines (one of the most decadent, delicious and memorable meals I've had), while Taxi was (only!) the standard 3 course binge.

Descriptions of food and experiences to follow when I get the chance...

Spanish feast

Prior to one of my recent comedy festival outings, I had dinner at MoVida. I've come to the conclusion that MoVida is one of my favourite restaurants in Melbourne... the food is fantastic, the location is great and the service is always good.

Mmmm, Spanish food. I always love the opportunity to try multiple dishes and flavours in one meal, although truth be told, I tend to gravitate back towards favourites. In particular, "Bistec tartar de wagyu", which is the spicy steak tartare. This dish is phenomenal, peppery and full of flavour. The only tartare I've had that rivals this dish was from Cafe Claude, SF. Nowhere else has ever managed the flavour that MoVida manages to put into this dish.

The poor man's potatoes and the capsicum and tomato salad were some of our side dishes (our reliable regular choices as well). And for dessert... seriously, how can you ever pass up churros? A dish that combines chocolate AND donuts? Works for me.

It was almost a pity that we had to be out by 8pm ahead of the next sitting (and our comedy show)... but I think if I sat there for too long, I'd eat my way through the menu, and end up as a penniless lump of Spanish goodness.

I got donuts

No, not the good kind of donuts... like Spanish churros and chocolate sauce... or the best donut I've ever eaten (a vanilla-glazed square donut filled with orange-raspberry jam from a tiny donut shop in the Lower East Side, NY).

I got donuts as in I got nothing. By now, you all know my best blog story ever. The story doesn't end as well as it started... I never heard back, was never given the opportunity to be "proved wrong".

All talk, no action.

Cheers to PB for the inspiration for this post.

Fish for thought

Since it has been so long since my last restaurant review, I thought it would be appropriate to write about our latest culinary experience, at Toofey's in Carlton. I knew about Toofey's existence, and knew it was a fish/seafood restaurant, but that was about it.

We headed into Carlton last Saturday evening, experiencing the rare feeling of running through pouring rain while trying to catch a taxi. We were having pre-dinner drinks at Markov Place, quite a nice bar just across the road from the restaurant that seemed to be channelling a bit of a Melbourne CBD bar vibe, hiding away down a laneway. I tried a refreshing mix of green apple vodka, ginger ale and lime that, quite frankly, I could have kept drinking all night. The green apple vodka was surprisingly just a Smirnoff flavour; I'll have to track that one down, the aroma was spectacular.

The drinking continued at Toofey's, where the inability of some of us to decide on a pre-food drink meant we ended up ordering of bottle of Veuve Clicquot for the table. It took us a while to actually order our food, deciding on an appropriate combination of dishes was quite difficult.

In the end, I went for the kingfish carpaccio for entree, and the seared atlantic salmon with green curry for main. The entree was light, but very flavoursome. The kingfish had a similar consistency to tuna, and it was drizzled with a wasabi mayo and soy. The salmon was cooked perfectly, still tender and pink in the middle, and the bite to the green curry provided a nice contrast.

If our entree and mains took a while to order, our dessert took even longer... the decisions on the dessert menu were even more difficult. In the end, a good assortment of dishes we chosen around the table, including a banana and walnut pudding, a passionfruit souffle and a cheese platter. Personally, I went for the Valrhona chocolate plate (apparently "ideal for two") after seeing it delivered to another table. Wow. The plate contained 4 tastes, including a chocolate and Baileys mini-milkshake, a chocolate pudding, a chocolate mousse and a chocolate mini-ice cream cone filled with honeycomb ice cream. I'll let you make up your own mind as to whether that sounds good! This was accompanied by a bottle of dessert wine (for the table, not just for me).

All in all, I was very impressed by not only the quality of the food, but the quality of the service as well. Courteous but not intrusive, and no missed drinks or dishes confused between diners.

Almost four hours later, as the last of the diners left in the restaurant, we stumbled out into the street and found our way home, sleepy and content.

Post-Christmas lunch

OK, so after just finishing a post about a great, excessive lunch only a few days after a period of time known for excessive consumption of food and drink, what would make sense to write about next? More food, of course.

