Cafe Altenberg

We like most of the inland country towns near Canberra - like Bungendore, Cobargo, Milton, and, of course, Braidwood. They try that much harder than their coastal cousins and seem to attract a different type of resident than the seachangers of the South Coast. Instead of bland suburbia-upon-sea, punctuated by the gin palaces of successful mobile phone store owners and quantity surveyors, the stores and houses inland towns are generally older and evocative of the unknown country of the past. Similarly, more frequently among their residents are those who have sought to escape from Babylon rather than desiring to reproduce it.

Long a favourite stop for pies and ice creams for Canberrans on their ways to the coast, Braidwood seems to be going through a gentrification process, as various members of the monied classes follow one another in setting up homeware, antique, and 2nd-hand book shops and cafes along its main drag. Among this milleu, Cafe Altenberg can be found in a pleasantly shaded courtyard behind a gallery selling fairly generic contemporary art. When we visited on a somewhat busy on a Saturday afternoon, we were confronted with a friendly front of house waitress, and a clearly agitated cook mumbling to herself and purposefully slamming and rattling various kitchen implements. We thought we heard something about the flyscreen not being shut properly... Anyway, undeterred, we ordered and generally enjoyed a falafel salad and a Moroccan lamb pie. At $17, the latter was on the expensive side, and a little average, but the salad was OK at $12 and enormous. Both dishes were treated with a tasty, if slightly sickly sweet, dressing.

Overall, good if not great.

Debacle

If the Civic Pub is the social centre of the working-class of Braddon, Debacle is its middle-class counterpart - being usually filled with university students and people who look like young functionaries in one of Canberra's public or private bureaucracies.

In short, it's one of those loud, upmarket pizza places that sprung up as a genre of Australasian dining sometime in the 90s. Unlike most other such places, Debacle does have a genuinely impressive array of beer - probably the best in the city after the Wig and Pen. There are better German wheat beers, Czech pilsners, and Belgian trappist brews on tap - along with other friends in the fridge that we haven't got to yet. Unfortunately, the pizza is a bit of a disappointment - you'd be better off with a burrito from Zambrero across Lonsdale Street. While looking good on the menu, the delivery is just not that flash. On our last visit (on a 2-for-1 Monday), both pizzas were way too doughy and the toppings were seriously undercooked. And while the place does get busy, the kitchen did not look like it was so rushed as to serious cut corners while we were there. Not good.

So, in sum, if you're willing to put up with a little atmospheric vanity, 70s/80s middle-brow pop (Lionel Ritchie/Van Morrison), general noisiness, and the junior ranks of the middle-class - for the payoff of better than average beer (if risking worse than average pizza) - Debacle could be for you.

Sushi Sushi

Malls and franchises, no matter how hard they try to suggest quality and sophistication, are not often known for their culinary excellence. In the world of eating, certain individual food products aside - typically sweet or preserved things - mass production and homogeneity very, very rarely lend themselves to tasty meals. Against this background, we were happy to recently find Sushi Sushi, in the Canberra Centre.

Located where the Flaschengeist outlet used to be, across from Supabarn and the deli, Sushi Sushi does perhaps as good a sushi experience as could be hoped for from, what we suspect, is a chain, in a mall in a medium-sized Australian city. The food is freshly made (prepared seemingly by Just-In-Time production methods), with the individual rolls not being wrapped in plastic, and the ingredients we've had are also notably fresher than comparable places elsewhere around town.

Unless you really detest sushi, this is probably your best option for a cheap and quick lunch the next time you find yourself in the mall that slowly seems to absorbing Civic piece-by-piece.

Chairman & Yip

Why "Chairman & Yip"? (Why the name, rather than why go there). There must be some quirky historical, possibly literary, connection there. Any suggestions are very welcome here. As to why we were there, and why perhaps you should also go there, read on...

One of us was recently wined and dined at the Chairman & Yip (a fusion - Chinese/ModOZ - restaurant) as part of a pleasant 'business dinner' of sorts, although you never would have guessed it given the limited amount of 'talking shop'. With only three dinner guests (including one of the Always Hungerians), this was a highly unusual, intimate, reflective sort of affair, which Chairman and Yip - food- and atmosphere-wise - only complemented. So, the details then.

We shared three mains and a veggie side, and then had desserts. Trying some of the entrees would have been nice, but it sort of didn't happen (it did happen on another occasion, a few years ago, and they were excellent). The mains we chose this time around were shantung lamb, duck breast on a bed of what tasted very much like chestnuts, and prawns in plum sauce. While I could happily have any of the three again, it was the lamb that stole the show. It was crisp, without being chewy, and spiced just right - fragrant, aniseedy, a little hot and a little sweet, with refreshing slivers of cucumber and leak on top. The duck was also memorable - although the skin could have been crisper... The prawns, while nice, was the dish that perhaps the least justified the $30 (or thereabouts) price tag. The desert I chose was green tea creme brulee and it was perfect (a particularly nice touch was a white cloud of Persian fairy floss perched on the side of the plate). It's the availability of a wide range of delicious desserts that really marks this place as primarily fusion, with the rest of the menu being far more easily identified as excellent Chinese fare.

The waiting staff were some of the best we've ever come across in Canberra - attentive without being overbearing, welcoming without being sycophantic. Just right. Rather than the food per se, we wonder if it is this kind of 'tender love and care' that makes (relatively) expensive meals seem worthwhile (see also previous post on Ottoman)?

Rice Paper

We may have expressed this thought before, but we'll do it again after experiencing further confirmative evidence - if the name of a restaurant features a certain dish, you should probably order that and not be tempted otherwise. Our latest case of this was ordering entrees at Rice Paper, a Vietnamese restaurant in Civic, where the curry puffs turned out to be average, but the rice paper rolls were, of course, delicious.

On that visit and our previous visits the food has generally been pretty good. Among the vegetarian dishes the mushroom and tofu dish is clearly the better option; for meat-eaters we recommend prawns with chili and lemon grass, and the red duck curry with lychees and potato. The soft-shell crab is possibly a little overpriced though, for what it is. The service is generally very friendly, and the carafe wine cheerful - unlike (who we presume is) the owners' son sulking behind the counter. On the wall are photos of opera houses and street scenes from the French colonial period. Whether these represent a certain nostalgia of the owners or are attempts to pander to a possible nostalgia for 19th/early 20th century Western imperialism among the majority of the clientele is, however, somewhat unclear.

Ottoman

Always Hungry isn't over - it's just had a bit of a hiatus due to one of the team members being out of town. But now they're back and so are our comments on eating in Canberra...

Last Saturday we had occasion to go celebrate a reasonably significant life-event, and so decided to treat ourselves at somewhere that charges $30 + for mains. We chose Ottoman, a Turkish restaurant in Barton, sitting between the Edmund Barton Building and those office buildings housing the nation's better funded lobbyists of the federal government. Unlike many other Canberra restaurants, Ottoman can be said to be sprawling. Notably, the main dining room also appears to only take up half of the space, with there seeming to be a similar amount of seating spread among a number of private dining rooms, where presumably from Tuesday through Thursday on sitting weeks, the discrete wining and dining elected representatives takes place.

We BYO'd a very nice bottle of Lark Hill Pinot Noir (2004) , and degusted the degustation menu - which was for the most part excellent (as you would hope for $80 a head). Particularly good were the dips and entrees (including a memorable baba ganoush), while the deserts were less exciting. Despite the size of the place, it wasn't uncosy, and the service was flawless.

Overall, extremely competent, without being the-best-place-ever in any distinct sense.