The human race has long had a fascination with food as a metaphor, from the tension of the apple in Rene Magritte’s works to Adam and Eve. There’s something intrinsic about that which enters the body. It’s more personal than the buildings we inhabit and the sky that is glued above us. I’m not sure we’ve evolved to truly understand it. I think about the push-pull between food as a primitive survival tool and a hedonic vehicle of extravagance a lot and I still don’t think I have the answers.

Ancient Greek and Roman societies would use large-scale still life food paintings as frescoes inside buildings of note. Kind of like how Subway used to have giant salad wallpapers. Actually, not.

Still-life food paintings are a dime a dozen in institutions abound, but it seems like a dying art to the naked eye. So much contemporary art of the 2020’s is driven by moving image, sculpture and machine-learnt slop, but still-life food painting hasn’t died. In fact, it has respawned through the lens of the smartphone. It’s painted in a grid of pixels and metadata. The mise-en-scene is no longer vertical and multi-dimensional, it has been replaced by a flat-lay photo, backlit by those phallic table lamps that every fucking restaurant has. The restaurants have followed suit, plating is designed to wow from a bird’s eye view. The phone eats first and so on and so forth. Instagram is awash with still-life portraits of lunchtime Fishbowl orders by the lanyard class that make us feel nothing at all.

Still-life food painting, like the meals we eat, has different symbology depending on who you ask, and who painted it. Much of it was a celebration of conquest and a declaration of abundance, yet much of it was a subtle warning of the ephemeral. Game birds hung by hook symbolised the triumph of the kill, the will of man, yet the perishable nature of all that is living. These paintings spark a multi-pronged reaction. The beauty of the visual, the desire and hunger for indulgence, and yet the repressed fear of all that shall pass. It is pretty much the same trio that motivates me to live each day.

The concept of food abundance was once something exclusive to the noblesse only. Now, we have a disgusting oversaturation of 99c biscuits and gas-ripened vegetables in plastic. In fact, studies have shown 20% of all food produced now is wasted, over 1 billion tonnes annually. The rapidly increasing CPI basket is slowly casting goods such as meat and eggs back to an archaic status symbol as prices soar, but what now lies beneath for the proletariat is not cheap grain but rather packet upon packet of processed slop.

No longer do we have vegetables and wheels of cheese plonked on to bench tops, and game birds hanging in the dark, we have refrigeration. We managed to hack agriculture and trade routes between cities ages ago. We figured out how to narrow the scope of commercial vegetables ranked by their perishability and ease of transport. In fact, in just a few centuries we’ve over-engineered food to the point of Doritos and Maggi noodles. To the point where the abundance of food is largely associated with the lower to middle classes. One can deep dive the studies on “food deserts”and the alleviation of “food deserts” to see that it’s not just proximity that keeps people gorging on slop.

Anything you truly need in a modern commercial supermarket lies around the perimeter, yet walk through the aisles and look at overflowing trolleys and baskets of the average punter. Mountains of nothing. I went to Costco with a friend recently and could not stop laughing at the never-ending bulk. Shelf upon shelf like drawers at the morgue. We’ve lost the purity of the 17th century diet.

The fluctuation of austerity and decadence in still-life food painting over the years shows the rollercoaster of economics over the course of human history. We’re seeing that play out in real time on a micro level today as people’s Instagram stories gently sway from 10-course degustations to small luxuries like $18 sandwiches and $9 Loco Love chocolates. We’re both proud of, yet intrinsically taken back by, what we’ve managed to acquire. It’s the intangible feeling that dining gives us that we will never be able to truly translate onto canvas. We delight our senses, we document the beauty of what we are about to eat, but we know deep within the psyche, that much like the salmon, our days are numbered.

The desire for bread and wine is still encoded into our genetic make-up. Many women I know in their 20’s and 30’s eat expensive bread and cheap wine for dinner more often than they care to admit. The “girl dinner” is essentially a plug-in assortment of aristocratic delicacies of bygone eras. Cheese, tinned fish, pickled vegetables, bread. The triumph of the kill now however is that you worked 9-5 and answered a few e-mails to afford it. The still-life food painting does not depict what you toiled over or what you killed anymore unless you cooked it yourself. For some, it simply depicts economic status. Not much has changed. Yet for others, it’s a celebration and appreciation of the craft, the taste, the experience, your free will in a gargantuan marketplace of food.

From Caravaggio and the “Basket of Fruit”, through to the Dutch and Flemish masters of the 17th century, through to that video I posted on my Instagram story of a jiggling soufflè to the soundtrack of “Back That Azz Up” by Juvenile, we romanticise and fawn over food as a species. We chase it and once we catch it, it’s gone. The Dutch masters had 3 main categories of food paintings; ontbijtgens (breakfast), banketgens (banquet) and the most common, Pronkstilleven (big ass piles of food). Many of the paintings of this era expressed the concept of “vanitas”. The idea that the food is perishable, pleasure is fleeting, and you too will die. Bolstered by the use of skulls and withering plants everywhere. There’s as much of a story being told in still-life food painting as there is in “The Creation of Adam”.

As far back as “Butcher’s Shop with a Flight Into Egypt” by Pieter Aartsen in 1551, biblical scenes of the Virgin Mary feeding beggars spliced in between sausage links and pig trotters, a juxtaposition between decadence and the nourishing of the soul was told. We have the ability now to do both, yet we’ve strayed far from the “noblesse oblige” and the gratitude that should underpin hedonism.

I’ve had moments mid-meal where I’ve gotten up to piss and realised how grateful I am for the company of friends, the talents of the chefs, the mysticism of nature and the joy of shoving my fucking beak full of food after dieting all week. The meal was not simply downloaded from the sky. It is immortalised through memory, and probably the camera roll.

Food is a subtle reminder that we have come into contact with such particular plants and animals on the plate at such a particular point in time in such a vast galaxy, that all of us will come to know the same fate, that we are lucky but we must cherish the moment. If you cannot see the ritual of going to the market, soaking a cheap beef liver in milk, slicing it, frying it with onions and eating it as a humble act, then you will not truly appreciate the lobster and saffron rice that comes to your table in a matter of minutes. All of this can disappear at any moment.

The photo of the pint of Guinness is not simply that. It is the labour, the release, the arduous journey that led to the pint of Guinness. We are oversaturated with food imagery, particularly the moving image. We need a renaissance of the still-life. I think there’s an inflection point brewing between cost of living and the social media-driven restaurantmaxxxing of the past decade which is spurring on a return to equilibrium and a slower, more mindful appreciation of food and humble dishes. As long as the pendulum doesn’t swing all the way to bread lines, I’m all for it.

I have had somewhat of a sabbatical from this blog and platform, largely in part to the fact I’m currently finishing an album and juggling 87 other ambitions. That’s the joy of agency and ownership over you’re on publication at least, you can come and go as you please and leave the door open.

Alas, I wanted to share a new article I wrote for Loiter Magazine… it’s about the death of late night dining and the failure of Melbourne to materialise as a cosmopolitan after hours metropolis. You can read it below:

https://www.loiter.au/melbourne-used-to-do-dinner-at-3am-now-its-meth-and-uber-eats/

Kudos to Loiter. It’s risky business to publish writers such as myself that don’t really make highly digestible clickbait. I’m actually largely a fan of the decentralisation of media via the internet in general.

Thank you to the loyal More Plates readers, many of whom bought tea towels and hats off me recently, salute! See you soon.

Ganbei

Ladies and gentleman, pimps, thieves and hustlers. It’s high time I did some merchandise for this here blog. To kick off proceedings, a baseball cap and a tea towel.

MORE PLATES Baseball Cap. Two-tone pinstripe Yankees-inspired joint, with raised embroidery and leather strap. Largely inappropriate for many of the venues that I write about but don’t be afraid.

SHOP THE HAT HERE

MORE PLATES Tea Towel. Digital print on white cotton and linen. Drape it over the oven handle or tuck it in to your pants, whatever floats your boat.

SHOP THE TEA TOWEL HERE

I tend to write retrospectively about restaurant experiences after the fact, sometimes 3 days later, sometimes 3 months later, sometimes 3 years later. Often going wayward on minute details or the lingering feeling the experience gave me. In many ways, it’s an extension of the anatomical pathway.

Food moves from the pharynx into the stomach and so on and so forth. The small intestine, the large intestine, the rectum and such. The S-bend, the sewage farm in Werribee, Port Phillip Bay. You get the gist. The parallel journey is one which stalls in the right cerebral hemisphere. Both relatively ugly yet necessary pathways.

I eat a lot of food, I eat a lot of beautiful food. Not all of it transcends. Certain meals stick with you; some relived 100 times, some never to be repeated. Some meals fill me with such volcanic desire. They live on inside the brain to the point where I have to open this proverbial sewage farm aka food blog, and sing from the clocktower. The food takes on a new life and new form physically, but also mentally. This is the food writer’s tract. Unlike the prawn, it is not simply discarded.

The beauty of eating and having this mirror of a blog outlet is that it allows me to channel the joy and often the stream of consciousness I get from eating. Whether that’s dining solo and staring into space, or my phone, or whether it’s dining with friends and soaking up conversation. To eat and to think simultaneously is ultimately to feel. I have been guilty of being emotionally detached and frozen in the past, particularly my teens and twenties. I now look at the arduous labour of having feelings as a privilege. To experience the high highs and low lows of life is much better than feeling like a cinder block.

You can study ontology and wank yourself off over cheap discoveries but the bare fact is that simply, you exist. Better to feel it than to be a passenger.

I often peer into kitchens, looking at the chefs and the cooks, sick fucks like me who thrive under pressure and enjoy the rhythm of chaos. We all have a love/hate relationship with the pressure cooker when we are in the eye of it, but take it away and you’ll miss it. Like a toxic girlfriend, except much easier to predict. I love seeing the nuance of the waitstaff returning to the pass, temporarily absorbing the frenetic energy of the kitchen, allowing their guard to slip and the stress to leak for just a brief moment. In a split second, they’re back in the dining room, poised, playing the role. The theatre of service it’s an art form, albeit conflicting when you’re the one on the stage.

I love seeing those with a penchant for quality, in any realm, but particularly in food. I once had lunch with the dear owner of Royal Palace in Sydney, and watched her pass around raw pork back of house before the doors opened to the public, asking for second opinions. She thought it had an off smell, not rotten, just not up to par. There was debates, basically a mini royal commission, before she decided to replace the lot. Many would’ve given it a pass, but there’s a thing called pride, and an unwritten relationship that exists telepathically between the discerning restauranteur and the discerning patron.

I asked her if we could have crispy skin pigeon, to which she declined, simply because from time to time, they cannot get the standard of pigeon that they have become accustomed to serving. In my gut leaves an absence, a longing, but a deeper respect. We must refrain from unfettered glutton, the death drive. There’s a fine line between grandiose hedonism and jouissance.

I liken this system of eating, digesting and recalling to the beauty of ambergris. When I worked at a famed multi-brand luxury retailer on Collins Street, we had an occasional visit by a fragrance training specialist. He looked and spoke like Stanley Tucci’s character in The Devil Wears Prada and would talk to us about Creed fragrance and speak with such vigour about ambergris and its place within the scents.

Ambergris is a lumpy substance that comes from the bile duct and the intestine of sperm whales and is essentially shat out into the vast ocean, where it slowly oxidises and collects an oceanic scent. There is a lot of folklore about eating it and carrying it in various cultures, but the fragrance industry prizes it, drying it and shaving it to add to formulas for a tinge of sea spray. It’s expensive as fuck. I was told a basketball sized lump netted $350K AUD.

The natural arc from the whales ocean trek to its literal shit to the distillation of said shit is really the pipeline of the food writer. Although you may smell the prized ambergris, even spray it on your neck and wrist, and know that it carries the legacy of the ocean, there is something intangible felt by the whale that you will never fully comprehend. I can speak of grand meals, joie de vivre and flowing claret but I will never fully relay to you the true essence of the great dining experience, both internal and external. That’s the fickle thing about writing, about music, about film. That’s the fickle thing about philosophy, about psychology, about metaphysics. Better off to shoot for 99% and die happy.

For a place that used to be known for hooligan behaviour, it’s come a long way. I’m not sure the youth gangs of 2026 are into BBQ-ing and drinking in parks like yesteryear. One of my friends got stabbed in Box Hill Gardens one night. He left his sharehouse one night solo while another friend and I were chilling there smoking weed, as he told us he was setting off for St. Kilda. Somehow he’d gone in the opposite direction first.

He didn’t come home for 2 days but as so happens with the reckless young male lifestyle, we didn’t really question it until the 48-hour mark. He was a peculiar yet warm guy, and a master doctor shopper, who often went to various urban hostels and hung out to try and sell people weed and Xanax. Otherwise, he tended to fund his lifestyle by breaking into Connex ticket machines along the Alamein line. He was also somewhat of a charmer, so we figured maybe he’d gone on a bender with some strangers, or maybe met a filly somewhere out there and spent a few days holed up.

When he returned to his apartment a few days later, he laughed and told us he only made it out of the house to Box Hill Gardens for just over 2 hours when he was accosted by a mixed-race gang. He was one-out, they were 15-deep and they held him in place while they forced one of the younger members to stab him, straight through the guts. The scar was pretty nasty later on but he took it in stride and had a chuckle about it, as did we. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Bless his soul, R.I.P.

One constant since those days is the chapel at the east end of the food court known simply as “Rainbow Chicken”. It’s much more than chicken, it’s a religion. Staff yell into the atmosphere in Mandarin, the flow that of an auctioneer, as punters flock to the Bain Maries, churning like ants. The window is piled high with skewered morsels, big roasted purple yams and fried chicken joints for quick access.

One of my favourites is the lamb skewers, Dongbei-style chargrilled lamb skewers with cumin and a dash of heat made to order. I can’t honestly tell you how many of them I’ve eaten in my life, it must be north of 200 by now surely. They come straight off the grill, reverse kanga’d into a paper back with the wooden skewer sticks poking out. Glorious wok-hei emanating into my hand. Best enjoyed on a park bench or concrete slab out the front of the Centro.

They also do an incredible xian bing aka Chinese meat pie, translated on their signage as “beef borek”, “chicken borek”, “veg borek” and so on and so forth. It’s essentially a thicker cong you bing (scallion pancake) flatbread stuffed with ground meat and onion, ginger and a hint of sesame oil I imagine. They are pan-fried and greasy as fuck, the residual grease literally forms a perfect imprint on the paper bag. The way they manage to always have an oily yet tender filling delights me, harmonising the crisp exterior with the pillowy dough and then the delicate ground meat.

I learnt a lot about nose-to-tail eating from Rainbow Chicken, trying various gizzards and offal skewered and charred. They do a great ox tongue skewer, great tripe and intestines and what have you. I’ve never even ordered off the wider bowl menu, to me it’s a place to eat quick and painless, like one can only hope death is served. I’m sure there’s a gazillion places in the woodwork that do what they do better by technicality, but at Rainbow Chicken you know what you’re going to get. Maybe hygiene freaks and the meek are perturbed by big old piles of dead animal inside a Bain Marie but one can only hope for such a fate; to have a purpose beyond the grave.

If you feel like a hop, skip and a jump away from the main drag, I implore you to visit Best Guilin Rice Noodles on Whitehorse Road. Who knew such beauty could co-exist with a Dominos and a police station. It’s a stones throw from a mammoth failure of a restaurant called Bridge Garden, who’s weird ornaments and odd decor still sit there attached to the abandoned site.

I don’t know too much about Guilin rice noodles other than that they are a cheap street staple. Here, I quite like the beef noodle soup, piled high with chickpeas, braised egg, mushrooms and zha cai. It’s a spicy and sour combination, generously dished up with beautifully bouncy noodles. I could think of worse ways to spend $20. They also do a gorgeous braised pigs feet for $6.50. Gelatinous as ever and gently finished on the grill after being braised in soy and aromats.

I have also tried the river snail soup, which is very dank and sour with a spicy kick. I’m not sure if it is Luo Si Fen by technicality, but it is strikingly similar as a soup. I once cooked the 2-minute noodle version at my apartment and my housemate came downstairs and asked me to open the fucking doors he said it smelt so bad. The soup here doesn’t contain snail meat but is rather boiled with the shells I believe. I had a quite nice pork intestine version, mounted with pickled bamboo shoots, peanuts, shredded wood ear, zha cai and dried bean curd.

Best Guilin Rice Noodles is often very quiet, there’s not even much content of it on Red Note which is surprising. Sometimes it feels a tad vacant, like my own private Tsai Ming Liang film, but it’s an underrated venue of Box Hill without question.

Another gem off the beaten path is further down Station Street towards Box Hill Skate Park in the southern part of the suburb, where you’ll find “The Taste Of Home”, Jiangnan cuisine. I’ve never lived a domesticated Chinese experience, but it feels as if you’re being cooked for by a relative. Many of my Chinese friends reference “home food” or “mum food” akin to I guess what Aussie’s would say if there was a restaurant that served tuna bakes and casseroles.The Jiangnan food seems light an delicate, classic sauces like soy and shaoxing wine used in gentle application.

As I await the colder months to try the duck blood vermicelli soup, I must say I’ve grown quite fond of their delicate salted boiled duck, served simply with egg, greens and rice. It’s not uncommon to see young staff perched at an adjacent table preparing ducks out in the open, much like you see old “aunties” folding dumplings at many restaurants in full public view.

Much of Box Hill is dominated by these little regional pockets. There’s not too many big arena restaurants as compared to the CBD Chinatown. Phoenix Kitchen is as close as you’ll get, situated on Whitehorse Road. Tanks full of live mud crab, snow crab and lobster, rotating lazy Susans and staff wearing shimmering vests that look straight out of a scene in Rush Hour 2.

