Home at last
One of the country's best chefs, Melbourne-born and bred Luke Mangan has opened restaurants all over the world. Now it's finally our turn. Luke Mangan has conquered land, sea and air ... next stop Melbourne. One of Australia's best-known chefs, Mangan is about to set up shop in his home town. His new restaurant, The Palace, which will offer modern pub-style food, will open in South Melbourne later this month. He already owns a handful of restaurants—Glass in Sydney, Salt and the World Wine Bar in Tokyo, South in San Francisco, Salt Grill on a P&O Cruises liner and he does meals on billionaire businessman Richard Branson's airline Virgin America. On this night he is celebrating a new deal to provide meals to international business-class passengers on V Australia, by hosting a meal at Glass, for Branson, along with a handful of celebrities and food journalists. Mangan, 39, and Branson first crossed paths at his first restaurant, Salt, in Sydney more than 10 years ago. Herald Sun (Australia), November 14.
work in a bank or anything like that."
Kitchen giant leaves a void
The influence of our own master chef Cheong Liew goes far beyond what happened in The Grange restaurant. Whether they have experienced the extraordinary alchemy of his food or not, he deserves the thanks of the entire state. No one has done more to lift our profile in the food world. It is because of Liew, as much as anyone, that Adelaide for many years was envied as Australia's culinary capital. Furthermore, the style of cooking he pioneered, bringing together elements of the West and the East, influences kitchens everywhere from the finest restaurants to the local pub. His departure from the public eye will leave a huge gap. The Advertiser (Adelaide), November 13.
Cheong Liew—Mixed grill on chef's departure
AdelaideNow readers had mixed emotions about the announcement that Cheong Liew will leave The Grange restaurant next month. By 4.30pm yesterday, more than 650 readers had responded to an AdelaideNow poll and more than 40 comments had been left on the story. ``Having eaten at the Grange, and previously Cheong's food at Neddy's, I feel privileged to have done so. Cheong helped define an Australian cuisine, and his creations are/were amazing. Good luck with whatever comes next, Cheong,'' wrote Yoda. However, not every reader applauded Cheong Liew's 14-year career in Adelaide. ``Had the opportunity to sample the food and was extremely disappointed,'' wrote Tim of Semaphore. ``The food was not up to scratch. The service was not up to scratch. The pricing was totally disconnected from that ordinary food and service,'' wrote Jim of SA. The Advertiser (Adelaide),
Reddy for summer action
Matt Moran
I'm very excited. I started a vegetable garden at home and it's starting to yield very tangible results. My tomatoes are looking especially good. I've planted quite a few varieties: oxhearts, black Russians and several other heirlooms as well as just the common tomato which, when allowed to ripen on the vine, is a very different specimen to the ones on supermarket shelves. I've also planted some cherry tomatoes in the reserve out the back. Just now, my tomatoes are ripening nicely and I can't wait to pick them. You can buy so many different tomatoes these days. For such a long time, the only way to get a decent-tasting tomato was to grow your own. Only pale, floury specimens were on offer at the shops, grown for ease of transport and long shelf-life, with flavour seemingly not to be considered. It's totally different now as even the most basic supermarkets stock at least a couple of different varieties. Sunday Telegraph, November 15.
Fare augurs well for sea change
Frank Correnti has made the ultimate switch from turf to surf. The one-time head chef at steakhouse Cha Cha Char and former owner of Ascot butcher Rae's on Racecourse Rd, has opened a gourmet fish and chippery at Bulimba, in Brisbane's east. Scales and Ales is a compact 60-seater with white walls, wooden floors, pendant lighting and tables topped cheekily with butcher's paper. There are also a few tables outside, where we chose to sit. These tables are on a considerable downward lean as the restaurant is on a sloping street. They also receive almost full sun, so bring sunscreen as we looked like lobsters by the time we left. The place had only been open a few weeks when we visited and the menu is a mix of easy-eating fare like burgers and seafood pie, and delicate dishes such as house-cured gravlax and steak tartare. We started with the tempura squid, which featured about 10 thin rectangles of squid coated in the thinnest tempura batter, surrounding a mound of pickled carrot and cucumber. The squid was tender but slightly dry I thought, however, the pickled salad added moisture and a splash of acidity. The Sunday Mail (Brisbane), November 15.