I just spent the morning hitting up M-town for sales bargains (40% at Ben Sherman? Hello...) and was meeting J-star for lunch. Away from the major shops, the streets were rather quiet and we were feeling rather indecisive about our lunch venue. Feeling extravagant since my credit card had been slipping so easily out of my wallet all morning, I suggested we walk past one of the happiest places on earth... Becco. If you like classy, well-made Italian food in a stylish venue, there are few places around nicer than Becco.

A short review this time...
Main course - Tagliata; char-grilled rare porterhouse with capers, spanish onion and wild rocket (accompanied by a rocket, radicchio and cherry tomato side salad). A heavy duty red meat dish, with the porterhouse cooked to a nice rare to slightly medium rare consistency, with a nice charred, peppery crust.

Dessert - Vanilla pot with passsionfruit jelly. A small pot of vanilla bean-flavoured custard/pannacotta/mousse "stuff", covered with a layer of tangy, thick passionfruit jelly. Delicious.

I love food. I love holidays.

Christmas lunch

All this Christmas business over the last few days has diverted me from my intended task of posting about our Christmas lunch last week for work. Hmmm, doesn't sound too exciting, a work lunch, but there is a bit of history here. (Note: this isn't an "official" lunch, this is simply the exploits of me and a few culinarily enthusiastic work colleagues).

Two years ago, we had a shocking Christmas party for work, so a few of us compensated by having a extra long, boozy lunch at a South Melbourne pub the day after. Last year, we went to Tolarno. This year, we thought we'd celebrate in style... Christmas lunch at Circa. Oh yeah.

We started our sunny Wednesday afternoon with a round of cocktails, mine was a lovely cinnamon and pear number. We then got straight in to drooling over the menu. I went light for my entree, with a vegetarian dish - pressed tomato with grilled shallot, Italian buffalo mozzarella and white tomato cream. It was very fresh, very tasty and very colorful (almost festive); white for the cheese and cream, yellow and red for the tomatoes, green for the lettuce. In particular, the layers of pressed tomato and shallot was intense in flavour, while the mozzarella was quite delicate.

There was method to my entree selection... my main course was a grilled rib eye with bearnaise sauce - the other end of the food spectrum! Wow. The meat was cooked medium rare, so it was still just pink and juicy in the middle. And the taste, oh, the taste... melt-in-the-mouth juicy, fatty, delicious beef. All accompanied by a lovely shared bottle of red.

Since we were well and truly on the path of lunchtime extravagance, we shared a bottle of dessert wine with our dessert. I chose the lemon verbena pannacotta, a light and tangy way to finish the meal. This was accompanied by either peach or nectarine (can't remember) and yellow (!) raspberries. Delicious.

So what was the point of this post? Not sure, beyond reminiscing about more lovely food. And a great lead-in to my next post... my post-Christmas lunch! (Sense a theme...?)

Hot off the presses

As mentioned as coming soon in previous posts, I wined and dined at The Press Club last night.

Short review; food was delicious, service was average.

The restaurant itself is pretty slick; lots of dark colours, sharp modern lines, an open kitchen, and some big windows looking out towards Exhibition and Flinders Sts. The table set-up seems pretty flexible - we had 6 at our table, but other tables had anything from 2 to 8 or 10 people pretty comfortably. (Actually, now that I think about it, I did find the actual chairs/table set-up reasonably comfortable - I didn't get particularly fidgety or on edge at all, which I usually do by the end of a big meal courtesy of my long legs and a general lack of leg space in fine dining establishments). The menus are on a single large cardboard sheet, with a layout definitely influenced by newspapers.

The first signs of underwhelming service were when I received my pre-dinner drink in a short glass, rather than tall glass, despite the waitress specifically asking if I wanted a tall glass (and me saying yes), as well as a description of the menu that ended up with me being more confused rather than less (an attempt to describe the entree/main/dessert versus sharing plates). Unfortunately, this trend continued through the night... drinks forgotten or taking an awful long time, loads of time taken to clear away finished dishes, a long wait with the menus before someone took our dessert orders. Perhaps they were only teething problems - I certainly hope they work them out soon. It didn't turn me off, it just left a slightly sour memory of the night.

Anyway, on to the positive - the food. These was probably some of my favourite dishes of the year, easily up there with choice dishes from Taxi, Pearl and Becco during 2006. I was doubly impressed since, as much as I love my food, I can be a little picky when it comes to avoiding prawn/scallop/oyster types of seafood and there were some of these options on the menu, so I had to choose carefully.