Phoenix Kitchen is heavily Canto-leaning, offering all the bells and whistles of yum cha by day and full menu by night. It’s not my ultimate dream spot for that type of restaurant but it is solid, and there’s not that many places you can get roast goose. I do love their braised claypot abalone, sea cucumber, mushrooms and fish maw, delicately embodying that Cantonese soul. There are many of these restaurants trying to do the most at big prices so the pedestal gets higher. Some blocks away, there’s a similar place known as Canton Lake. I’m not in the business of trashing restaurants but it makes Phoenix Kitchen look like the Trevi Fountain. I ordered a bunch of my favourites there one night; braised sea cucumber, roast pigeon and roast pork. All of which throughly disappointed, to the point of meme status.

One great addition is Old Street, a restaurant that trades under the signage of “Easy Cafe” but is actually a sister to Old Street in the CBD. Old Street specialises in food from the Hunan region, which I adore, as it is akin to Sichuan in many ways but the spice is less numbing and more of a gentle persuasion. Long time readers know about my penchant for stinky tofu Changsha style, and here they serve it free if you’re over 60. Looks like I won’t be committing suicide at 50 after all.

They have many interesting dishes; bullfrog, “Hermes” boujee special fried rice and the like. I love their Chairman Mao’s braised pork belly, slightly caramelised and deeper in flavour than Shanghainese braised pork belly. Have a go at the “Pi Jiu Ya” aka beer-braised duck while you’re there.

If you want to go deep into the crevice of regional cuisine then there’s Dolan on Silk Road, a Uyghur restaurant on Station Street, a very interesting North-Western Xinjiang menu with shitloads of lamb and potatoes as opposed to pork and beans. It’s very hearty and cold-weather grit food, from a place close to Tibet. In Sydney, there’s a decent Uyghur restaurant called Apandim. If I had to pick from the Northern Chinese cuisine, I’d certainly steer North-East to Dongbei.

One curveball addition to this sporadic geographic mapping of Box Hill is “Golden Hoof” on Bank Street near Malay Kitchen, next to the laneway where the old Paris and Peril “Hip-Hop” piece still faintly stands. I’m not really sure if that is even the name of the restaurant, as it’s a rough Google translation, and the signing has some reference to Homes Dumpling Kitchen in Balwyn. Nevertheless, it’s an old-school haunt that is actually relatively new. When it first opened, it had a giant sign on the front, bigger than the entire menu, that said “Cigarette”.

Inside, an “uncle” as they’re affectionately known. An elderly Chinese man who cooks and serves all by himself, specialising in Shanghainese “home food”. People come and go, even helping themselves to his Bain Maries and waiting for cooked-to-order dishes. The owner can’t speak English, but he is chipper and always incredibly appreciative of my broken Mandarin.

They do a braised pork knuckle, so tender that the meat slides off the bone with the gentle nudge of a chopstick. Bang for buck protein and carbs, as the meat and rice is only $14. In 2026, you basically take a deep breath outside and you’ve spent $25. Again, it’s not the epicentre of culinary arts, but it’s a homely bargain joint that has quickly cemented itself in Box Hill. The Lions Head meatballs over rice are saturated in soy but good for a quick snack.

It’s a far cry from the big wigs you might find in Chinatown in the CBD, but these restaurants reflect the soul and spirit of the working class Chinese population of Box Hill, as well as the affluent uni students who miss the traditional cooking of their cultural lineage. It’s not uncommon to see kids wearing $4000 Maison Margiela jackets eating $14 pork knuckle.

I’m heavily biased toward Malay Kitchen and Rainbow Chicken on a pure visit-quota basis, but I’m still that same teenager digging through Box Hill looking for gems. I’m sure there’s hundreds of dishes in the suburb alone that I have yet to discover, and thousands in Chinese cuisine that I have not even heard of. Such is the limitless pursuit of food and the sensory act of eating in different places.

Australia is shifting, once upon a time Box Hill was a reflection of another shifting Australia of another epoch, but nowadays feels like a constant. I may not hang out with many of the old wave of friends who I knocked around with back then and there, for better or for worse, but like any mini metropolis, it always has a home for the lone traveller.

“A thug changes, and love changes, and best friends become strangers” - Nas, “The Message”.

IG - @houseoflumes

The 109 tram route my friends and I once dubbed “the pilgrimage to Mecca”, seeing as it linked the less affluent outer-Eastern suburbs directly to the open-air heroin market of Victoria St, North Richmond, widely considered the “last resort” for the desperate souls seeking to score heroin. Not much has changed in that regard, and to the untrained eye the veneer of Box Hill may seem like it’s still frozen in yesteryear, but to the local barflies, it’s a tectonic shift.

Box Hill is to Melbourne what Burwood is to Sydney, what Flushing is to New York. The “second” Chinatown. It is dense, a far cry from the urban sprawl that has spread beyond it in recent decades. It is a multicultural suburb famous for its working class Chinese population, and some Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom originally came from settlements nearby, including the infamous Burnt St. Nunawading housing commission strip.

Its evolution has been bolstered by the more liquid generations of Chinese immigrants in the recent decade and a half, the descendants of a generation whose prosperity stemmed from the relaxation of China’s trade and investment laws. It’s not uncommon to see international students traipsing the Centro plaza in Taobao pyjamas and Balenciaga Triple S sneakers. As you descend into Box Hill from the CBD, its skyline bears a stark addition; monolithic high rise towers like The Chen and Sky One. The phallic signifiers of Chinese prosperity and its global tentacles.

In parallel, Box Hill is a major Eastern suburbs transport hub, and has long been a hotbed for drugs, graffiti culture and petty crime. Still to this day, there’s tags by Sinka and guys like Shevi, Vosko, Arena and Trial PDT secreted in the laneways of Box Hill if you know where to look. It’s a multicultural melting pot, with hoards of East and Southeast Asians (“nips”), Aussies (“skips”), Greeks, Maso’s and Italians spilt over from nearby ethnic neighbourhoods like Doncaster (“wogs”), Maoris, Samoans, and Tongans (“coconuts”) and whoever else finds themselves in it’s many laneways and plazas.

My earliest memories of Box Hill are going to the Dark Zone laser tag on Whitehorse Road as a child, marvelling at the fake rock climbing statues on the Wilderness Shop nearby. As kids we would laugh at some of the Asian shop names, like “Hung Long Video” and “Geto Internet Cafe”. I remember Timezone on Station St was seedy; the shadowy mystique of early Asian gangs hunched in the back radiated throughout the neon flashes of the arcade.

I was always engrossed in the flair of the Asian gangs of the era, many of whom inspired my personal style to this day. Big double-pleated microfibre chinos, with boat shoes or Nike Shox, Country Road sweaters or Nike jackets, ribbed knitwear, big rat tails and long fringes that shaped the jaw at the front and slit back to a triangle at the back. Nunchuks, machetes, shopping trolley poles with gaffer tape handles, bowing knives, boxcutters, icepicks, hammers.

Second-generation immigrants struggling with identity and the pressure of bridging their parents with a rapidly shifting Australia, seeking the fleeting illusion of brotherhood. Many of whom were juggling the lofty expectations of their parents who’d fled to Australia for a “better life”. The Asian gangs mixed with the other local gangs who were seeking much the same, just from different vantage points.

There’s a lot of foul memories attached to Box Hill, but thankfully even more wholesome ones. It was the place that first piqued my interest in Asian cuisine, a journey of discovery that feels like a dangling carrot, a magical trek that is at times confusing yet ultimately rewarding. Walking past all the restaurants and seeing all the ducks and pork bellies hanging from hooks, glistening in the windows, I used to peak through and try and judge how “good” a restaurant was by quantifying the number of real-life Asians sitting in there eating. That old trick is harder to do now, given the vacancy of many restaurants, as contemporary Asian diners steer towards delivery services like Hungry Panda and Fantuan.

I used to go to the Chinese supermarkets day in, day out, trying different drinks from the fridge, and different ice creams. I even had a phase of drinking the Birds Nest drink, made from the saliva of the swiftlet bird, thinking I would adopt holistic Eastern health remedies. Instead, I just got off the bongs and started lifting weights.

Slowly I started to piece together the jigsaw that is regional Chinese cuisine, from the numbing spice of Sichuan to the clarity of Cantonese, from the sweetness of Shanghainese to the heartiness of Dongbei. Many of the classic haunts of Box Hill have since shut down, like Lu Yang Dumpling House and the infamous David and Camy’s, purveyors of the tripe dumplings with chilli oil. There was restaurants I ate at that I couldn’t even read the name of, that have long passed into the ether, memory-holed in the never-ending Rolodex, like spectral blips. The bustle of Box Hill back then was like Wong Car Wai’s Chunking Mansions, places and faces like ships in the night.

I recall many late nights stoned off OG Kush or Lemon Haze at Bokky Burgers, a 3 A.M tuck shop on Whitehorse Road run by a Russian man and his son, dishing up “Aussie” style hamburgers with the lot, dim sims, potato cakes and what have you. The father-and-son duo were warm and jovial, another local tale of prosperity and cultural assimilation.

At one stage in the open plaza between the two adjacent Centro shopping malls around 2013, there was a two-week pop-up service window, no bigger than the back of a truck, that sold incredible rou jia mo, aka Chinese hamburger. Everyday, I would migrate from Ringwood to eat two little bundles of joy, slow braised beef with the earthy plume of five-spice and cumin, chopped red bell peppers and onion served in a bun that was somewhere between a bao and a cong you bing (scallion pancake). It operated on the spirit of Chinese work ethic, make use of the temporary lease and stick to what you know. One day I turned up and the window was shut, the signage gone. I still think about those rou jia mo like ships in the night, an unrequited lover you will only ever see again in holograms.

Although the facades look similar, not many fixtures of “old Box Hill” remain. Vegie Hut is a longstanding stalwart on Whitehorse Road, although I generally scorn it’s presence as I love to eat animals, and also I spilt sauce on a checkered blue Lacoste tennis jacket that I stole and ruined it there one night in 2008 and I’ve never really come back from it mentally. I’m stubborn and reluctant to accept the mysterious concept of “karma”.

Of the old guard, Roast Duck Inn on Carrington Street, out the back of the main Centro, is an institution known for its Peking roast duck. They are also known to do a whole Pai Par duck, spatchcocked and extra crispy. These days they have an expansive menu, it’s not uncommon to see someone ordering mud crab there, but the BBQ is where they shine. I’ve been coming here for close to 20 years and I must say, it’s a 75% hit and 25% miss ratio, much of the 25% from recent years. It used to be packed to the point you had to pre-order the duck but as recent as 3 weeks ago, I’ve managed to wrangle a half duck on a whim without issue.

The other institution that springs to mind is Hills BBQ on the corner of Station St and Bank St. It’s a bigger dining hall that cranks out all the simple fan favourites, and a couple of cheeky fake-Chinese dishes a la beef and black bean and lemon chicken, just to ensure that middle-aged White money still lines the till. Personally, I love Hills BBQ. It’s never going to hit you like Flower Drum or Royal Palace, but it’s that low-brow Chinese comfort food that first populated Australia. They’ve somehow managed to keep the prices fairly in line with inflation, probably subsidised by employing family and paying shithouse wages, but alas, you know what you’re getting when you go to Hills.

The pork belly is as you’d expect. Crispy puffed skin gently underpinned by a gelatinous cushion of fat and tender pork flesh, the right marriage of umami and fat. They’re definitely still holding a candle to Roast Duck Inn when it comes to the Peking duck. Another gluttonous favourite of mine at Hills is the salted egg yolk prawns. Crispy salted egg yolk batter that gently coats the prawn meat, covered in Chinese parmesan aka pork floss. There’s no lazy Susans and no ornamental dinner napkins fashioned into birds but it’s still a good shout for large groups to litter the table with 19 dishes and 87 Tsingtao’s.

The area has come to be dominated by fast-casual restaurants adopted by the younger Chinese diners, and half-decent franchise restaurants like Colourful Yunnan and various Lanzhou noodle places. I suspect this is what is taking away from the classics like Roast Duck Inn as shifting attitudes towards dining and traditions creep in. The median age in somewhere like Hills BBQ is probably 48, if I had to give you the back-of-the-pub-napkin calculation. It’s somewhat of a relic in amongst Two Peck, Nene Chicken, Machi Machi, Dragon Hot Pot and the copy-and-paste establishments.

Dumpling King is another old-school Box Hill classic still alive and breathing on Station Street. They certainly have the best tableware in Box Hill by far. Yellow-rimmed plates adorned with cartoon dragons, that are oh so kitsch yet charming in their own way. As you’d expect, they cover off all the different variations of dumplings from wontons through to xiaolongbao, all of which are up to par. My only gripe with the dumpling selection is the “four season” dumplings, a gimmicky vegetarian dish in which they place brunoise vegetables of different vibrant hues into 4 pockets. It’s not much to write home about in terms of flavour and is basically just an edible Uno card.

They also do a Peking duck service, 20 pancakes to a whole duck. I will however recommend the tea-smoked duck which is an oft forgotten alternative. Another specialty of Dumpling King is the steamed custard buns, the skin of which is so smooth you could sleep on it. It’s a must.

Dumpling King tends to be the epicentre of dumpling action in Box Hill, largely attracting the “laowai” crowds (yes, you can get Kung Pay Chicken and sizzling Satay Chicken), and it is my go-too, but in the spirit of community I will briefly shout-out DC Dumplings about 50 metres away on Station St. I’ve been in there late at night, one lady working who doesn’t speak English, and left with a full belly from a nice array of dumplings.

The east-end of the food court is now largely dominated by the Grain Asian monopoly. Not only is there Grain Asian BBQ, where live seafood specials are scribbled on bits of lined note paper and stuck to the windows, but also Grain Asian Cafe and Grain Asian Dessert. All three are within a stones throw of each other, a trinity of outlets that probably could just be one restaurant. If you want “quick” food like Mapo Tofu or Fish Ball Noodle Soup, you can do Grain Asian Cafe. If you want live lobster and BBQ pork, you can do Grain Asian BBQ. Don’t make me spell out what goes on at Grain Asian Dessert.

Beyond the Grain Asian trifecta is Kitchen Republik, a modern complex of mini hawker-style restaurants, mainly Taiwanese leaning. I tend to prefer specialised restaurants, I’m not much of a Welcome To Thornbury artificial market type of guy, but Kitchen Republik is always a safe bet for food, if you can handle the stimulation of a menu with 73 trillion options.

Further East, across Station Street, on Bank Street, is the crown jewel of modern Box Hill, and my current favourite restaurant in the area; Malay Kitchen. It’s only six or seven years old, yet it’s well past its teething. They’re not reinventing the wheel with Malaysian Food or trying to have an orgy of fusion, but golly gosh are they just cranking out some of the best Malay food in the country.

It’s a full blown operation, as you can choose from an array of plates or do the bakuteh style with extras, or hit the Nasi Lemak menu, the laksa menu, noodle soup menu, fuck it, everything. I’m generally suspicious of restaurants that attempt to cook everything. A product for everyone is a product for no one, yet Malay Kitchen has it on lock and could arguably double the venue size if they wanted. Generally, there’s a queue of about 15 minutes on any given day.

The Malaysian style char-siu is a honey-glazed fatty dream, often with the jowl of the swine, with a most fragrant and slightly acidic samba oelek that cuts through the richness of the pork with precision. One thing about Malay Kitchen is that the flavours across the menu are pronounced, such is the tradition of Malay food, yet they’re incredibly well balanced. They also run a masterclass on textures. Black vinegar pig’s trotter, wonton soup with the clarity of a man who’s had 8 hours sleep, curry asam fish, there’s endless worthy plates.

My go-too soup du jour is the “special gravy” Curry Chicken Laksa. It’s an ever-so-slightly thickened laksa lemak mounted with beautifully braised and sweet chicken thigh, fried wontons, a boiled egg, potato, a spoonful of curry paste, and two types of noodles; yellow Hokkien noodles and thicker egg noodles. Much like pasta, the texture is the gamble when it comes to noodles, and the two intertwined creates a really bouncy yet silky mouth feel, especially absorbing some of the soup. I must give honourable mention to the fish-head laksa as well. It’s a more physical dish, as you stab at the whole fish head and flake it with the chopsticks as it jostles within the vessel of the soup, moving from side to side like a saonce. The ghost of the fish making you work for it. It’s in a classic fragrant broth, and the fattiness of the fish head particles adds a gelatinous depth to the dish.

These days, when people ask for the point blank recommendation for an all-inclusive place to eat in Box Hill, it’s without question Malay Kitchen. In an area dominated by Chinese food, it runs its own race. The only negative is that I can see it from the far corner of the gym.

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Beneath the algae and the pond scum of brainrot food content, the city is abound with hidden gems and cult favourites that rarely garner algorithmic praise. Vlado’s Steakhouse, Mario’s, Pasta Classica, Malay Kitchen, King of the Roast, Supper Inn, La Pinta, Hi Chong Qing etc…

Just over the rise from Clifton Hill down High Street, there’s a joint that’s been gently humming the last few years, nestled a stone’s throw from Westgarth Cinema. Ruckers Hill, helmed by head chef Dave Murphy, is a wine bar by technicality, with a big nod to bistronomy, but really overall it’s just a nice haunt. You can drop in for a casual tipple and a snack just as easily as you can sit down and have 7 courses and a wine pairing.

Full disclaimer, the venture was supported by dear family and friends of mine, so I’ve seen the inception and the growth. One important thing Ruckers Hill set out to do that it has achieved is provide an old-world, unpretentious atmosphere for locals and wider revellers. Set inside the former Bar Nonno site, next to Ophelia, it feels as if it’s always been there.

I do love the razzle dazzle and grandiosity as much as the next person, but homeliness has my heart when it comes to dining. Somewhere you can seep into and zone in on the food, the conversation, the joie de vivre.