Celebrity chefs still the publishers' bread and butter
Eat before you shop: this is the advice often served up to supermarket shoppers who tend to spend too much at the checkout because they are hungry. It could also be good advice for those headed to a bookshop. The most prominent displays on bookshop shelves are already filled with the latest cookbooks as retailers prepare for the pre-Christmas sales bonanza. Publishers have reported an explosion in demand for cookbooks over the past five years, with research showing a 23 per cent surge in sales of food and drink titles last year alone. “Fiction aside, food and drink is by far the biggest category in bookstores," Scott White, of Murdoch Books, says. And much of the sector's success is tied to the rise and rise of the celebrity chef and their foodie followers. “The success of cookbooks in recent years has rested on the celebrity chef and the celebrity restaurant,” Mr White says. “We call it food porn in the industry. It's not simply a matter of cookbooks being pretty and sitting on the shelves, people are engaging with them more than they ever have before.” The Age (Melbourne), November 14.
No reservation; Authors of foodie fortune
Matt Preston
So here’s the conundrum. You're a famous chef who has worked for years to hone your skills and vision to finally win acclaim for your beautifully crafted dishes. Your menu is now praised from Vaucluse to Vladivostok and your peers look on with awe at your achievements. Then someone suggests you "do" a cookbook. The first thought must be to craft something that reflects who you — and what your restaurant — truly are: a book featuring the food that you construct in the stainless-steel heart of your white-linen gastro temple — I think of epic tomes such as Ferran Adria's seminal El Bulli cookbook, Alain Ducasse's magnum opus or Ramon Morato's Chocolate. These giant slabs of print read more like instruction manuals — no heart-warming stories about learning to cook in granny's country kitchen, or how the chef thinks nothing is more special than cooking for his family, even though the last time he did was back in 1989. There are very few chefs who can demand your week's wages for such a doorstop. Price is only one issue — the other is that recreating every painstaking step at home would require a team of foragers, trained apprentices and enough equipment to turn your kitchen into something that looks like Dr Frankenstein's lab, and which will prompt your partner to say, "Look, darling, I just want to eat dinner, not re-animate it." The Age (Melbourne), November 14.
Hopping mad
Steve Manfredi
I would love to do a rabbit-eating tour of Italy. It would start on the island of Ischia, at the northern end of the Bay of Naples, where Italy's most famous rabbit, coniglio da fossa, lives in caves that extend into warrens. Its meat is firmer and tastier than cage-raised rabbits. On Ischia, rabbit is not just food but a symbol of celebration. These rabbits are included in the Slow Food Presidia, small projects to help groups of artisan producers. The seemingly endless ways of preparing rabbit in Italy are astonishing. In the port city of La Spezia, it is done with olives and pine nuts; Perugians make it with artichokes; in the ancient Sicilian city of Syracuse, it is prepared "a la stimpirata" with aromatic vegetables and wild mint; while in the Abruzzo city of Teramo, they stuff it with eggs, fennel, herbs and the local pecorino cheese. It goes on and on. Here in Australia, there is a resurgence of interest in rabbit. So much so that farmers are having trouble keeping up with the demand from butchers and restaurants. Whenever we put rabbit on our menu at the restaurant, it is one of the most popular dishes. Some diners are looking for alternatives to beef, lamb, pork and chicken. When prepared skilfully, rabbit is a real delight. Sydney Morning Herald, November 14.
English chef puts Aussie health on the menu
Englishman Rob Rees, better known in Blighty as the Cotswolds Chef, made a flying visit to Australia recently with a number of things on his to-do menu. Rather than checking out the sights, however, the former Michelin star-holder focused his attention on tackling our public health agenda. ``I want to help Australia get off the fast road to fatness,'' Rees tells Food Detective. ``Evidence says you're spinning out of control and I want to share [England's] experiences with you so you don't make the same mistakes we did.'' Rees blames a lack of government commitment to a holistic health agenda for the perilous state of the Australian diet. ``You are where we were a few years back,'' says Rees. ``You have organics organisations and the like but these are small pockets in isolation. You don't have the leadership wanting to do something about it.'' Weekend Australian, November 14.
Critic describes eating discomfort
A food critic being sued for defamation over a Sydney restaurant review has beefed up his criticism, saying one oyster tasted like ``reflux'' and the pork belly tasted ``hormonal''. Giving evidence in the NSW Supreme Court yesterday, Matthew Evans also described the combination of a sherry-scented white sauce with a prime rib steak as tasting ``highly unpleasant''. Evans, whose evidence praised a small minority of what he was served, said Coco Roco was one of only three restaurants he had failed in his five years as chief reviewer at The Sydney Morning Herald. The paper's publisher, John Fairfax, and Evans are being sued by Aleksandra Gacic, her sister Ljiljana Gacic and Branislav Ciric, owners of the now-defunct restaurant at Sydney's King Street Wharf. In September 2003, the paper published a review referring to ``unpalatable'' dishes, describing the restaurant's overall value as ``a shocker'' and scoring it nine out of 20, in the ``stay home'' category. The restaurant went into administration in March 2004. The hearing continues. Weekend Australian, November 14.