I chose the salad of cumin roasted beetroot, pistachio biscuit, yoghurt cheese and honey for my entree. The beetroot had a lovely intense flavour, with each mouthful finishing with a distinct cumin flavour. The pistachio biscuit was more like a mini-pistachio sponge cake with a slightly firm/crisp outside... sweet, spongy and delicious. The yoghurt cheese rolled in herbs and the drizzle of honey complimented the rest of the dish beautifully.

For my main course, I chose the seared salmon with cauliflower cream and a moussaka cigar. Wow. Easily one of the most perfectly cooked pieces of salmon I have ever eaten, still moist and rare inside, slightly crispy and salty skin, and a lovely delicate taste. The salmon fillet was in a "puddle" of cauliflower cream - like a smooth and creamy cauliflower-flavoured sauce. Tasty, but subtle enough to compliment the salmon, not overpower it. For a different texture, a flaky pastry "cigar" with moussaka filling was on the side. The dish was topped off with a passionfruit sauce, adding a slight tang. Top marks.

Dessert was a rich, intense and divine chocolate souffle, with cinnamon ice cream and what was listed as sour cherry jam but seemed to be more chocolate (with a gold leaf sprinkle). The souffle was an impressive size, and was a decadent mix of fluffy, spongy souffle and oozing chocolate.

So, in summary, the food did not disappoint (we could even see head chef George Calombaris running things in the kitchen, complete with surprisingly shaved head), but the service was not quite up to scratch when compared to some of the slick operations at other restaurants we've dined at this year. But don't let that put you off... the food was well and truly worth a visit to the Press Club.

Is this a food blog?

Once again, I find myself writing about food... this is definitely becoming a theme.

I just got back from lunch at the Botanical; a nice, casual pre-Christmas catch-up Sunday lunch with a few old work friends. The food was great, I'm not entirely sure I'll need dinner tonight! I decided to limit myself a little bit, and so I only indulged in entree and main (no dessert, although I was definitely tempted). I started with the smoked spiced salt and pepper calamari with roasted almond aioli - soft, tasty calamari with a nice smoky tang to it. For mains, I succumbed to the temptation of the wagyu beef, and had the Botanical wagyu burger with fried duck egg and crispy pancetta. Even my much-vaunted burger eating technicque couldn't handle the burger stack, and I had to deconstruct it with knife and fork. The burger itself was delicious, while the accompaniments (rocket, egg, pancetta, dressing etc.) worked really well.

This is turning out to be a heavy (literally) duty festive season already, and it isn't even December yet.

Food for thought

I'm on a bit of a food bender at the moment; both at home, and out at the glorious restaurants around Melbourne. I've already mentioned the "at home" aspect, mainly courtesy of Ready Steady Cook, now for the "going out" aspect...

We went to Libertine in North Melbourne on Friday night, for delicious French food and wine. The restaurant itself is rather small and quaint; we sat upstairs next to a fireplace (fortunately not working or we would have been the ones cooking). The food itself was delicious; it was the "spring menu", so the dishes were hearty without being too heavy. I started with pressed pork belly with apple and crackling for entree, followed by seared tuna in a hock consomme for main, and a callebaut dark chocolate and hazelnut pithivier for dessert. All the courses were worthy, but the dessert was something else entirely - quite thick, firm pastry in a "pie" type shape, filled with molten dark chocolate and hazelnut pieces. Wow. I also sampled a wide array of beverages... champagne, red and white wine, and even a sherry (with dessert) - all at the recommendation of our waiter, and all very well chosen (as I had hoped and expected - Libertine won best short wine list in The Age Good Food Guide awards this year). Highly recommended.

Looking ahead, I'm off in 2 weeks to The Press Club (in the Herald Sun building on the corner of Flinders and Exhibition Sts), which is the new endeavour of George Calombaris, who did Reserve at Fed Square (which I unfortunately never tried) and who also regularly appears on Ready Steady Cook. His creations always look and sound delicious, and somewhat creative, so I'm definitely looking forward to our meal at Press Club.

I'm also keen to try Gingerboy, which is the recently opened offshoot from Ezard.

Busy eating times ahead.
(Fortunately, in my line of work as an all-round lazy slacker, the post-eating exercise is optional... but probably recommended).