The menu is straightforward, classics with a nudge, comfort and class. The drawcard for many is Chef Murphy’s tasting menu. At $89pp, 5 courses top to bottom, you don’t need to remortgage the home and sell the cat to get a good handle on what Ruckers Hill is all about. It’s not reinventing the wheel when it comes to dining formats which I think is a plus. There’s always a lil’ something off the slicer, something from the fromagerie, a market fish, a good steak, house specials and a few good snacks.

I love the fact that they serve a Caesar cos wedge, adorned with anchovies, candied bacon and Parmesan. It elicits the feeling of an old-world 5-star hotel bistro lunch, lost in the sea of corporate junkets and soon-to-be divorcees. Many restauranteurs would cower at the thought of putting a caesar salad on an upmarket menu, but at the end of the day it’s a fucking classic. Watch this space, the market will trend further towards bygone classics and comfort food, as economic headwinds and yearning for the past permeates the zeitgeist.

Off rip, the manchego and leek croquettes are a favourite, served with a delicate black garlic aioli-style emulsion. Just the right hunts of umami and crunch counterbalanced by the creaminess of the emulsion and the manchego. The arancini is in a similar vein, served with a tomato jam and a generous shower of grand padano. The arancini ball is another bygone delight that really never went out of style, you just need to experience it in this context and not haphazardly trotted out by some suburban shithole to remind yourself of its humble merit.

I’m fond of the pork belly dish too, a crispy-skinned wedge of tender belly, topped with a laser-precision julienne of apple, served with a confit ginger emulsion and a cider and sherry gastrique. The acidity of the apple cuts through the fatty richness of the pork, with the ginger and gastrique rounding out the palette with a bit of depth, and a touch of earthy sweetness.

There’s been a few highlights off the list over the last few years at Ruckers Hill, hidden gems if you will. Outwardly, they self-profess to be a “uncool” wine list but that’s subject to context. Sure, there’s a couple big brand names and Gevrey-Chambertins lurking about, but some of the hits I’ve had there like the saline Domaine Tarbordet 2021 Pouilly-Fume (Sauv B) and the most underrated Maison des Ardoisières 2021 Silice Blanc Jacquere are not cheap plonk but they’re not coveted trophy bottles either. It pays to have an Italian on the team too. There’s a staff member by the name of Massi who can steer you towards a nice Nebbiolo with pride. Highly recommend something of that nature for the crescendo of the set menu which is the steak.

Everyone has a take on steak, it’s basically a universal icebreaker. The Ruckers Hill steak is decadent for all the right reasons. Grass-fed strip, mounted with a Montpellier compound butter, served with a classic bordelaise sauce and a thickened smoked onion soubise. Throw in the blossom of a good Burgundy or the cherry hint of a Nebbiolo and you’re good to go. The smoked onion soubise is rich and earthy, with a creaminess that compliments the delicate borderlaise. It’s a far cry from a sports bar steak, drowning in a peppercorn swamp or the sludge of a half-pie mushroom sauce. Chef Murphy’s steak is bold in the sense that it has three elements on it, yet it’s delicately built, rich without being too gluttonous, flavoursome without the clash.

Bonus points for the side of chips and the leaf salad. Longtime tragic readers of More Plates would’ve heard me lament about the removal of the complimentary sides and how you have to pay $19 just to add a bit of fucking foliage into a meal but fear not comrades, here you’re getting old school hospitality. This is the sort of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hospitality that is overlooked by the trend lists and the constant desire for the new, yet it is the sort of hospitality that will see a place like Ruckers Hill endure whereas some of the flash-in-the-pan venues will come and go at breakneck speed. It’s certainly not a new-age venture capital style restaurant.

I’m a glutton at heart so I always love to close off proceedings at Ruckers Hill with the Basque cheesecake and chocolate ganache sauce, with a double espresso to revive me and lift me off the chair. If you have the nouse to dine out for sensory enjoyment and not microwave status, you won’t be disappointed. Go and watch Marty Supreme down the road afterwards.

I can see an inflection point being hit with food and social media in which it is no longer flashy and new. Many try-hard influencers took the cue of “food as content” and “something to post” and ran with it because there’s a plethora of options aka it’s not easy to run out of content. It’s basically like Google for food spots now but there’s a need for new voices, or maybe less voices, not sure. Ironic, seeing as I harp on about the same thing ad nauseam but just in more depth. At least I’ll never just give you an out-of-10 rating, I’ll give you a 1500-word rant instead. If I had a crystal ball and I knew where it was all going, I’d let you know, but I’m in my own lane and I tend to love restaurants that are also in their own lane. You might panic-buy the trends, but nothing is safer than your own lane.

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It feels prude to discuss the price elasticity of the blood sausage sanga at Ester or the squid ink tagliolini at Tipo 00, but such is the nature of the market. We learnt to live with the market like a nosy neighbour. We resent the market, like we resent the neighbour, but ultimately we know there could be an even worse neighbour, an even worse market. Communism.

It’s difficult to slice the well-done steak that is the “state of the industry” because the forces at work are often contrasting. We want to see it as black and white, we want an enemy to blame, but it is complex, with a long mouldy finish. I’m really no expert either, I’m not a restauranteur nor an economist, I’m an armchair specialist in a vintage Dior blazer. One thing is for certain, the landscape looks different to 10 years ago and trouble looks to be on the radar. The dialogue has become a facet of the game in and of itself.

For starters, food itself is really complex to map onto economic curvature. It is really a staple necessity of survival, hence very inelastic in demand relative to price, yet food is a sliding spectrum that very quickly ends up the opposite. In an economic downturn, you still need basic protein and carbs to survive, and will pay XYZ price, but do you need A5 wagyu? The sticky situation forming in our economy is that the cost of living has been a rising tide, now gone totally mainstream. Our next election will likely revolve around cost of living and immigration.

Real wages have long decoupled from house prices, 83% of Australia’s total money supply has been created in just the last 10 years alone, and eggs cost an arm and a leg now. The inflationary pressure is insane. Actual inflation is outpacing wage growth. You can literally get a pay rise at the end of this financial year, and be earning less in real terms. Hustling backwards. In that same decade prior, the explosion of dining spots and dining culture has gone gangbusters.

I wrote a piece on this here blog one time about having never gone to a nice restaurant until I was 23. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see 18 year olds on a date at Hubert. I can’t really put my finger on it in empirical terms, but I’d say on a whim that roughly the rate at which nightclubs have declined is the same rate at which restaurants have risen. People don’t really seem to go out and take googs and dance all night en masse anymore but they seem to frequent the dining circuit and post about it online. Social media has accelerated the intangible “status” of restaurants and given people “something to post”. The result of which has been a cascade of new venues, and potentially the false illusion of infinite growth.

The magic carpet ride seemed to be flying at one stage, new venues from new groups left, right and centre. Parallel offerings all thriving. Throwing shit at the wall and everything stuck. Many brilliant venues have been born out of the last decade. Why is it getting so hard for venues to stay afloat though? We’ve all seen it, everyone you know was at every restaurant all of the time. So why aren’t restaurants bathing in profits?

Many whispers abound about pre-made stocks, IKEA dishes, restaurants not being able to afford the labour it takes to make everything from scratch. Have a look at London and see how many dishes are being made out of fish collars, pork and other less expensive proteins. I actually love to see it, there are many under-utilised parts of said animals, but the motivation is cloaked in financial insecurity. It costs a shitload of money relative to the business to pay staff, yet staff earning that wage can barely function comfortably in relative society. Make it make sense.

The sheer fact is, you need a higher earning capacity than ever before to be able to keep up with basic luxuries that you’ve come to expect in Western society. It’s very difficult to work in hospo in a mid-range position and live within your means. Naturally, people would rather just get a fake e-mail job that pays $20k more per year and just milk the hours doomscrolling and having water cooler chats. At least you can sit down in a chair and you’ll be home by 5:30pm. Hospo is for the die-hards, the connoisseurs, and also for the desperate. Restaurants have suffered greatly from this chain reaction of an economy they have little to no control over.

The other part of the equation is that it’s not just the hospo staff that suffer. The average Joe who has enjoyed the flurry of new venues in recent times is now looking to tighten the belt. Look at the resurgence of pub food, the rise of trendy sandwiches, the renaissance of Asian food. Lots of these trends are silently born out of the desire to still experience micro-luxuries in life, without breaking the bank. There’s a similar effect within fashion and apparel, another tricky economic good which can technically slide into the conceptually Veblen category.

Brands that occupy the space of the “accessible” middle, have thrived, and are currently outpacing heritage luxury houses. People overdosed on Gucci monograms and Balenciaga hoodies for a greater part of the last 10 years, now they’re being spoken to by smaller-scale labels. Perfect timing, as you pull back on luxuries, you realise this niche brand $300 hoodie is cool enough. You don’t bother entertaining the template auto-text from that faceless sales associate at Prada anymore. The middle between fast fashion and high-end fashion is bulging. Such is the food market, everything between Dandenong Market and Gimlet has blown wide open. Every rung of the price ladder is basically maxed now.

The other much more sobering point to all of this debacle is that there’s a total oversaturation of venues. So much so that there’s been memes about kingfish dishes, even Adam Liaw had a good crack about it. I walked down Smith St this morning, and even as an avid forager of venues, I didn’t even recognise the majority of them and I used to live around there for years. I ended up reverting to default settings and getting a banh mi at N. Lee Bakery. Sometimes it just feels like everyone’s whoring out the caviar, and everything is so formulaic. Many venues feel like they are AI-generated and made for Tik-Tok. Even if the food is decent.

If you walk into a supermarket and see 87 brands of canned tuna, it’s overwhelming. Sooner or later you just make a lizard-brained decision and grab the cheapest, the nearest, or the fucking John West or Sirena just ‘cause of the brand equity. That’s how it feels for a lot of people planning a birthday dinner or a first date. I get it. The great Sambafication of wine bars has lead to a lot of cookie-cutter venues, which seemed to thrive at one point as the industry was awash with starry-eyed patrons, but now it’s 7a.m, the birds are chirping and people are calling Ubers in rapid succession. They just don’t have the money, or they’re bored of the experience, or they’re just reverting back to what they know and love. They had a fling, they had a phase. The best-sex-of-your-life person is not the one that you marry.

I wish I had the answers. I barely have the diagnosis. I care deeply about all of this for some god-forbidden reason. I do not own the palette of others so I can never really tell you hat you should like. I think that the closing of many venues is a brutal chin-check in what feels like a reset, a period in which the market returns to homeostasis. Luxury fashion has typically grown at 5% year on year, yet many years within the last decade, numbers like 18% growth weren’t abnormal. Now, we’re seeing numbers like 2%, 5%, theoretically normal numbers. I imagine the curve will look similar for the dining landscape. Many great trends have been born out of this whole shemozzle, such as people cooking at home and taking pride in developing cooking skills, as well as the appreciation of seemingly quotidian yet soul-nourishing food, like pubs, cheap Viet spots, bakeries and the like.

The same doom and gloom that constantly crowds the housing market will no doubt crowd the dining market, yet it will endure and it will grow, just not at the exorbitant rates we have seen. There will be casualties. Many of them quietly deserving of it. There will always be a reason to get dressed up and go to a “nice” restaurant, there will always be eccentric people with big budgets that do it frequently, it just may need a little cooling-off period to level out. What the actual food will look like in years to come is one of the most interesting developments. My prediction is that high-end restaurants will continue to trend towards staples, classics, feel-good food, and periodically, continental and regional cuisine will trend. Maybe Spanish food, Portuguese, Scandinavian will be the next arc or three. I’d say Greek is the current arc in Melbourne.

The same way fashion cyclically trends towards minimalism then bounces back to maximalist opulence, before you know it everyone will be back wearing Barocco Versace shirts and eating tuna tartare with gooseneck barnacle foam in a few years. One can only roll the dice and hedge your bets. I do think a lot of venues and groups have been caught with their pants down in the midst of rapid expansion, formulaic venues and overall public scandal. I do also think a lot of venues and groups have inadvertently suffered innocently at the hands of a chronically mismanaged economy and a fake free market. Cost of ingredients, labour and operational overheads has gone brazy. With that said, for a little retarded island in the continent of bumfuck, we have a very impressive food scene. If you love this caper, you’re not in the business of giving up.

Vote #1 More Plates, legalise foie-gras.

These days, I’m more partial to an opposing quote that was written a mere 5 years later in 1949 by TS Eliot; “What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it are merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.” No man is an island and such. Hell is what you make it.

In the fiery depths of Brisbane, Queensland recently I made it to Agnes for the second time. Addiction knowns no temperature, and I’m more than happy to attend a restaurant where everything is cooked over wood-fire on a 38-degree humid evening up north. What’s most impressive about Agnes is by wood-fire they really mean wood-fire. There’s no single gas or electric appliance in the kitchen. Even the delicate sauces are finished over open fire, and there’s charred pineapple and the like in many of the signature cocktails.

There’s a primitive undercurrent to the fit-out, resolute slabs of what looks like granite or some dark stone line the open plan kitchen. The lights are dim and there’s a glow from the kitchen fire. I’ve never been to any of the other Anyday group’s restaurants which I think is a plus.

To start affairs, a crisp German Reisling by Robert Weil, a good shout by the young somm. The wine list is fairly staggering, and there’s plenty of empty trophy bottles on the wall. I prefer the minerality of such wines if we’re doing food that’s been cooked over coals or wood-fire, smoked and the like. Something flinty and crisp, with a bit of a steely resolve. I love me a buttery, oaky white wine but I think something with such minerality really rounds out the earthy theme when paired with that kind of food.

In tandem came a little sourdough crumpet (fried in ghee), with yellowfin tuna, creme fraiche and caviar, on a piece of wood, and also a grilled pork and prawn farce mix wrapped in a betel leaf, with arabushi. I’ve been to Japan three times but my knowledge of their cuisine is really very surface. I did not know that arabushi was a type of dried and smoked tuna. It’s also where dried bonito flakes come from. That dish was served on what looked like a dried fish jaw.

I’m a little bit of a stick in the mud when it comes to 3D theatrical plating. Things that look like primary school dioramas and terrariums tend to piss me off for no valid reason, but it was on brand enough for a pass. The food itself was incredibly redeeming.

The sour dough crumpet was a nice opener, but the pork and prawn betel leaf dish was what won my heart. Small bites are quite risky, especially charging XYZ price, but this had the umami, the creaminess, the meatiness, all the elements condensed down. Previously a few years ago, I’d had an lamb offal and curry leaf skewer at Agnes that I remember being the stand out.

Next port of call was a hefty smoked ox-tongue. One thing Agnes does that fuck-all higher end establishments do is big old serving sizes. The wait staff warned me I was over-ordering upfront when I asked for the pork as well as the duck, as well as the ox tongue. Normally I get like a drunken punter confronted by bouncers in that moment and stand defiant, but I did take their word for it this time.

The ox-tongue was deadset one of the best things I’ve eaten thus far this year, and what a joyous occasion to be able to get tucked into a nice steak cut of tongue. Usually, I have ox-tongue on a skewer or in a soup or some Eastern preparation. The ox-tongue is smoked with a divine pink centre, lightyears from hell, served on a bed of sour white onions and a very foamy miso hollandaise on the side. I’ve had the foamy nanged béarnaise at Gimlet and this was a similar texture.

Truly a masterclass in balance of flavours this dish. Hard to put my finger on it, but maybe the ox-tongue was brined in some sort of umami flavours and glazed gently with honey after being smoked. The miso hollandaise had wonderful depth. I could describe it in excruciating detail if you like but just know that it was poetry.

By this stage, I’d moved on to another great shout from the somm; an ancient spicy wine from Etna in Italy by I Vigneri. I’m fairly out of touch with Italian wine, as the blend of the two Nerello grapes, I’d never even heard of. I must admit, of recent, I’ve been reeling in the wine consumption and therefore calming the obsession, allowing myself to be guided by the shepherds of the list. I’m open to trying new things and getting outside of my comfort zone. I’ve also just been drinking a lot of Kilkenny. I had a big phase of punching a lot of higher end Burgundies and the like, but I grew fond of finding value in less decorated regions. Layered wines like this make me want to look in every nook and cranny of God’s wretched Earth to find clarets unknown.

All the romanticism was amplified by the fact that it also went down an absolute treat with the next course, the slow-roasted duck. It came out looking like a modular sofa at first, with it’s accompaniments on the side. I like this idea, similar to the French notion that you should never douse the protein in sauce to obfuscate the proof of how it is cooked.

The duck was also gently glazed post the roast, and served with some charred Muscat grapes and charred radicchio. The bitterness and the acidity cut through the umami and fat of the duck, and the earthy fruits of the I Vigneri red just pulled all the kids together like a doting matriarch. Agnes the second time around was better than the first.

The wood-fire cooking method infuses such a wok-hei into everything that it really is so bold in theme but they manage to extrapolate a lot of variety across the menu. It doesn’t just feel like you’re having charred octopus every waking bite. One of the many great food marriages is wine with food that is smoked, wood-fired or cooked over coals. I walked over coals in order to eat here. Yes, it’s a long and arduous life, in which I have dragged myself over the coals, both in punishment and in stunt, but all roads lead me to be where I needed to be. Eating the ox-tongue joyously by myself at Agnes in a state of Australia that I’m not particularly fond of.

Restaurants and great meals are like pit-stops, respites along the way. Intermissions shared with brethren or experienced in the sanctuary of the self. The world temporarily halts. The senses take precedence. Hell is merely a projection, you’ll run toward it or away from it depending on what day of the week it is. Heaven much the same. Purgatory and the limbo is just the philosophical bridge. One might argue we’re living in purgatory right now. I stopped overthinking these concepts a few years ago when it dawned on me that they are just philosophical constructs that distract us from the big scary idea that death is finite and that’s just it. The current life is all we are promised. Dance into the fire.