Eatery dishes up sustainability
Its exterior walls will be made entirely of strawberry vines. Its roof will grow lemon trees, lettuce, carrots, beetroot and marjoram. From the street it will look like a big box of veggies. In a State where innovation in the restaurant sector is thin on the ground, the arrival of Greenhouse restaurant, an Australian first, will be a radical collision of sustainable politics and dining. But will restaurant-goers care to digest a political manifesto with their tagliatelle? "Yes," says co-owner and hospitality veteran Paul Aron. "We don't want to make it faddy. We just want it to be a place where people can discover things of their own accord and eat great food." Set to open in three weeks on St Georges Terrace, the restaurant is, despite appearances, far from some daft, deep-green social experiment. The project's PR messages talk about "discipline-crossing creatives making artful commentary on the world's wasteful ways". But such cerebral artiness appears to have been tempered into something more straightforward by Mr Aron's hospitality credibility and the involvement of head chef Matt Stone, one of WA's new wave of top young chefs. The West Australian (Perth), November 14.
Abalone racket smashed
After months of covert surveillance Fisheries and Marine officers and police have smashed a major black market abalone racket in Perth and regional centres. Codenamed Operation Acacia, officers swooped on business premises and homes, and fines of more than $200,000 have been issued against seven people and two restaurants. A major precedent was also set, with the Perth Magistrates Court ordering the forfeiture of a van used to transport illegal hauls of abalone and rock lobster. In the latest court action, 40-year-old Kevin Huynh, of Maylands, was fined more than $104,000 after dealing in more than 80kg of abalone in June and July last year. A set of commercial scales and $1500 in cash was also seized when Huynh was arrested while attempting to deal in a further 250kg of abalone. He was also fined for the illegal possession of 55 rock lobster tails. The West Australian (Perth), November 14.
Ifs and butts of al fresco dining on a balmy summer eve
When a footpath cafe, believed to be Melbourne's first, sparked controversy in 1958 outside The Oriental Hotel in Collins Street, threats to its continuance would not have alarmed smokers. In Australia then, as in the America of Mad Men, smokers could fag on almost anywhere they pleased: in pubs, offices, trains, schools and into the faces of fusspots who had not taken up the habit. Smokers could even light up inside a restaurant, which now seems astonishing. As tougher laws and social stigma have gradually encircled their nicotine-stained butts, smokers have largely been forced to inhabit the great Aussie outdoors. That's a big place, but outdoors in this city of famously fine dining includes abundant al fresco restaurants and cafes — places now beset by drifts of cigarette smoke. Take a walk along Acland or Swanston streets or past seafront venues and experience the concentrated waft from kerbside tables. It means, ironically, that smokers now tend to get the best seats in the house during warm weather: ocean views, cooling breezes, summer sights and (if they could smell them) the fragrances of jasmine, honeysuckle or salty sea spray. The state's Tobacco Act allows smoking in outdoor dining areas unless they are roofed and have walls that cover more than 75 per cent of the "notional" wall area. Yet smoke seeps, annoyingly: it can foul your Angus steak, pollute your panna cotta. "Would you like some carcinogens with that?" wait staff might as well inquire as you order a caesar salad. The Age (Melbourne), November 13.
Gastronomy Symposium—Food experts in town
More than 100 foodies, culinary experts and academics will explore the history and relevance of frugal foods, home cooking and migrant cuisine at a conference in Adelaide this weekend. The 17th Symposium of Australian Gastronomy at the National Wine Centre returns to Adelaide 25 years after the first symposium was held here, in 1984. Papers will range from the psychology of leftovers to the political power of the food industry. The Advertiser (Adelaide), November 14.
Volatile dollar and oversupply hit industry Wineries facing collapse
The full extent of the wine sector's troubles has been revealed in a new survey showing that well over half of Australia's wineries are making losses or an inadequate return on investment. The 10th annual Deloitte survey of the financial performance of Australian wineries indicates the looming collapse of significant parts of the wine industry. Deloitte Wine Industry group leader Stephen Harvey said the Vintage 2008 report indicates troubles ahead for wineries with poor brands and low margins, many large investment scheme vineyards and small growers along the River Murray. “The base of the problem will be among our Riverland and Sunraysia growers who are forced to either rip out their vines or take government packages and walk away from their properties,'' he said. The report showed that the volatile Australian dollar and the ongoing oversupply of grapes continue to exacerbate the difficulties faced by many wineries. ``The message is no different from past years, with a number of really good performing wineries which have their business model right making good margins and profits,'' Mr Harvey said. ``The problem is a lot of people don't have a good business model and plan and they are really struggling in these business conditions, which could make them close to unsustainable.” The Advertiser (Adelaide), November 14.