Big shout out to Len One and Chubz from Milesago records with whom I got drunk with the night before.

I’m generally a purveyor of the “seagulls breakfast”; a yawn, a piss and a look ‘round. I fast until around 12:00pm most days, and generally run off black coffee, still water and the reckless pursuit of self-actualisation until then. It’s a gym bro fat loss tip originally, but I grew to love the clarity and the discipline of fasting. I generally write of a nighttime, as I find microdosing tiredness is a similar lubricant to alcohol or drugs for the creative brain, a quasi-haze if you will, in which my subconscious oozes. It’s also why there’s probably so many spelling mistakes in these articles.

I very rarely edit or re-read, not to be cool and contrarian but this outpost is one giant brain dump and I love the stimulation of writing more than the nerd end. It’s similar to making an album, of which I’ve done a couple. The spark of the lyrics, the rush of making the beat, the idea. These are all the exciting things. By the time I’m doing vox in the studio I’m pretty much over it, let alone having to manufacture it, package it, upload it, ship it, finish it. But, there’s a Ph level of grit required to get shit done and you must persist.

The indefatigable rush to write about food doesn’t allow space for me to simply turn off the autocorrect on Apple Pages that somehow got turned on once upon a time. It’s probably a 30-second fix, but when I’m in the zone to write, I can barely breathe I’m so manic for that short window. Things like editing and autocorrect are secondary problems. Yet and still, it’s been about 15 months that I’ve had this little outlet.

I liked a post recently on the notes function of www.substack.com about the saggyness of the mid to 3/4 part of a novel. About how the original spark has died and now you’re in the trenches trying to keep the book interesting until you crescendo into the planned ending. I agree with the notion that if you really like doing something, you will persist over time and not just hang up the boots like every other short-lived hobby. You will suffer for your art. Remember that shit people used to say about tattoos? Hang the sketch up in your room for six months and if you’re not sick of seeing it after that then you should probably just get it.

I often wonder though, what am I really doing with the insatiable desire to eat and discuss said eating? Is it a metaphysical void that I’m seeking to fill via the conduit of eating and obsessing over it? Loneliness and emptiness, self actualisation and fulfilment? Literally filling. Am I so addicted to stimulation that I need to maximise all the touchpoints of sensory experiences? Like, I have to crave, then eat, then orgasm, then review.

Food is really a vessel, a conduit for existence. I love this quote by Ang Lee about food and sex; “one is to sustain life, one is to multiply life.”

Writing about food is really just a vessel and a conduit for my thoughts. The way rest allows for the brain to download itself, moments of clarity over meals and snacks allow my subconscious thoughts the pit stop to change tires. Alcohol is a much more decadent beast. I know many people who don’t drink and by and large, they live very productive lives on average but oh boy, do they not long for the magic carpet? Hast they forgotten the poetry of intoxication? Vignettes within a larger novel.

I heard a theory once that fat people eat not only for the instant gratification and temporary eradication of pain that the dopamine of eating provides, but to also subconsciously build a wall around themselves. A wall of visceral and subcutaneous fat. A forcefield that shields others from the inner. But it is a false pursuit, as you end up wearing your inner traumas on the outside for all to see. But the coping mechanism and dopamine loop is too strong by that point. It becomes a self-defeating prophecy you never knew existed within yourself. I need several rounds of duck liver parfait and bone marrow to mull over all of this. Will report back.

I also question why I need to take photos of food and upload them on Instagram? Mainly it stems from plating; I’m so in the zone and excited to taste, but I am fond of plating ideas so I want to review it later for personal inspiration. But then again, the photos then serve as tokens of the meal, they evoke memories. I can look at photos in my camera roll of food I ate 3 years ago and remember who was present and what we were talking about. Then I also kind of enjoy the innocence of social media and having a “personal blog” - after all, I came out of the era of MySpace and Tumblr. I also love the song function on Instagram story. I don’t care if anyone sees it but I need to know myself that I’ve done justice to the meal by providing its soundtrack.

Simple northern style pho from Pho Tin on a cold day, no caption, just “100” by Dean Blunt playing for 15 seconds. That’s how I felt. Or a transcendent “rabbit of the day” at France-Soir with “Anti-American Graffiti” by J Dilla playing. Many years of sensory cues amalgamated in one moment. My tastes are erratic but I’m free in the sense that I like what I like.

You do however risk becoming a “tourist in your own reality” (Sontag). The digital age of hyper-documentation has shortcut the feedback loop, the perpetual referencing system in which we simultaneously live and document the moment in tandem. Often, with instant disparity. We now watch ourselves being watched. We exist half within the moment, and half within the image. If you curate moments for the sake of a photo, you’re placing higher value on the image than the lived experience of the moment. We are speedrunning the present by chasing the image.

Keep in mind, aristocrats used to commission portraits of themselves to hang in their own mansions. The mirror was one of the original portals, before that the shiny object; the polished teapot or serving tray. Remember Meta didn’t exist when Caravaggio painted “Narcissus”. You wonder if that dumb bitch from your high school really took that private jet she posted? Is that really what happened when Louis XVI gave his instructions to La Pèrouse?

Art imitates life imitating art imitating life imitating art, chicken and the egg, “Synecdoche, New York” by Charlie Kaufman starring Phillip Seymour-Hoffman (R.I.P) and so on and so forth.

This solipsistic streak has been around since the primitive ages, I think we only really run the risk of not being able to self-regulate it. I think staring at endless slop reels is much worse than posting 19 selfies. We are simultaneously being ourselves and watching ourselves from an existential vantage point but I don’t think the mass of men clocked that until social media made it really obvious? Nothing new. I know deep down you really want me to hate social media but I’ve got Stockholm syndrome.

I fear I may not have curated a cohesive online persona which is cool because my brain is a nonlinear pinball machine and not much about my personality or style is cohesive. The current “performative male” era of social media and IRL has spawned legions of reels about menswear that suits the female gaze and the “sluttiest thing a man can wear”, allegedly just slim white t-shirts. Most women I’ve dated likely wished I’d just wear linen shirts, pleated pants and shut the fuck up. Instead, I need to own several obscure vintage YSL blazers and canary yellow Sefr jackets.

Really no point to be anything other than your pathetic self. Same goes for your choice in restaurants. Pretending to be OMG’d by hype restaurants is a fleeting mask. I got dragged into Society by a mate the other night. Luckily I had a semi-decent rum and raising pudding and one cocktail, but what is a temple for many was a prison cell for me. I find the hype train of restaurants comes and goes. One develops no discernible taste profile.

I like people with niche taste aka, a personality. I like knowing that if I go to London, my mate Craig can point me to some pie-and-mash shop deep in fuck knows where that I’m sure is great, or I can trust his steak ratings considering everyone does steak. Yet I know just as well not to recommend him the best century egg and Changsha tofu in town. I have a mate Josh coming to town next weekend, and it’s both exciting and comforting to peruse dining options rather than just follow the herd.

I’m fairly diplomatic when it comes to trying food and establishments. I will actually go to a restaurant I know I’m not going to like if I have a soft spot for the people I’m going to see there. But, I do have major overlapping fields of taste as this blog surely reflects… French food, Italian food, British food, Cantonese or regional Chinese food. That’s pretty much the Mount Rushmore.

There are many things I do not really like or do not move me. Korean BBQ, deep dish pizza, high tea, Filipino food, craft beer, okra, sparkling water, injera, bubble tea, sushi train, macarons, Brazil nuts etc. (I can expand each of these into 1500-word essays after 3 pints).

I have a friend Amy who custom paints all the $60,000 steamer trunks people buy at Louis Vuitton and use as coffee tables. She is the first and only person to every tell me she feels indifferent to music. Like she “doesn’t mind” music but doesn’t actively seek it out as a hobby or extension of herself. Mind-blowing revelations. I wonder if I was to be set alight in a freak accident in her presence would her complete nihilism prevent her from rescuing me but I also like her and kind of trust her. She’s passionate in other realms and has good taste in memes.

It’s ok to not like things. It’s ok to like really specific things. These are often the “extreme” outliers but what scares me most is those in the vast middle. The length of this article has given me time to really reflect, and I’ve deduced that of the 18 said oysters, I will require 10 natural, 4 with tabasco and 4 with finger lime. The soundtrack will be “Triton Journey” by Sporting Life. Thank you for your attention on this matter.

The plight of the spruiker is to be a purveyor of a dying art. An odd intersection of sales, exhibitionism and theatre now relegated to the last of the fresh food markets and Big Issue street vendors. When I was a child, I loved the “cherry man” at Queen Vic Market who would yell out “you want to buy my cherriiiesss!!??” in a thick Italian accent. It’s an art form that makes me feel as if we haven’t yet totally dissolved into the flatline of a digitally enclosed world. It’s nice to know someone has the confidence to sell into the void of the public arena without shame.

I looked around at the old maritime buildings that surround the pier. I’m so conditioned to flaccid modernity and the millennial grey that taints the urban that these buildings seem like relics of yesteryear, and yet they stand before me in the present, still alive. Hobart might be the most beautiful place in Australia. So much of its landscape and trade is an ode to maritime industry and the seafarer.

Now I’m thinking not only of the spruiker, but the plight of the seafarer.

The faceless voyager, one who sails the murky depths for a crust.

Long bouts at sea, bookmarked by jelly legs and cold pints.

The celebration of the seafarer is so much more pronounced on a smaller island where they are part of the lifeblood; cogs of the economy sailing along trade routes, or even more anonymous still, henchmen of the military. Maybe in a larger metropolis where the distance to the ports and docks is lost to the sprawl, the seafarer goes even more unseen. Trinkets and slop just magically appear at the doorstep like an episode of Bewtiched, yet no one thinks of the seafarer who guided their Theragun safely from Shenzhen.

I flew into Hobart on the first flight. If you know me well, you know I have an oddball fascination with good banana bread; moist, untoasted and cakeish in texture. When I was booking my flight, I was joking with a good friend that I should add the Jetstar banana bread to the booking for $6. I did, and forgot all about it, only to be woken up at 6:20am on the flight with a piece of shit banana bread. Reap what you sow.

I generally fast until lunchtime but I decided to knock off a morning bun at Pigeon Whole Bakers while I waited for the ferry to MONA. Highlights that proceeded were the Erwin Wurm car, an always welcome Nam June Paik piece and the generally untreated rock walls left exposed in the architecture. David Walsh certainly has a taste for the macabre.

I made the pilgrimage to Hobart during a time when many restaurants were still shut for the Xmas/New Year break so I was a bit light on the bookings given some last minute cancellations. Next time, Ogee. So I did what any respectable punter does when in a lurch and looked for the best pub in town. The New Sydney Hotel it was. Running on more pints of Guinness than I’d had hours sleep, I tucked in to a bowl of crispy pigs ears and HP sauce, followed by a gargantuan pork knuckle, a feat of pub grub given its meltingly tender interior and crispy shell.

I was so full to the brim like a drunken sailor that I ordered a cruise ship (an Uber) up the mammoth hill that leads into West Hobart to go back to my hotel. Staring out the window, I was still aghast at how people have houses with sheds and yards in such close proximity to the city centre. What awaited what a delightful combination, a spa bath and a bottle of 2021 Blaufrankisch/Syrah cuvee from Weingnut Dorli Muhr in Austria, which I’d bubble wrapped and brought on the plane for this exact purpose. I’m really taking a liking to Blaufrankisch, the mother of Gamay.

I sat in the spa with all the worlds great intentions of writing some prolific piece of something but instead I mainly stared at the wallpaper and perused new loafers on my phone periodically, intaking the complex bottle of red by my side. There’s a bit of a dance between dark forest fruit and lighter berry, and an earthy peppery note to a long finish, but what’s most striking is the pronounced aroma, an all round impressive and affordable bottle.

The next morning saw a trip on the bus up Mount Wellington, which I experienced shortness of breath as a result of altitude for the first time ever. I got off the bus and felt like I was having a panic attack within minutes. It’s about 1150 metres above sea level, and took me a few minutes to adjust. This fat Chinese guy next to me was smoking cigarettes unphased, respect.

On the way back into town, I polished off 12 Bruny Island oysters, a subpar wallaby burger and a charred octopus skewer at the Salamanca markets, and brought some dehydrated squid for my brothers dog. I asked around about Angasi oysters. Turns out they’re a cult favourite only peaking in the wintertime. It’s on my 2026 bucket list to revisit Hobart in the winter for the sheer sake of chasing the elusive Angasi oysters.

Later that day, clad in double denim and ready to start swilling piss again, I went for a quick rabbit pie at Jackman and Ross in Battery Point en route to the Shipwright Arms. In the midst of a quaint little street, the Shipwright Arms is a beautiful pub, adorned with stained glass windows and much memorabilia, much of it an ode to the Sydney to Hobart competitors. Jeez, the pubs are fantastic in Hobart. I’m a pub stint guy, I love to breeze through for a few hours, yet in any of these decorated Hobart watering holes I felt like an ol’ boozehound who could easily meld to the furniture and swallow the remainder of my days in one gulp.

I wanted to check out Lucinda Wine Bar, a natty nook by the folks of Dier Makr back in town. They had a notably interesting butter laced with crushed fennel seeds and some good sourdough, and a decent steak tartare. In al honesty, I found the set-up a tad hard to navigate. The waiter told me there’s no list they’ve just got a bunch of bottles open and what would I like to drink? What’s the vibe? In theory, I like this idea. Guide the punter. Yet, somehow it felt clunky and I was also dining solo. I’d love to just read a list 19 times instead of looking at my phone. Sometimes wines on a list speak to you in some ouija board fashion, tickling an itch you didn’t quite know you needed to scratch. Bouteilles that summon you from a simple text translation, glaring at you longingly like a puppy at the pound.

After all that, I did discover a great wine; a juicy Cabernet Franc from Calvez Bobinet in Saumur in the Loire, a good shout after all. Three harmless yet relatively insufferable boomer women wouldn’t stop talking to me about Melbourne so I left abruptly en route to the 3rd slot of the Hobart pub trifecta; the Hope and Anchor Tavern; the oldest licensed pub in Australia.

It was the 3rd of January and they had the fireplace going, perfect, as I long for cooler weather and generally dislike the heat. I zig-zagged between hot buttered rums and pints of Guinness until it was time to call it. In the midst of the pub, I did chat to a solid gentleman working the bar, a single father with 4 jobs who was also studying. Admirable to say the least, yet I quietly took a deep breath and internally sighed of relief at my loose bachelor lifestyle.

The next morning, I awoke dusty, my skin flaking and dry from the lack of skincare routine and the surplus amount of hot buttered rums and Guinness. It doesn’t take long for me to unravel on a holiday. Tunnel vision for food and alcohol and all that is sensory. While I waited for my reservation at Fico, I listened to the Best of… Bob Lind and strolled back to Salamana Place to buy Australian poetry books at Deja Vu bookstore. What a charming little slice of retail. One of the “rooms” had an entrance so narrow I had to wobble in sideways. I was in a trance shopping in there but I think I’d go stark raving mad working there. Reminds me of the only shop in Goussainville in Paris, where a single man runs a bookshop in a town empty after a 1970s airshow crash. I visited this town and saw 3 people in 3 hours, and when I finally crossed paths with the book vendor at 2pm, he asked me to come back with an appointment if I wanted to buy books. He then walked inside his little bookshop in the abandoned village, put a torch on his head as there was no electricity and then got to work. Unlike the spruiker, he cares not for the sale.

I also discovered a Sunday market, where I ate another 12 Bruny Island oysters for breakfast and had a terrific cardamom bun by local outfit Toni Brisco.

Fico is a nice open-plan environment. As a solo diner, I was plonked on the island bench in the centre, right next to the open bottles where I belong. First cab off the rank, a Moreau-Naudet Chablis, yes sir. I was in the zone for a set menu. I normally dislike gazpacho, even as a French bistro nut, but the watermelon gazpacho was a hit off the bat, as was the little quail egg and sesame bite. The first knockout dish however was the chawanmushi. I’d heard so much about Fico, most of it connected to the Italian ilk, but I guess it wasn’t as I expected at this point.

The chawanmushi was topped with calamari, zucchini flower, basil and celery all set into a dashi jelly. The earthiness of the dashi and the veg, the tender salinity of the octopus, the custardy egg; wow. There was a quick intermission of bread and cime di rapa oil before another complex and surprising dish landed; a potato and pureed lemon tortelli, atop mussels, spring peas and curry leaves with what I believe was a foamy pastis sauce. By this stage, it struck me just how complex and earthy the flavours had been throughout the whole menu. There was a real elegance to the food, gently marrying land and sea, tickling the senses just enough without trying to gouge your eyes out with intense flavours.

I had a bit of a pause and switched to red as I knew there was venison coming, enjoying a Nebbiolo by Bruno Giacosa, itself very earthy yet packing a cherry punch, a delicious go. There was a lovely poricini risotto with local white truffle that seemed to follow suit with the resolute approach thus far on the menu, with a creamy undercurrent yet a gentle woody touch of the truffle. The next dish was what sold me on the curation of the set menu. It was venison loin, cooked over the grills with a rich sauce made of its bones, akin to a bordelaise consistency, served with a forcemeat style cube also made from the venison.

What I realised was that the whole menu had been this gently complex journey, produce heavy and elegant, before the main hit with a sweet uppercut. Meaty and rich, with a crispy fried side, the Nebbiolo hit just in time for this crescendo moment. I find that sometimes set menus can be a little formulaic by design and sometimes experience but not by taste. Yes, appetisers, starters, mains, desserts, send out a belly dancer, whatever, but there’s no ingenuity to the actual journey of taste.

After the venison, a buffalo milk gelato, with frozen strawberries that resembled Nerds, raspberries and Mexican marigold. Resolute yes, but enough sweet punch to bridge the gap back down from the venison, then finally into a white chocolate sorbet with an earthy malt custard and hazelnut to finish proceedings. I felt like I had climbed a ladder, looked out upon the summit and gently climbed back down. It’s been a minute since a set menu made me feel some type of way. Jack and the beanstalk, Patrick and the menu.

I was in a nice haze all afternoon thinking about that meal. I had a late flight out so I went back to the Hope and Anchor and got on the hot buttered rums and ate a brilliant beef cheek wellington for good measure because why the fuck not. What a city.

I could ramble on for eons about the beauty of Hobart but sometimes to extrapolate things and put them into words kills the seduction. I hope it lives long and prospers in the midst of a changing Australia, for the locals and the tourists alike. Much like I felt in the air of Mexico, the locals are proud and protective people, a notion fast disappearing from the cultural identity. There hasn’t been a place that’s taken me out of my head as vividly as Hobart in quite some time. I’d like to think in decades to come, I can still traipse about the Cove, hot buttered rum on my breath listening to “Elusive Butterfly” by Bob Lind and slowing down enough to enjoy the view.

In “Big Night”, everyone is smoking indoors. The last time I saw real-world smoking in restaurants was in Tokyo about a decade ago. I do have a mate that smoked gaspers inside at Lucky Chan at Crown Casino quite a bit in recent years but that’s because him and his motley were in a private room and spending too much filthy lucre on average dinner. Gross displays of wealth afford such ephemeral luxuries.

There’s something romantic about billowing cigarette smoke inside a venue, the air of hedonism. It tends to obfuscate one’s visage as if to cloak your indulgence. The fable of the bees, public virtue, private vice and such.

Then again, smoking really fucks with the experience of food and wine in my opinion, and is largely overrated. I do often miss smoking but there’s only really about 3 or 4 good cigarettes (after a meal, after sex, with a coffee, with the first beer or two). The other 15 just come and go. Infinitely better than vaping though. Nothing irks me more than seeing a grown man take a desperate draw on a big fandangled grapefruit-flavoured vape box mod device. Gasping for testosterone. At least when the camera pans across the dining rooms in Big Night, there’s no one attempting to sneak a cherry vape, rather just good old tailored cigarettes and those big old glass ashtrays. You know the ones. My great grandfather actually died from being hit in the back of the head with one of those glass ashtrays in a pub brawl.

In the opening scenes of Big Night, we see Tucci sweeping the exterior of the restaurant in said chocolate suit, a nice ode to taking pride in the small things. There’s a foreboding tumbleweed effect in the street though. As we come to learn thereafter, Tucci and his brother, played by a young Tony Shalhoub, run a bonafide Italian restaurant that is struggling to make ends meet, as they contend with the 1950’s Americana attitude towards refined homeland Italian food.

Pride is a central theme to Italians and their cuisine, as often some of the preparations are rather simple, but the pride of quality ingredients flies the flag. There’s a theory that “how you do one thing is how you do everything”, which I adhere to, given that everybody is a brand, and Tucci and his brother maintain a resilient approach to quality even if they are cooking aboard a sinking ship. I can’t help but think how popular their little trattoria would have been if only it was in 2026 Australia and not fictional 1950’s Jersey Shore. My oh my how people would’ve appreciated the seafood risotto so much more. Mio dio.

When Secondo (Tucci) visits Pascal’s, a glitzy competitor restaurant, he is aghast at the razzle dazzle of it all; theatrical table service, bustling jazz, Isabella Rossellini walking around in elegant gowns. The place is packed, a far cry from his empty trattoria. Comparison is the thief of joy, given these restaurants are polar opposites, yet you can feel Secondo’s desperation. On a side note, as wary as I am of razzle dazzle, I do see a gap in the market in Australia for theatrical over-the-top old-world style restaurants. It’s not something that can be grown in a lab though, it’s forged through years of service and reputation. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it.

In the 2026 economy of Australia, that ship may have sailed. Who can afford to have cabaret dancers and ample good-looking wait staff, pianists on retainers and expensive curtains? I would live to see something like Bemelman’s Bar at The Carlyle NYC here in Melbourne. We are much more likely to see something like Secondo and his brother’s trattoria here, despite the contrast to the film in which they are the ones going out of business.

The whole premise of the film is that through Pascal’s connection, Secondo and his brother will host a big night with famed singer Louis Prima in attendance, one last dash to save the restaurant. They go all out in preparation for this one night, as Primo flexes his culinary skills and unwavering commitment to tradition.

As they bend over backwards into the crescendo of the evening, the calm before the storm sees the early doors guests laughing and drinking, claret flowing, dancing and bonding in anticipation of Louis Prima and the giant feast. Secondo and Primo are naturally stressing, but what is striking is that in these moments, they’re glossing over what really matters more than Louis Prima. Sure, big celebrity endorsements may carry a bit of weight, but seeing the patrons connect, enjoying themselves free of the ills of the world, is the other big component of what they’ve missed. It gets ever more clear as the stunning menu rolls out, once it dawns that everybody is drunk and Louis Prima is nowhere to be seen. At least there’s some joie de vivre that hasn’t been seen in the restaurant for donkeys. The guy singing Mambo Italiano is all-time. Reminds me of myself cooking ragu in my apartment on a slow Sunday, singing and swaying to “Blue Velvet” by Bobby Vinton, a little wine for the chef and a little for the sauce.

“To eat good food is to be close to god.”

Course after course, anticipation bubbles as the call and response between kitchen and patron simmers. We see Primo anxiously flip out a stunning Timpano, whole pigs, delicate consommé, risottos, artichokes, fish, poultry, the works. The classic Italian communication of love through cooking and an unwavering dedication to quality. Louis Prima may as well be in the Bahamas at this stage, as the patrons have long forgotten as they are entranced by the food and the connection, the core of what really matters inside a venue. I’d love to try a Timpano one day, gorging on this robust slab of multiple cheeses, ragu, multiple pasta shapes and all sorts of protein. In an odd way, it seems like the bon vivant’s equivalent to a meatlovers pizza.

Sure, Primo and Secondo are going broke. That is likely a symptom of a bigger illness, maybe it’s market positioning, maybe it’s the channelling of their anxiety in the dining experience, maybe it’s just a mismatch of client and offer. The nasty nitty gritty realities of doing business. That’s tomorrow’s problem. What they still have is passion and pride, and how very Victor Frankl of me to suggest, but that is what carries you in the darkest moments. Purpose. Whether or not Primo continues to cook in his restaurant is one thing, but the silver lining is that he can still cook, and hey, at least he asked the florist out.

Besides, anyone who has worked in any domain of sales or ever asked a woman out on a date will tell you that rejection and failure is part and parcel to success. In my 35 long and arduous years on the third rock I’ve sold it all; marijuana, Beats by Dre headphones, cocaine, Louis Vuitton croc-skin handbags, AFL tickets, Xanax, MDMA, dental implants, oxycontin, acid trips, vinyl records. That’s just scratching the surface. You get numb to the trial-and-error and rejection. It’s rarely personal. I feel Primo and Secondo’s pain, I truly do, but I see their plight as a chapter in an exhausting Russian novel called “having ambition on Planet Earth”.

The ill-fated twist is in all this is that Pascal is a snake-oil salesman and deadset liar. There was never going to be a Louis Prima. Pascal is a mildly insecure sociopath who can’t help but use people as pawns in his circus of hedonism, and gets off on his own false grandiosity. The “big night” is a coming-of-age lesson for Secondo and Primo, a tale as old as time. Be careful who you trust. All that glitters is not gold.

It is also indicative of this notion people have about one all-encompassing victory and glory that renders the past obsolete. One giant rectification of all that has gone wrong previously. Like a sports star in pursuit of glory, nothing else matters. Life doesn’t really work like that. I’ve known many recovering drug addicts, people who’s lives have been riddled with failures, and unproductive sloth-esque people who decide to kickstart a redemption arc, who latch on to one big crescendo moment in which they win the gold and everything is all ok in the end, and the past never ever happened. How very Hollywood. It’s a sad state of mental gymnastics. Often that moment simply never comes, because it was never meant to.

People often misdiagnose their underlying problems. They miss the cues of toxic self-fulfilling thought patterns and think one big overarching victory will delete any trace of the past and kickstart a new pattern of happiness and fulfilment. I’ve been there. Life is rather one long ebb and flow of fluctuating misery and random joy, a giant wave pool that you get better and better at riding. There are many bad times that lay ahead, and there are also amazing things coming your way. I’m yet to eat Timpano.

You can dictate the course through brute work and discipline to a large degree, but there’s this thing called luck that swings like a pendulum that you can’t quite catch. Life is unfair but sometimes it’s unfair in your favour. Sometimes things break, things fail and you pick yourself up and move on. All you can do is attempt to stop romanticising your own suffering or falling for pipe dreams, and rather get curious about how you respond to stimuli as if looking at yourself from an existential vantage point. What was that thing Wong Kar Wai wrote in Chungking Express about the past being something you can see but cannot touch? Thankfully, along the way there’s friendships, Barolo and Venetian Duck Ragu. You’ll be fine.

There’s an odd vacancy to Christmas this year, a sort of anti-climatic lull in which councils don’t seem to be spending as much on fancy wreaths and artificial mistletoe. The larger shopping centres seem much quieter. Maybe everyone is shopping online or maybe everyone is broke. Maybe it’s a reflection of the changing demographic make-up of society and globalisation. I’m sure, like every year, spikes in theft and car crashes will come, but also, like every year, it’s a good excuse to not have to trot off to work or be beholden to the relentless commitments of daily life.

I’m a tad grinch-like this time of year, but I must say, I do love the Christmas spreads. I think Christmas dining is about plates that don’t make sense. Plates that only seem normal in the context of Christmas. Ham, turkey, lamb piled high next to steaming piles of roast potatoes, your auntie’s cheesy veggie bake thing, a few parsnips, that grain salad that your cousin downloaded from www.taste.com.au.

But it doesn't end there does it? Next minute, there’s a few leftover Lindt balls that got added on in passing, and a bit of dip-and-biscuits. Your drunkard uncle has gotten stuck right into the Christmas pudding early and you’re paranoid there’ll be none left so you throw a slab of that on as well. The sponge cake was there at the same time a bit early on the table so you sampled some of that. Unfettered gluttony in the spirit of Christmas. You’ve forgotten what religion this even is.

By the time you go back for seconds, the plate looks much less curated and much more indistinguishable. The first plate was that of a Flemish master, a Baroque style platter. Second plate just looks like a kid running through an antique shop. And that’s fine. All you have to look forward to is dessert, then beers on the couch while you wait to have a second dessert.

It’s a great time of the year for niche films. I made a list on Letterboxd called “MIXED EMOTIONS XMAS HAMPER” and I think it speaks volumes of the vibe of Christmas. It’s a cosy joyous time, but it also brings a lot of ugly interpersonal ills to the fore. My psychologist told me during the Covid years, there was a sweeping calm amongst those chronically lonely people, because for once they felt connected via the proxy of loneliness, as the average person was also then confined to their house and limited contact. I feel like Christmas is the polar opposite of that. It sucks for the lonely.

Anyway, generally around this time of year I like watching Home Alone, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, The Big Chill, Die Hard, Beat Street, oh fuck it here’s the entire list:

-Die Hard (1988)
-Metropolitan (1990)
-Home Alone (1990)
-Home Alone 2 (1992)
-Batman Returns (1992)
-Lethal Weapon (1987)
-The Big Chill (1983)
-Trading Places (1983)
-Edward Scissorhands (1990)
-Bad Santa (2003)
-Broadcast News (1987)
-Love Actually (2003)
-Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
-Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
-A Heart In Winter (1992)
-Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
-Notting Hill (1999)
-Kicking and Screaming (1995)
-Good Will Hunting (1997)
-The Little Rascals (1994)
-Catch Me If You Can (2002)
-Stand By Me (1986) - R.I.P Rob Reiner
-Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
-Irma Vep (1996)
-The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 and 1999)
-Beat Street (1984)
-Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
-Pretty Woman (1990)
-What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)
-Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
-Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
-Matilda (1996)
-Magnolia (1999)
-The Addams Family (1991)

The emotional rollercoaster of wholesome films, coming of age films, lonely films, sad films, disillusioned films, romantic films, hopeful films, blah blah tends to encapsulate a certain residual turmoil, sombre gratitude and tranquility that comes with the holiday period.

On that note, I wish to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all the MORE PLATES readers. I forgot to actually acknowledge in the October passed that it had been one year of this lil’ food blog. I’ve managed to interview a whole bunch of really cool people and also treated it like a confessional booth to just type whatever the fuck I want really. My brain is like a pinball machine in the depths of the Mariana Trench most of the time so it’s been refreshing to write about food. Nothing too deep, nothing too salacious, it just is what it is.

Maybe I should do some commemorative hats or something.

I appreciate those who connect with this project and relate to some of my MacBook ramblings. Basically ever convo I have stemming from this blog is a good one too, whether it’s with old mates or new faces. I have many iterations of MORE PLATES to come in 2026, plus a few other non-food written projects. Might even drop a new rap album, fuck it. The world is your freshly shucked Sydney Rock Oyster.

I hope all of you fucking freaks have a wonderful holiday period, regardless of what you celebrate, and above all else, stay safe. Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

The great flattening of time and the distortion of the continuum is our new normal. It either engulfs you with one or more disease; nostalgia, passive comfort etc. or it gives you a new plateau in which to breathe and build your own world within a world. The avalanche of micro trends are like blips on the radar, ephemeral waves that don’t so much crash as gently ripple on the sands of time.

I ate a brilliant spread at Bistra in Carlton recently. You know, it is quite arduous to separate “classic” from pastiche, “time-honoured” from stale when culturally, everything feels like a rehash, a remix, a re-something. Amongst all of that though, there is a through-line of things that have been good, are good, and will be good. I Googled the menu for Bistra en route to dinner and nothing screamed of the future. Nothing really shouted from the past. It just was. A delightful meal came and went, and it just was. Classics without forcing themselves as classics. It’s difficult to quantify aura but you just know.

To start, spinach and ricotta dumplings, floating in butter and adorned with a sufficient shave of Reggiano… soft and pillowy… potato rosti, creme fraiche, trout roe, chives… basically a perfect marriage of textures… and surprise surprise, sourdough bread. Really good sourdough bread.

There’s a certain art to elegant comfort food. People tell me the cheeseburger at Bistra is great, and I’m sure it’s much like the Clam Bar thing where the burger is indeed great. My mate Craig recently texted me a beautiful looking burger from The Gidley. New York haunts like Waverley Inn and Monkey Bar definitely opened up my scope of reference for the idea of ordering a burger in a high-end dining establishment. In the manor of the COS/Zara tag-a-long of the quiet luxury fashion trend, you can’t force the classics onto people through a lab-grown pastiche. You just have to do them and do them well.

I remember easing into proceedings at Bistra and calmly thinking that this could’ve been a meal from years passed or it could be a Thursday in 2025. Alas, I was enjoying myself free from impending doom and past ills. I’d forgotten what year it is.

Next was a very cute agnolotti filled with whipped cheese doused in a nutty pistachio pesto. Delicately, enough earthiness between the pistachio and the cheese to offset the river of creaminess.

Crescendo into the mains, a lovely sweet lamb rump with spring asparagus and an impressively airy horseradish cream, side by side with a hanger steak and mustard service. At risk of glossing over the sensory details and giving it to you with a poetic brevity, the food was exactly what it sounds like, done better than what you’d expect it to be done like. Somehow Bistra, in it’s youthful glory, has opened the doors to serve food that you already know, yet with an ace-up-the-sleeve level of quality. Restaurants like these are fantastic arenas to drink wine in. I’ve waxed poetic about how I structure wine pairings and my personal take on when to drink table wine and when to unleash the Raveneau, and somewhere like Bistra is a happy medium if you want to polish off a few bouteilles of distinction while punching out some solid plates without climbing onto a jungle gym of flavours and overstimulation.

It’s a game of perception here. One might say there’s nothing new under the sun and not to bother, but there’s a roundabout element of the “water and diamonds” paradox here. It’s about perceived value. Water is worth fuck all compared to diamonds by equivalent weightings, yet in a barren wasteland, 3 days dry, clinging on for dear life, swallowing a handful of diamonds is going to do nothing for you. In that clinch moment, water is worth exorbitantly more.

In a flattened world of mish-mash kitsch offerings of the past, Fisher-esque observations, fumbled attempts at the new and incremental genre-bending, maybe something good and proper like Bistra is worth it’s weight. It is what it is and it is not what it is not. It’s up-to-date in it’s techniques yet it harks backwards for its referencing. Culturally, the middle ground has eroded and we seem to be stuck in purgatory between the past and the future. Future which is anxiety-provoking and a past which was maybe not as good as we romanticise it to be. To enjoy the “now” comes at a premium and so be it.

There are many low-brow spectres of the past still glued to the landscape, rotting in real time. The standard lanyard-class Melbourne cafe fare; sub-par lattes, Costco muffins and milquetoast ham-and-cheese croissants full of Coles plastic slop. Many of whom cried poor during the totalitarian Covid wave yet many of whom also let their competition live long and prosper while they withered on the vine. There was probably better sandwiches at Fyre Fest. Whatever’s not evolving is essentially dead.

I recall a mate of mine buying a jam donut at a bakery near Ormond about 12 years ago. When he pulled it out of the white paper bag, it was actually a fluffy little dinner roll piped with jam and rolled in sugar. These sadists had gone to such lengths to create a simulacra of a jam donut. It was only fair my mate threw the donut back at them over the counter, as young scallywags do. It’s only $2.50 but the perception of value cost them a lot more.

You have to look at not only the functional, but also the emotional utility of each meal. There’s $4.50 Bahn Mis and there’s $75 scallop-stuffed John Dory and Champagne caviar cream sauces. The free market is cruel and callous yet ultimately has lifted more out of poverty and emotional wreckage than any and all else thus far.

Many of the cheap and cheerful haunts have suffered under the weight of government-printed inflation. I remember boys from Dandenong taking me to Westall Spice Cafe 20 years ago, with shitty plastic tablecloths and friendly owners. We’d gorge on giant plates of Colombo mixed fried rice for what felt like the same value as a $2 minimum chips. It’s now gone. The past is something you can see but you cannot touch.

Now, we have the entire world’s information at our fingertips and the entire spectrum of food available to us, delivered via drone or by some faceless soul on an electric bike. It’s generally all overpriced and you want none of it, but you feel it’s what you somehow deserve. In a twist of fate, enjoying the “now”, buying organic ingredients and cooking something wholesome within your home, or going to Bistra to eat top-notch renditions of what you know and love is a grand commodity. It’s one of the last untainted luxuries.

Gone is the big-budget, big-balls risk taking of 1930s-1990s Hollywood. Bring forth the lukewarm Netflix Originals and pathetic remakes of Jacobs Ladder. Gone is the mystique and rebelliousness of luxury fashion houses. Dario Vitale just lasted one season at Versace. You can smell the desperation wafting from Milan and Paris as the Creative Director musical chairs continues. Matthieu Blazy at Chanel is a glimmering hope but really Karl Lagerfeld was already doing all of that decades prior. For the first time in 35 years, there’s no rap music in the Billboard Top 40 in America. Entire genres grinding to a halt.

Thank your lucky stars for all that endures the vice grip of modern life. The through-line of true classics and the time-honoured. Be careful where you tread in the field of the future, be careful of eachother. The “I” must embrace the “we” as the “we” must embrace the “I”, and all of us must embrace the “now”. You’ve forgotten what year it is.

I’ve always loved eating out but I wasn’t always into cooking. In fact, I never was terribly domesticated until recent. I spent most of my 20’s aloof and peripatetic, traipsing between drug dens, music venues and urban haunts. My recall for shortcuts, public toilets, hidden parkland and tunnels is uncanny. I know a lot of names and faces from familiar train lines, apartment towers and other nefarious enclaves. After living in Sydney for a few years, I returned to Melbourne and never realised how much it had changed. My mental Rolodex of retail stores and restaurants had gathered dust, like cheap old plastic Christmas decorations waiting for a fruitful future that never comes. David and Camy’s in Box Hill disappeared, so did the Reach WCA piece at Victoria Park. Many of those familiar names and faces have disappeared for better or for worse, once-was staples of the urban ecosystem that just become holograms of data in the eternal screen of 1s and 0s that is memory.

I moved in with a girl I was dating haphazardly at 23 years old, something I fell into but selfishly figured would cure my rogue streak. The idea of domestication made me anxious, having to dissolve my calm veneer and frenetic undercurrent in order to commit, to relax, to breathe. I smoked an acreage of choof everyday in my 20s, and most stoners I knew were domesticated in the sense that they were practically glued to their smoke-stained couches, yet I could never reach such stillness. All marijuana did was somewhat quell my racing mind, and allow it to cling on to random fleeting interests like old library records, Baudrillard and Shark Tank on TV.

Some years later, when I was living in a share-house in Clifton Hill and started properly attempting to cook, I started to peer through the cracks of my nomadic shell, and stare into a portal previously unknown; a world in which you can decorate your apartment, exist in it comfortably and temporarily absolve yourself of external commitments. It has taken me moons to properly transcend. I had a girl come over to my apartment in Potts Point a couple of years ago and she made a quip that it looks like no one actually lives here. It was funny at the time, She’d have had a fright if she saw some of my previous dwellings though. Slowly I came around to the art of chilling at home and doing fuck all. Feels good.

Home cooking is a totally different kettle of fish to the real deal gritty chef life. You don’t need to fire that sea urchin pasta in 5 minutes. You can listen to Red Scare or Tim Dillon while you cook if you want. You can make steak tartare in your underwear and eat it on the couch, remnants of Pafritas truffle chips and yolky beef spilling on your Uniqlo t-shirt. Just as you deserve. There’s a beautiful focus that comes with home cooking, in the midst of sequential activity you find a peaceful rhythm. As long as you don’t mind doing the dishes.

Home cooking has also become a huge business, but is it technically part of the hospitality industry? Not really, yet it runs in close parallel. Private chefs have been in the shadows of the hospitality industry for a long time. There’s a friend of mine, a mother of two, an excellent chef who did away with the Michelin-starred life and just started cooking for the uber-wealthy in Sydney and on various private jets. She said most decent chefs she knows wouldn’t set foot in a commercial restaurant anymore unless they were front of house wining and dining.

Cooking on social media has been around since the inception of the platforms but Covid-19 was an accelerant, with the arduous lockdowns having a whoosh effect on the rise of the home cook/social media cook. At one stage, it felt like everyone you knew was making sourdough bread at home. I’m also one of those people that posts their half-pie attempts at cooking nice food, just because I can. My feed is a rich tapestry of whatever the fuck I was feeling at the time.

I’m sure you can hear the faint snarls of the purists, those who’ve slaved in steamy kitchens for years on end with no recognition, cooking food of the highest order, delighting the masses from the shadowy depths. I feel their plight and I admire it. I hear them diss these Instagram cooks, they feel as if they owe dues. Yet, I also quite admire this new crop of people who’ve managed to parlay social media presence and quality cooking into an income stream. I’m not generally a fence-sitter but I’m planted on the palings here. You’ll never replace the restaurant experience, you can’t eat through your screen just yet, but why not soak in a few Adam Byatt cooking demos in between.

At the end of day, I just enjoy culinary excellence, I’m not terribly biased on how it’s delivered. Sure, Instagram cooking reels are essentially delayed gratification cut and packaged into instant gratification, as you watch a dish get prepped in a series of half second chops that eventually climaxes as a finished plate, but you can also learn a lot of techniques. I’m a big supporter of the average person becoming better at cooking, eating less biohazard slop and eating more whole ingredients. Less Uber Eats and more cooking for yourself. I’m a big supporter of families that eat together at a table, and friends who pot-luck. Online cooks tend to cook more approachable and wholesome fare that appeals to the followers. Not everyone is trying to be Heston.

Sure, there’s a lot of piss-poor rage bait cooks and thinly-veiled socio pornography associated with online cooks that distorts the marketplace but is that not too dissimilar from the offline hospo world? Remember Salt Bae and his chain of steakhouses? Ever had pasta at the Sooshi Mango guys restaurant on Lygon Street? Remember Karen’s Diner in Sydney?

Trad-wife aesthetics crossing over into cooking is an interesting pocket of the online cookery world. Not just Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman but there’s a real blue-blood everyday trad-wife community too. It’s hard to decipher whether it’s just pick-me energy, and pseudo-porn for guys who like traditional gender roles, given they’re now at more of a premium. Or, is it what I often suspect, a subtle flex on other women, the “look at my perfect little life” play. The over-engineered effortlessness. Same with really hot guys that cook and wear “slutty white t-shirts”.

Alas, when you zoom out, there’s a myriad of really cool people cooking on the internet and earning money from it. The Kiwi guy Andy Hearnden, an ex-chef, is doing numbers, I’m sure Paris Starn’s Substack is easily making more money than this one, and people like Laila Gohar are selling mother-of-pearl salad servers now. I fuck with the vision. Real wages are stagnant, fiat is off the gold standard and the neon-lit property casino is open 24/7. The meritocracy is over and we’ve crossed over into crony-capitalism, it’s time to listen to “Gotta Make it to Heaven” by 50 Cent and hustle.

Many pockets of the physical dining landscape are now downstream from the online world too, and vice versa. Ben Shewry makes potato salad on Instagram, you can watch Pierre Koffman make veal sweetbreads on YouTube. Everything’s starting to emulsify. People who got known for cooking from socials now do pop-ups and supper clubs. The aggregated dining landscape is widening to accommodate the online arc. Jung Fun Chae of Chae restaurant in her home is dripping in accolades of recent. Fashion brands have realised the power of food aesthetics as a commodity. It feels like Balboste was catering for every possible luxury house at one stage.

It runs deeper. You can now unpack dieting in a streamline manner on Instagram. “What I eat in a week on the Carnivore diet”… “Six simple mid-week vegan meals”… By sheer distortion of volume sometimes it all feels like slop. I gloss over 90% of it, but I think finding the cooks and social media personalities that speak to you on a different level is fun. The rabbit hole endures.

So as I sit down letting the mind wander after this lovely little swordfish, thinking about domestication and home cooking, I’m starting to wonder if the Homeless Industrial Complex is a thing? Remember when the council rounded up all the homeless people in Melbourne and put them in hotels while the Commonwealth Games were on in 2006? It’s taboo to question the homeless in the public discourse, but when do we start to unpack the difference between the various sects of the unhoused? If you really care about issues you want to dive deeper, you don’t just share some bullshit on your Instagram story.

There’s many people, particularly DV victims, stuck between the streets and shelters, yearning to get back on their feet. I also know a lot of guys with complex trauma issues who ended up on the streets because of severe drug addiction who I feel sorry for, a tragic affliction, yet many burnt every bridge on the way down. Many wouldn’t bother trying to claw their way back now anyway even if the helping hand was there. There’s two sides to every coin toss.

I would also say the majority of the people I know who live in social housing commission flats were not born in the system, but rather landed there by way of poor economic decisions and once again, complex trauma and severe drug addictions. Most people I know who’ve made money in Australia are from lower and middle class origins, a faint ray of hope for socioeconomic mobility in a system that gets murkier by the minute.

I’m starting to believe the cause and subsequent solutions for the homeless community has less and less to do with actual homes. It’s currently bundled in with the wider housing crisis but yet in my lifetime, nothing much has really changed. True charities exist to help at the point of crisis which is great, but why do we try to fix this issue only at the crisis point? The bigger picture itself never seems to get any better.

The middle class is still being sold the same old pipe dream of “work hard and you’ll get ahead” with no real specifics, as housing prices and the CPI have long decoupled from real wages. It makes me experience a sort of sombre gratitude. As hard as I work, I’m also somewhat blessed to have a roof over my head and four walls in which I can chill and do fuck all in. I can safely cook a Venetian duck ragu in my underwear and watch Tsai Ming Liang films if I want to.

I caught up with Lily to find out what makes her tick, her genesis and what’s next…

You have a dual presence both online and offline. How does the approach to cooking differ between these two paralell worlds?

I think I’ve adapted to the point that I can naturally go between the two with ease. You’d assume that after a busy day of service, the last thing I’d want to do would be to cook yet ironically, it’s often how I unwind. Most of the time I’m not even making anything elaborate - it’s usually some variation of a rice bowl (topped with mountain of bonito flakes). I also tend to do more baking and pastry work at home than I do for my job which can allow for it to still feel like ‘play.’ I really love what I do so it’s rarely a chore. At times there can often be a bit of a gap between what I want to eat vs more complex dishes I wish to serve and that difference probably helps maintain a sense of separation too.

“Aesthetics” of food have become a dime a dozen commodity, but it has been an important facet of dining since forever, before social media and the vibe economy. What inspires your visual language with plating and dining?

I really enjoy plating and playing around with shape and colour. I’ve always been a very visual person so naturally, it’s one of my favourite parts of cooking. I like to keep things a little playful, I don’t think presentation has to be too serious to feel considered. I also think that the plate itself / serveware can play a large role in how a dish is received. I’ve built up a kind of ridiculous personal collection over the years (mostly thrifted) with a particular weakness for curly-edged ones. I’d say probably most of my inspiration comes from the places I dine and also from being, admittedly, chronically online. The people I follow in my little corner of the internet constantly blow my mind with their talent and creativity.

What was the turning at which cooking became a full-fledged hobby and obsession?

It’s hard to pinpoint a specific point in time. I’ve been interested in food and cooking for as long as I can remember, ‘inventing’ dishes from a pretty young age. I started my page during the pandemic and found this small online community (largely based in New York) who were also cooking and baking whilst being home bound. We pushed each other creatively, and I think that experience really sparked something in me. It made me realise that cooking was more than just a hobby and something that I genuinely cared about. I’ve worked a lot of random jobs across different industries but it never occurred to me to pursue cooking professionally. I left my full time job to attend culinary school and later landed at Don’s Prahran - where I currently cook (with a team of people I truly adore). Now that I’m doing it, it feels almost silly that I didn’t start sooner. I’ve never felt more like myself.

Restaurant service is like theatre. Chaotic yet choreographed. Home cooking is probably a tad more mellow. How do you toggle between the two?

Service really is like a dance! It ‘s chaotic, fast paced and there’s a level of focus and finesse involved that I don’t necessarily apply to my home cooking / baking. During a busy weekend service, I tend to slip into auto pilot mode and for the most part, muscle memory takes over. There’s hardly time to think (probably a part of why I love it). Cooking at home can be the complete opposite. If I’m working on a project, I’ve probably planned my whole day around it. I’ll have a playlist or podcast on and can happily spend hours creating, getting lost in my own thoughts. It’s much slower and more introspective. It’s a different kind of energy, although I love both equally.

Guilty Pleasures, we all have them. I love maccas, banana bread, fake indian food… what low end food gets you going?

I think ‘low end’ is pretty subjective. I don’t really care for most fast foods, to be honest. In saying that, I am partial to a mars bar and a vanilla milkshake (or really any vanilla form of dairy). I’m not sure if it’s considered ‘low tier’ but I’m also really into thin sliced packet swiss cheese right now.

Aight, death row meal!.. one dish, one song to end it all. What are you eating and what are you listening to?

I had this conversation with somebody just the other week! Except ours was about a full ‘last day of eating’. Mine’s annoyingly specific and a bit elaborate, I’ll spare you the details. My final meal would probably involve some sort of rye sourdough direct from the oven with French salted butter, traditional steak tartare (ideally mustard heavy) and either Portakalopita (Greek orange filo cake) or a crepe suzette for dessert. Alternatively, if my last meal ever was a set Japanese omakase, I would be more than content.

What I’m listening to? That is an impossibly hard question to answer. At this exact moment I’m listening to ‘At the River’ by Groove Armada, maybe that. Or anything by David Bowie.

What’s next on the radar?

I’m currently planning a bake sale at Don’s next month! There will be a variety of sweet and savoury pastries available + plenty of filter coffee on pour. My friend Sam has designed all of the menus and graphics and I’m really excited for it. So I guess stay tuned for that.

The man is Don Scott, ex-AFL ruckman, avid race-goer, and renaissance man of a cross-section of Australia that has all but withered away. Tall and lean, draped in a tonal beige get-up; a barn jacket, chinos, wide-brim Panama hat, offset with a red striped poplin shirt and an ornate red tie. He stands alone, clutching a form guide, his astute gaze totally unwavering. Humans are temporarily suspended and the vision of the horse is all that matters. Flesh and muscle. Yonks ago, many of the men who loosely orbited my life looked like this.

The dawn of spring and the peak of the horse racing calendar is for me a welcome constant in an ever-evolving life on planet Earth. I looked past Don Scott’s shoulder to see Treasurethe Moment float past me at arm’s length, a star mare on the rise. When I was a child my grandmother worked in a TAB, and the sound of the horse races on Sport 92.7 blaring on a radio in her home was calming. I had an uncle who I never met, a young jockey that died in a tragic car accident on the way home from Echuca Racecourse. When I was a young boy, I used to rock back-and-forth while standing on a dining chair, using one of my uncle’s old whips to pretend I was atop a horse. I had lofty ambitions of being a jockey but I was too tall.

In 2023, I visited Longchamp Racecourse in Paris, and on the way to the racetrack I marvelled at the quaint paddocks and leafy surrounds of the preceding suburbs en route. This aesthetic romanticism that surrounds traditional horse culture was lightyears from my concrete upbringing. The world within a world of horse racing was an escape, a holiday of sorts. There’s something tender about the sweeping calm that comes over me as spring approaches. I love winter more than any of the seasons, but I’m gently relieved by the prized stallions and spring menus that lay ahead. Light hedonism.

That evening after a flutter at the Caulfield Guineas, I did what any half-pie punter does after a bet and a pint of Carlton Draught unpasteurised tank beer, and shouted myself dinner, and more drinks. I trotted back to the big smoke in my vintage Ermenegildo Zegna double-breasted blazer and found a nook for one at Harriot, the latest venture from the Tipo 00/Osteria Ilaria crew.

I was seated quickly and had a glass of Chenin Blanc in hand even quicker. There was a touch more brassiere grandeur in the decor of Harriot than any of their previous ventures. I support that. The moody lighting is gently interrupted by an illuminated kitchen pass in the corner. Realising I was a week late for the pigeon special, I spent a few minutes perusing the menu. Working out the mental mapping of a menu and wine pairings to suit your palette and mood is like the poetry of a chess opening. Appetisers, entrees, mains, sides, desserts. Pawns, bishops, knights, rooks, queen. Ruy Lopez. Queens Gambit. Control the centre, don’t move the Queen too early.

I opened proceedings with a gorgeous tartlet with raw Bluefin tuna atop a fermented porcini mayonnaise. A serious couple of bites. I’m always intrigued at how the courtship develops between restaurant and diner. The menu, shock flirtation or a gentle seduction, where does one lead? Like a pawn to e4? Or a thoroughbred who takes off 3 lengths in front before the home turn?

The tartlet was one of the best little morsels I’ve experienced in a hot minute. The freshness of the tuna, treated with a genteel touch, cubed to the perfect ratio for the application… the creamy mayonnaise enriched with fermented porcini contrasting with an earthy richness… all of this set against the backdrop of a crisp rye tartlet. Really well executed balance of textures. Like one overlooks the 15-1 shot set to peak mid-prep, one can overlook the details in the early doors of the menu.

I’d moved on to a glass of Pascal Reverdy Sancerre by the time the next little foray appeared. For the record, always a reliable table drop that doesn’t require you to take out a Commonwealth personal loan. Globe artichoke appeared, simply with witlof and fennel pollen, no pretentious plating or fandangled devices, just a genuine plate. The anatomy of an artichoke is fascinating even when dissected into wedges as per this plate. Artichoke, fennel, endive, these kinds of bitter veg always hit the spot with white wine. There’s a lot of upsell, pomp and wank about with pairings but sometimes the straight-down-the-line classics suffice.

Given I was dining solo, I oscillated between reviewing the days racing results and reading the wine list like it was a biblical canon. There was a very chill somm who after a bit of banter about Alsation whites, saw fit to scribe a recommendation on a card; Jean-Marc Dryer (Jean-Marc Dreyer). The sensory arousal of wine has no time for academicism and spelling bees. Good shout.

35 years old, single, no kids, unsure of what the future holds, I’m so used to solo dining, I long ago shook off the slime of social anxiety that plagues most in this situation. Don’t worry about what others think of you, they don’t think of you.

While I waited for the next course, I scanned the trophy bottles lined up next to me. I always chuckle to myself seeing Laurent Ponsot’s Y2K pastiche graphic design, which looks more akin to a Windows XP video game menu than it does a Grand Cru Burgundy.

Next order of business was a brothy plate of lamb sweetbreads, served with big croutons which I suspect may have been cooked in duck fat. I live laugh love a well seared yet creamy sweetbread, fear not eating the pancreas, the thymus. Like any filly or mare, if you spend your whole life focused on breast and thigh you will miss the beauty of the silhouette, and the charming secrets of nuance in between. The sweetbreads were treated well, a buttery base with some preserved lemon, an earthy sage undercurrent and chives. One of the better plates of sweetbreads in the city.

In theatric succession, out comes a half plate of gruyere ravioli, with peas and a buttery saffron sauce. What’s evident by this stage of affairs, upon first light of the new digs, is that Harriot has that touch reminiscent of Tipo in that they delicately balance flavours and textures. There’s nothing overly restrained yet nothing that screams pizzazz. The food is elegant. I often hear people in Melbourne reference that they gloss over Tipo 00 because they generally cook pasta at home or they feel like they don’t want to pay upmarket prices for pasta. I understand, as I cook a lot of pasta myself, but Tipo 00 is not making your run-of-the-mill midweek pasta. It’s approaching or may have already subtly arrived at institution status for the fact that they make incredibly unique yet well-weighted pasta dishes. Recently, I had the squid ink tagliolini that they’re famous for, and another cute sea urchin special. It never misses and doesn’t feel like I cooked it after work either.

The attitude towards pasta is different in Sydney, people seem to froth Palazzo Salato, Ragazzi, Fratelli, Pellegrino 2000, Fabbrica, Bastardo, Alberto’s Lounge, I mean the list just goes on and on.

To crescendo into the final course, the star on the Christmas tree, I ordered the cockerel dish, a half-bird to be exact. Not a protein you see on every menu. This beautifully sweet cockerel was roasted on the crown, served with morels and podded broad beans. Definitely a masterclass in the treatment of the bird. It’s crispy skin offset against the gamey flesh, ultra tender and truly sweet. So much so that the meatiness and earthiness of the morels was a welcomed juxtaposition to the young male chicken. Spring comfort, a dish cooked with care and an emphasis on produce. Cockerel, morels, broad beans, all allowed to shine in their own right, and not be secreted into the depths of the plate.

The couple and/or work colleagues on the table next to me leant over and marvelled at my solo dining operation and we had a funny ol’ chinwag. They both work in the industry and were I think equally impressed and disgusted at my obsessive curation and reckless overconsumption. In my defence, I did not have dessert nor my ritual Fernet Branca to call curtains on a lengthy dinner.

I watched the owner of Harriot tour a Japanese couple through the kitchen as I gathered myself to head home, round the home bend for another lap. I’m delighted there’s another solid restaurant on the scene that’s unafraid to serve unique proteins, treated with respect and plus a gun list to swill from. In a crowded landscape, Harriot cuts through the noise, or maybe because that’s because they’re talking to me.

As I waited for an Uber outside, I couldn’t help but marvel at the colossal train wreck across the road that is Il Mercato Centrale. A behemoth project, intended to be an oasis of Italian culinary delights which has in it’s short lifespan already projected outwards as a failed labyrinth of fast-casual vendors. Never really passed the pub test. I put a line through the form guide on first glance.

As Melbourne is still dotted with rainy days, we’re in purgatory between seasons but the spring produce and subsequent menus are abound. Seasonality is a drug to the food lover. Gamble responsibly.

There’s many hedonistic pleasures in the world and a never-ending conveyer belt of slop to consume but as I age I require less and less of it all. I’m oversaturated. I heard Naval Ravikant quote something that Socrates allegedly said in a market bazaar once upon a time, “so many things in this world that I do not want”. I felt that spiritually. The dopamine hit of resisting a purchase is basically as good as a purchase.

I always consider the infinite ladder, the climb towards more. The idea of more has been so tainted by glutton that we see the concept of more as gross yet intoxicating overconsumption of things. Hedonism is a facet of the more, but to me, more is the state of abundance that blankets not only consumption but creation. More memories, more projects, more existential growth, more physical development, more spiritual ascension. I’m a sick fuck and always have been when it comes to hedonistic desire, but the pit stop question I ask myself and I ask you is this, how much do you consume versus how much do you create?

Fusion, modern Australian, lot of these terms are quite ugly but they hold some weight by definition. The food scene is Melbourne has always mirrored the multicultural fabric of the city, it’s not uncommon for chefs to take inspiration from the melting pot around us. How do you feel Melbourne has influenced your steez as a chef?

Fusion… I think it’s good like, it’s alright if you understand it. If you do some research on it. Even Thai food is fusion… there’s a lot of Malay, a lot of Chinese.. a lot of it is stolen, even from Laos. Fusion is all right, if you understand it.

So I guess it’s very cool to be here, you have access in Melbourne anyway. You have access to a lot of ingredients and a lot of food culture. You can go eat Thai food now, Uyghur food, Indian food, Afghani. You can’t get Afghani food in Thailand.

Melbourne, it’s really cool, but Modern Australian, I hate the term. Actually, no, I hate it more when people say “Modern Thai” food. Like when it been Modern Chinese or, like elevated Chinese, what the fuck do you mean?

Chinese food, it’s already elevated, like the actual Chinese food in China, even Cantonese food in Hong Kong. The time, the skill already, like no one is elevating that. There’s a lot of fine dining restaurants in Thailand doing Thai food. Yeah, that’s elevated because a lot of people probably cook street food, Thai food, basic, bottom line food. Usually, the owner, the head chef that’s popping up in Bangkok or Thailand right now, they come from like New York, Michelin star place around the world, but I’m talking about the chefs, the cook that works there, goes out at night and eats you know, lives that Bangkok life. Like, they have an idea what they’ve been doing their whole life with Thai food. So I guess that’s elevated.

But then if someone’s just like here, I read a couple of books, went through fucking Bali for a bit, came back and blah blah, that’s not elevated. I don’t really like that being called elevated.

In China, like the cutting, and, you go to Japan and like, it’s fucking next level already. You go to France, like French food in France, it’s like next level, man. You can’t really elevate it. You can’t elevate food here because everyone here gets paid well. Yes, I know that living cost is crazier here but a bottom line, like a minimum wage is pretty crazy. The $25, that’s like $400, 500 baht an hour. That’s what people get in a day in Thailand. Bangkok, you can live very cheap. But what I mean is, in the older day in the industry anyway, I think everyone you seen doing some crazy plating because everybody was cheating. It was wage theft. So you used to get people coming to do 80 hours, 90 hours, whatever, and then you kind of gaslight them, like, “you’re going to be the best if that you put in your time”.

Which can be true, okay, also not true at the same time. I was a part of that culture.

Or, you have to charge extremely a lot. Like, I don’t know what Vue De Monde charges anymore but I’m sure it’s a lot. Do you know what I mean? So it’s really hard to, like, crazy shit now.

But I do take a lot of inspiration from around town cooking. Like, I would cook curry the way Indian cook curry. Yeah, you know, Indian and Sri Lankan, like, South Asian. But in Thai food, they usually add the coconut and the curry paste or powder or whatever, and cook the fuck out of it, I add one and then the oil and the milk split, yeah? But then, because you study a lot of curry culture from South Asia, from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, what they do with the powder style curry, they temper, it’s called tempering your curry powder. So you add a little bit of butter, or coconut oil or vegetable oil or whatever, olive oil. And then you temper, you cook the powder like, like ground it in, whatever, so you don’t get the grainy powder on your palate, so it kind of dissolves a little bit.

Yeah, but like that’s what I take inspiration from, how the Indian cook. For some of the curry from India and Thailand, the South Thailand then to put the way they cook it, they cook it very Thai. Yeah. But then I’m like, if it’s from India, why don’t we cook it like India but with the Thai flavour?

So that’s what I usually decide to take inspiration from and like how people work, the way they would serve the food, how it was appropriate to serve and how not. That’s what I really kind of to me I like do, what I do now with the char-grilled chicken.

I like to go and get what I already know, why I come here to Nana lot. And then what, like, what do you do to get away with what you do? So what I mean is like, if the chicken is so fucking tender and juicy and flavourful, and the soft, whatever, the people who work for me doesn’t have to make sure all the chicken cut so perfectly all the time, like how I would like…

The chicken is still fucking off the hook, but we can just bang out a 100 order, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, in the box.

Fuck off. Yeah. Done. We’re not pretending. But then when they eat the product, it’s like, oh shit, a lot of people were like, oh, wow you know, that’s above that the expectation for what a takeaway food is. We’re not doing table service, we just kind of give you food. Here you go.

I think that a lot of people expect that takeaway food has to be shit. But that’s why I do what I’m doing now, when I get a gap in that market. So that’s why I like draw information from seeing what people really want, kind of answering a question and solving a problem rather than creating a question, like, oh, wow, if I put the tuna with that fucking blah, blah, blah, would the customer like it?

And then like, you know, kind of like, all right, what’s wrong with charcoal chicken? The breast usually fucking dry. It’s all all cold. Everyone always leaving the chicken in the box. I thought I was crazy. I know I’m not crazy anymore. I thought two months ago, I was crazy. But now I live long enough to be justified, I’m not crazy..

You’ve gotta have the fucking big ball to be like, have no fear like, I’m just going to do one thing, especially someone with my background. 50/50 chance it fails, if the chicken is shit, I’m fucked. The whole brand is a charcoal chicken shop. If the chicken is no good, it’s over. That’s a lot of risk. It’s in St. Kilda and people told us not to do it there but yeah, it just felt right. It just felt right.

We’re a little bit ahead of schedule the moment. We didn’t know we were gonna blow up this hard. Like, two or three weeks in. You know, I thought we were going to be where we are in February. Now I’m kind of like, how to fucking ride this wave, man? If I drown, I’m fucked.

Lot of discourse around Asian food and its price point. Historically, it has been seen inside the industry as too cheap compared to other cuisines with often less ingredients e.g. a plate of pasta... much of the West has thought of Asian cuisines as the romantic
“cheap and cheerful” until recent years... do you feel like with contemporary Asian dining that there’s finally an equilibrium developing across price and consumer respect?

Yeah, the price point, I think, like, yes and no. Like, I get it. I get it. I think it’s more about immigration, like a lot of Asian food price points are achieved because they don’t pay people properly, haha. That’s why they keep the price point low. Like everybody buys the same chicken. Everybody buys the same coriander. The coriander that Aru get, I probably see the same people. I’m not saying they don’t pay staff properly haha.

I get some restaurants, they do big volume, maybe they’re fucking loaded. Some restaurants, I don’t think they pay the staff well and that’s why they keep the price point low. Some of them stay in the ‘burbs, like really good restaurants, family run, yeah. Everyone they don’t really get paid… like the Mum and Dad get the profit and then, yeah. That’s it. You know.

I noticed there’s like racial thing too, obviously. But in that, I get like restaurants from like Italian backgrounds, our friends, they come with enough money. You know, and also like the Greeks and the Italians and the Chinese. They’ve been here forever. They were like the first wave of immigrant. So that’s why I get like, the heritage, they are doing well now. So they have to pay everyone properly but they are bigger now.

I agree with the racial thing. It fucked up. I agree with that, but I’m trying to bring a different point. I think, if you talk about Asian food, if you look around now, there’s not many like now, like right now, so many of white people here. So mostly Asian people, a lot of them are still immigrants, like Indians, still immigrants. So they don’t have much money yet, and like, you have to cater to your clientele and if they can’t afford the food, you go out of business don’t you?

But then if you count Aru or Sunda or whatever, modern Asian food.. they are not cheap, but their clientele aren’t working class So I think, yeah, there’s stigma, but I think people tend to forget, even like, Western food, that shit is cheap, food like gozleme, that’s European food.

I also I think Melbourne, or this country, majority of it is middle class. I read this article a long time ago, they tend to have a column of class, how they like to dine. So lower class and more poor people or whatever who have nothing, they tend to eat with quantity. That’s why your chicken shop with two salad, with fucking cold macaroni and potato salad for $20 pop off in Hampton Park or Noble Park. Do you know what I mean? And then you move up a bit.

Now, like, a low to middle class to middle class, they want flavour.. Because they create a lot. Now the flavour is like luxury now. I guess I’m in that class now.

And in the middle class, I get they love eating fucking vibes. That’s why Embla, like, I love Embla, pops off. Like Gimlet, it’s fucking vibe.

Then when you get into like fucking rich people now, now they don’t even give a fuck about anything. As long as like, that’s why like… Chris Lucas restaurant, Gimlet, Vue De Monde, and like, I say it again, they can flip like $20k bottle of wine, $10k bottle bottle wine, you know? You get to the point of like, millionaire goes there now. That’s where I fucking millionaires can be away from fucking people like me. You know what I mean? When I’m not in their vision anymore haha. They might run into me once every five year. They don’t need me.

So, like, money’s great. I would love to have money… a lot of money.

But like, now, people that have taste, usually don’t have money and people that have money don’t have taste. Maybe I’m right or wrong.. People want to make it like the “Asian thing”, I think it’s like the fucking class thing.

Asian food can go fucking crazy too, like Japanese restaurants. Japanese food has a good marketing team, like discipline, craft ha ha… but then you can eat trash Japanese food. I think, like, the Chinese people are rich., and there’s Chinese food as well, but you wouldn’t see expensive Afghani food. Think about all the expensive food and where it comes from, there’s fucking rich people there. Its a class thing.

After having stints at the brilliant La Pinta and the short-lived yet hyper-popular Earth Angels... how did you find these experiences shaped your vision from both the perspective of cooking but also hospitality?

Just before I worked at La Pinta, I was kind of hating cooking. I was kind of jaded. I lived close by in Coburg, I was begging them for 3 years for a job but never the right timing. Very tight team. Then when I had an opportunity, I thought I was going to be working there for six months, kind of like just like, helping them out. I was like, you know, I had really bad time at my job before that, which shall not be named because I don’t want to talk shit. Then I started loving cooking, where you have to do everything. The way that Adam works is crazy.

I had such a great time there and I understand they do everything there’re, 90% in house. It’s not a fucking marketing ploy. Some people might want to say table to farm, blah, blah, blah, whatever bullshit. Yeah. But they do everything there.

I was always on the grill cooking everything to order. It really tested my ability. Sometimes, we have like two to three fish on the menu. To cook to order and you have this tiny grill and you’re just punching out high quality, it got to the point I was really good at cooking with fire and I’m pretty good already, but like that really, like, locked me in. We were cooking everything to order, a different cut of meat, different animal, kangaroo, wallaby…you know, like, heart, liver, lamb, mutton. Like, vegetable… we’re doing 20, 30 kilo of carrot every fucking week. I remember every Tuesday, my first job was washing carrot. Took me an hour to fucking do that. We just like, appreciate food better. I had a great time and can’t talk enough good things about that place. I love it. I still I haven’t been back a long time now, ‘cause I live westside now, but yeah it’s elite, the best, Adams the best.

I wish I wish I learned more about becoming a leader. Like, he’s such a good leader. I wish I didn’t focus too much on cooking. Man, I was a wild animal too, during that era. I wish I’d picked up some of like, you know, some skill, like a leadership thing. I wish I learnt more about running things.

Earth Angel, up and down, yeah, but what I learnt is how to make a decision, lots of decision. I learned that sometime when people disagree with you doesn’t mean you’re bad or they’re bad. I’m getting better. If you ask my team now, they’re pretty happy with me. I’m happy. But also, I’ve had a lot of pressure and a lot of things going against me. I think I did my best cooking there, in terms of my pride. That’s the opposite now, like Yang Thai. I’m trying to like chase the unicorn again.

Id rather be like Dunlop Volley than be some niche brand that never took off. Dunlop is just there, not the best, bot the worst. How much are they now? $80. I used to go to kick-ons, lose my shit, go to Kmart or Target barefoot, grab a pair $20 or $30 and keep rocking. This is in Canberra back then.

Maybe I have a bad rap in the kitchen but I’m self aware, I mean well. So the people that I hired, people where are usually green or whatever are different type of people, and they’re all good, they’re great. I’m glad I have the team I have now, make works fun. I’m trying to make things easy, do them well, make them translatable. You don’’t win a team sport by yourself. Because at La Pinta, I guess I was like a striker. I guess. You know, I just get fed the ball, I shoot I score, fuck yeah on top of the world every week.

Then at Earth angel, I still think I’m a striker but I’m meant to be the coach. But now I think I’m there, I acknowledge I’m a coach and sometimes player. Outside work now I have to be healthy, behave, look after myself. If I’m in the hospital, were fucked. It just sneaks up on you two start having to think in ways that don’t just involve yourself. You just answer to everyone now. Yeah. But when you’re like to come up, you answer to one person. Then everyone become your boss. Like your kitchen becomes your boss. The cooks become your boss.Can’t do it alone. Yeah, it’s crazy important, but it’s not important to them. If they they leave, they get a job, chill. You know, I can’t leave. I’m not here now forever. Yeah. And they respect that. Yeah.

Hospitality in St Kilda... opening a takeaway-centric charcoal chicken shops where a lot of chefs in your position might’ve just opened another wine bar... zigging when people might tell you to zag.... it feels like having your own vision is important to you. What drives your journey as a chef and business owner?

I kind of answered the question a while ago but to touch on it quickly… St. Kilda, it’s like the Broadsheet thing. People talking shit about it so I see opportunity now.

You know, you don’t want to be on Broadsheet now? Cool, I’ll be the coolest cat on there, make that shit cool. You don’t want to go to St Kilda? I’ll go there.

There’s fucking beach there, dude. Places like Northern Soul, The Galleon, Cicciolina.. still classics like The Stokehouse.

There’s no dick measuring contest, everyone just does their thing. I want to do that thing and like, it’s so supportive.. Like when we open there, I don’t know how, I don’t know anyone there. Now I’m with cool with so many venues around there. They just respect what we do,

I’ve been in a system, like, cooking, being around, whatever, but I would never feel like I’m part of it. You know, if you follow my career, you know, then it’s really like, you know, I’ve been popular for cooking staff meals and people would come up and ask waiters about the staff meals I post.

The thing is like, I had a chat with a customer yesterday, St Kilda doesn’t seem central, but central to who? Like if you’re from the inner North it’s not central to you, but people rode their bike from Northcote to me. But yeah, central to who? You got the Westgate, you got the South East, Malvern, Brighton, you got Hawthorn, Richmond, Windsor, Prahran, Port Melbourne, the city, all close. In the summer too, we’re super close to Botanical Gardens.

Even all the good artists, all the culture, like, I think, are people from around there and the South East. Trendsetters. Like Judah Tribe, Baro, so many cool people from the South East. Sal’s from there. HP Boys.They would rather come to St Kilda than go to Northcote.

I’m glad it worked out, too. I did not know it was going to be like that. St Kilda is lit, always doing that tacky shit like Fathers Day, Halloween, St Kilda Festival, Pride, every calendar holiday which is actually cool.

Aight, “death row meal”, one final dish, and what’s the soundtrack, lets go... (1 dish, 1 song)

Death row meal. Oh, yeah, shit. Yeah, “Let It Rock” by Kevin Rudolph and Lil’ Wayne. Haha nah. Hold up, but I’ll handle the food part first. That was a joke, obviously.. I know what I’m going to eat. Steamed rice, jasmine rice. Two fried sunny side up yolk still runny duck eggs, crispy. Mushroom soy sauce, and a little bit of white pepper. Simple. And like, maybe a $20,000 bottle of Champagne.

That’s how Im going out. I’m changing the track, though. I don’t know. It’s so hard.. Oh, I’ll play Roxy music or Maybe Reign in Blood. But yeah, I would go with Roxy. I think. It’s good. You can get the saxophone at the end. Yeah. I’m done.

IG - @hotnoodlecoldwine @yang.thai__ @houseoflumes

As the aesthetics of Italy have been Samba-fied by the “pasta and vino xoxo” and “take me back” set, particularly in recent years, there’s many parallels to Greece that had not yet been totally branded and shipped to the social media realm. Previously, large swathes of Jersey Shore looking westerners flocked to Mykonos which ticked over, much like Ibiza, but I predicted that Athens, Santorini and other parts unknown within the Cyclades would have their moment. Approachable yet delectable cuisine, sun-drenched beaches, definitive architectural flair, government-regulated white facades, and enough urban charm to counterbalance.

I like betting on these kinds of pointless arbitrary outcomes, largely because I’m obsessed with sociological trends and pop culture, but also because I’m easily bored. I think in the proceeding years, my hunch has been proven right. Parallel to this, several Greek food ventures have opened up back home in Melbourne, much to my delight. I’m happy for venues that the commercial trend spectrum may widen from a spaghetti alle vongole and Sangiovese to include a pastitsio and Assyrtiko.

I think Kafeneion at the Melbourne Supper Club is a great addition to the landscape. I’m now clocking visit after visit. Recently, in congregation with friends I enjoyed a protein-rich spread, which at least kicked off with fava bean dip and ended with cake. It wasn’t late enough for the prized lamb offal soup upon arrival sadly but such are the forks in the road of life. I was ready for density anyway. I’d polished about five pints of Guinness at various Richmond watering holes prior, and also split a bottle of Blaufrankisch downstairs at City Wine Shop between affairs.

I have waxed lyrical previously about the disappearance of the side, particularly in meat courses. The fact that a salad or a small vegetable array has been slowly deleted from the plate and repurposed as a $19 dish in its own right. I have mixed feelings towards this. The funny thing is, Kafeneion is so bold in the outright presentation of protein dishes that I quite like it. It’s straight up and unapologetic. You’d be lucky to get a small onion or a few potatoes with each meat course but I find it quite endearing. I’m not sure if its a model that can be duplicated universally, and they’re definitely somewhat lucky that the protein dishes are that good.

Firstly, the sweetbreads. Buttery and salty fried morsels with a dash of lemon. I was sceptical about the singular lemon wedge but it was actually well portioned. I’m stained by a trip to a Western suburbs fish-n-chip shop in the dodgy bowels of Braybrook many years ago with my mate Shane (R.I.P) and a cool older drug-dealer Greek friend. The Greek says that when we open the parcel of flake and chips, there should be a comical amount of lemon wedges, as per Aussie-Greek lore. Sure enough, there was enough lemon wedges in there to make a citrus tart.

Next, we enjoyed a beef stifado, Greek classic. I love most meats in a long wet cook. There’s a beauty about the Kafeneion beef stifado in that it is very delicate. Delicate is probably not the word that springs to mind for such a robust masculine dish but the tender herbs coupled with the earthy aromats, cloves and cinnamon, creates a lingering complexity to a dish that look utterly simple. It feels more so as if it came out of someone’s home kitchen as opposed to a commercial space.

Of course, we also had to have the lamb and potatoes. Thankfully, they leave a decent amount of fat on the lamb, a buttery delight. Two friends at the table were stoic in their quest for Portokalopita, a traditional Greek orange cake. I’m a little 50-50 as to whether I get dessert but I was three sheets to the wind and after plates upon plates of meat, I was craving a little sweet and a little carb.

The everlasting union between orange and cinnamon is underrated, something I tend to use in protein-forward slow cooks at home, but it is equally as useful deployed within the Portokalopita. I couldn’t help but admire the air pockets in the cake and the gentle drizzle of syrup. Perfectly cooked to the point it was almost fudge-like, yet bouncy and soft. One of our friends who was dining with us had been Shanghai’d to a DJ slot nearby so the girls delivered her some Portokalopita later on. Sometimes you have to slug it out a few times at a venue to really know if it’s tried and true. Sober, drunk, hungry, full, the whole shebang. Kafeneion passes the test.

It’s not over-engineered but rather it leads by example, quietly achieving. It has the air of Pericles, statesman of the people. I grew fond of Pericles and his reign at one stage, a guy who resisted his aristocratic upbringing and treated war as a chess-like strategic game in which you should minimise casualties. He took the surplus from the thriving Greek economy and commissioned various projects within the arts. Really, his skill was social intelligence. Alas, it was all undone by the plague, his reign, his economy and ultimately his life. It’s easy to project our virtues on to holograms of the past, for we were not really present and have the luxury of distance. That’s why I like food, it’s as real and tangible as anything I can experience viscerally in this dimension.

Speaking of this dimension, so much of it is influenced by Greek history and Greek mythology. Socratic logic, stoicism, epicureanism. The double-edged sword of Greek mythology is that there are many lessons within the fantasy and many enduring tropes; passion, anger, sex, death. Half-pie oral traditions are not too dissimilar from the geopolitical entanglements we see today, but they’re much easier to stomach withe luxury of fantasy. We have a tendency to study the old and search for meaning in the clouds, but too often we forget to contextualise it in the grim over-saturation of modern life.

Speaking of over-saturation, I quite like the braggadocios symbolism of Greek architecture. As epochs mould and shift, this became passé to the Brutalists and the Bauhaus and such, but the more I see generic grey box apartments and soulless architecture made to be sold around me, the more I long for Grecian ionic pillars and ornamental friezes. I had a phase of buying things like vases made in the shape of a bust of Aphrodite, cool plates with meanders, and at one stage I even bought nice Greek earthenware from an antique bric-a-brac place in Newtown. There was 2, I bought one and came home drunk one night and smashed it by accident six months later, so I went back and bought the other one which was catching dust on the shelf there. I ended up displaying the broken one next to the new one.

I wasn’t really buying these things out of a deep affinity with Greek folklore or mythology, but rather out of what they represent in the visual language.

Back to the food. Tzaki in Yarraville, part of the new crop of Greek spots yet situated in an area with a bustling Greek population. Not quite Oakleigh, but close. Saganaki and honey peppered-fig, sticky and salty, creamy and smokey. The wood-fired approach at Tzaki is an echo of Greek traditions, cooking over flame. Lamb shoulder again, and some lovely spiced meatballs with skordalia, a humble emulsification.

What stole my heart at Tzaki was a burnt feta cheesecake. Yet again, a dessert that snuck up on me from the Athenian depths. I might lay off the rabbit stews at home and start baking on Sundays at this rate. Take a cheesecake, infuse it with the briny saltiness of feta and then wood-fire it with an earthy char and voila.

What I think I love about Greek food is it has never strayed from its natural roots. The salinity and sea-spray of a taramasalata, which may I add is one of the greatest entrees in history, supercharged by a nice white wine pairing. The depth and earthy spice of beef stifado, or the garden scent of fresh rosemary clinging to a lamb leg. I’ve never really seen people trying to create hyper-Greek fusion and play the way they do with other cuisines.

Safe to say, I’m quite enjoying this archipelago developing of Greek restaurants in Melbourne. Next stop The Pontian Club.

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My father used to train racehorses and host trail rides for a brief tenure in Yarra Glen, Driz-a-Bone clad, yet really it was all a country mile away from our suburban upbringing. For a long time in my early adult years, the stillness of the bush made me anxious. Quaint country towns seemed void of any stimulation. I yearned for the concrete metropolis, yet really the void was inside of me. These days I’m gently reconnecting with nature, attempting to be malleable to its pace.

The identity of Australian cuisine is contentious to say the least. Modern Australian is a term that sends a rippling cringe through the rib cage of many. Most of the classic tropes are actually British, and we really have no national fare. How do you explain 5 scoops of Milo at the bottom and 5 at the top to Scandinavians? Over time, our dining landscape has found its identity through mirroring its own multiculturalism. We offshore a lot of our own produce though, and rarely do we platform our own native ingredients. It’s a perpetual merry-go-round of conversation and intellectual riff.

The restaurant that cuts through that dialogue is Attica by the revered Ben Shewry. It’s off the beaten trail of hot spot dining precincts, situated calmly in the sleepy evening strip of Ripponlea.

I’ve had some lacklustre experiences at the pointier end of conceptual fine dining in recent years, and I’d all but forgotten the magic. Rigid theatrics, clunky dishes, over-academicism and general pomp and wank has plagued a few experiential dining moments for me, both here and abroad. I do have a bit of an internal tug-of-war with experiential concept restaurants, as I don’t often eat where the experience feels dictated to me. I usually prefer a bit of breathing room for solitude or joie de vivre with friends, mix and matching a la cartè and wine to suit the aura. Alas, I am happy to let Attica dictate the flow of proceedings. You’re in good hands.

The current menu is a tapestry that weaves the outback native heroism with suburban references. To start, a trio of bites inspired by Australia’s “first foods”. Quandong and its pollinator, a quandong piped with emu parfait and topped with ants… sweet and sour tart of boonjie tamarind… and an emu toast with a silky little gribiche. To follow, pearl meat served with samphire and other wild seaside greens, a great contrast between the delicate abductor muscle and the umami sea spray of the greens.

Several years ago when the dialogue around eating ants and crickets due to global food shortages was abuzz, and the “eat ze bugs” memes were popping off, I was divided personally. I can see column A and column B. Attica goes some way into reframing the use of ants and insects in dining. Whether or not they will become a staple remains to be seen. The attitude towards this in Australia is largely one of repulsion, although at Attica, I was dining with a Burmese mate who sees it through a different lens. Ants and insects are a common snack. Like many Overton windows, this may shift.

Across the 14-course journey, it traversed from the outback and the sea in to the suburbs. “The Edge of Reason” is a highly conceptual take on lasagna, an Italian dish appropriated by many Australian households. It’s an economic dish, easy to cook in large portions and can feed whole families at a suitable cost. In true Ben Shewry fashion, it’s a buffalo, venison and wild boar bacon ragu and a vibrant tomato sauce with sunrise lime atop a saltbush crisp. Risky to say the least, given that if it backfired it would be the corniest dish in Melbourne, but I guess that’s the magic of what Attica does. Playfulness with a serious undertone of precision and consideration.

By this stage, all skepticism had exited the table. What replaced it was a “Saltwater Souva”, a souvlaki rendition using meat from the crocodile rib and topped with waxflower. I’ve generally preferred crocodile tongue meat to the fillet in the past, but the rib meat came with a warm welcome. I must’ve been on my second glass of Joshua Cooper’s rosè by this stage but I’d totally tapped out of thinking about wine, a rarity of sorts.

For the next course we were ushered through the restaurant and into the courtyard, past multiple passes with the brigade in tow, greeting us at each checkpoint. The courtyard is adorned with a mural by Dabs and Myla, a cartoon-esque forest of mushroom references. We were served a playful twist on “magic mushrooms” with a brothy spiced rum concoction on the side.

Worlds collide looking at the Dabs and Myla artwork. I grew up on the Belgrave line in Ringwood and used to see illegal Dabs and Myla pieces everywhere alongside cohorts from the SDM and ACA crews in the early 2000s. The Belgrave line has always had an affinity with graffiti and psychedelics, made popular by the legendary PBP graffiti crew (Puffing Billy Posse). Lots of “trippers” used to hang out in the Dandenong mountains, tagging trains, taking trips and smoking bongs. I was not expecting shades of my youth to bleed into dinner at Attica. There’s a Reko Rennie piece that was hanging above our table, famed Australian artist and Melbourne knockabout who also used to tag trains in the late 80s.

Back inside the madhouse, the chaos ensues. Rock flathead, gently cured and served with an array of finger limes. Always an underrated fish the ol’ flatty. Next up “It’s All Just Noodles and Pasta”, a dish that reads more like an album title than a menu item. Inspired by a Japanese chef on the team, it’s soba noodles but shaped like macaroni pasta but made from wattleseed, served with Spencer Gulf prawns and a rich lemon myrtle corn cream; an animated dish that didn’t taste like it looked but delighted nonetheless.

We were having a laugh at the @ratemychives Instagram page as the next dish came out; a sextet of brunoise vegetables with a brothy mushroom tea poured over tableside. We marvelled at the brilliant brunoise cuts, and as the tea was poured over we admired the clarity. This was almost like a consommé on acid.

The next duo back to back may well have been my favourites. Western Australian marron with a buttery beurre-Blanc style sauce littered with chives and red champagne fingerlime. Just when the sauce feels a tad too bountifully rich, the fingerlime pops cut through and change the whole mouthfeel and taste, complexity that in essence is simple to execute but you have to map it out contextually first.

Afterwards, a peppery smoked kangaroo with quandong on top, brimming with grill char and a delicious “wok hei”. People ask how can you eat your national emblem? As if the lives of different animals are ranked in importance. If you’d eat a cow but not a kangaroo, you’ve got a moral cognitive dissonance that should be addressed internally. Have you tried speaking to the manager within?

One thing about this dish, whether it is intentional or not, it addressed Australia’s rich barbecue culture, but also demonstrated Attica’s ability to serve a relatively straightforward meatier dish in amongst the playground of the menu. Leave no stone unturned.

By this stage, the table had fogged over. Not of exhaustion or boredom, but rather of a deep and relaxing satisfaction that quells any and all anxieties. I often discuss how the ritual of dining is transcendent, and should teleport us away from quotidian everyday life. It should allow us a temporary suspension from all perils, free to enjoy earthly pleasures for a brief window. There in lies a rare peace.

The crescendo was a trio of desserts. Wood-steamed native ginger pudding, sugar bag honey and cream with a truly earthy raw honey that I am interested in buying by the tub if I can get my grubby mits on it. Lastly, macadamia and ooray jam. To top it all off, a little chocolate ganache and waxflower koala mould.

There’s another 2000 words of ins and outs on each dish that I could rave about, and surely many gaps that I missed on the night, but for me what rises to the top is a reminder that the experiential dining format can indeed be very fun. Even though I have worlds of fun dining out and socialising with friends, it’s always a more visceral experience. Fun is not a concept I really associate with dining out, yet Attica really delivers on that note. It’s a grand operation, risky too, but the Kool-Aid tastes good. Bravo to Ben Shewry and the team on their accomplishments. Attica is probably the only highly-conceptual experiential fine dining restaurant I’d outwardly recommend. All else, I either haven’t been yet or I simply did not like. At least my faith in the format has been partially restored.

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