Three Mothers

Having been somewhat disappointed with Zen Yai lately - our former favourite - we've been looking for a new Thai place in Civic. Last week, having quickly downed a gin and tonic at a clearly private-school-graduate establishment a.k.a. the Hippo, we got hungry, as always (ha ha ha), and decided to try our luck at the Three Mothers.

So, we walked across Garema Place and into a busy and noisy little restaurant, bustling, shall we say, with reasonably happy-looking customers and staff. Blocks of bright fuschia, yellow and green silk (some with the King of Thailand meets Andy Warhol-esque prints) lining the walls grab your attention before anything else - and keep grabbing it throughout the evening.

We were after something quick and straightforward - so had a tofu larb as the veggie option and the panang nua for the carnivore. The menu is extensive (and dishes seem at least a couple of dollars cheaper than the more up-market Thai options in Civic - i.e. Zen Yai and Lemongrass) although somewhat repetitive. What we mean here is that the same sauces, combinations of veggies and herbs make an appearance under different subheadings of 'chicken', 'beef', 'vegetables' - not that there is anything wrong with that... Nonetheless, what we ordered was fragrant and delicious. The presentation could have been more snazzy, although we did appreciate the hand-carved piece of radish in the shape of a rose. For a quick Thai meal before catching a movie, Three Mothers is a good option.

Bollywood Masala

"How were your meals?", asked the waiter.

We, the Always Hungrys, glanced at one another. A brief silence, then perhaps emboldened by that VB;

"The entrees were a bit average...but the mains were fantastic".

Having asked a routine question, but having received an apparently non-routine answer, the waiter was visibly taken aback by our candour, but retained his composure, if not his previous smile. The presence of another customer at the counter perhaps upped the ante somewhat...

Overall, we enjoyed our recent visit to Bollywood Masala in Dickson (on the corner of Challis and Cape streets, by the always-busy and well-lit Domino's and Pizza Hut outlets), as we have on all of our previous visits. This time though the entrees - stuffed mushrooms and paneer kebabs - were just a little dry and sad, especially in context of the general excellence of the rest of our experience, from the food to the service (including being volunteered the details of how they get their lamb to be oh-so-delicious). The eggplant main we had was particularly delicious.

With the unfortunate, apparently generational, closure of the Blue Elephant, we are now fairly comfortable in putting Bollywood Masala as the best Indian restaurant north of the lake (with only Taj Mahal coming close). Just keep to the mains...

Charcoal Rooster

Thoughtful planning can make a big difference to people's lives, with a case in point being whenever (or possibly after) they decided to build what is now Fenner Hall, someone thought it would be good to put in a couple of small shops nearby. Sitting on Ipima Street, the pair are seemingly isolated, but are close enough so that the residents of the said institutional accommodation wouldn't have to spend too much time and/or money going into Civic for a block of butter or a slab of VB. Instead, there is now a seemingly constantly busy liquor shop/mini-supermarket, and a similarly well-patronised fast food place - Charcoal Rooster.

Along with its evocative, and possibly (undeservedly) off-putting name, Charcoal Rooster, as we've recently discovered, also offers really-quite-good pide. The bread is moist and fresh, the fillings are superior, and overall its just much tastier than our recent experiences with the Turkish Pide House. Plus, the booze next door is some of the cheapest in the Inner North.

Recommended.

Zen Yai

Unfortunately sometimes good restaurants good bad. Chefs or other key staff move on, ownerships change and production values go downhill. This is even more unfortunate when this happens to one of your favourite places - like for us, Zen Yai.

Whenever we were hungry in and around Civic we used to know that Zen Yai was always there for us with its delicious, moderately-priced Thai food, served by always-friendly staff. Sure, it can be popular and difficult to get a table without booking on a Friday night, but that is saying a lot if that is the worst that can be said about a restaurant.

Basically, the food has suddenly and emphatically gone to rubbish on our two most recent visits, within a few weeks of each other. There had been some rough patches in the past, that later corrected, but they seem in retrospect to be relatively moderate, and there really seems to be a problem now. On our last visit we both ordered Pad Thais - the comparative benchmark for Thai restaurants. Both dishes were 1) thoroughly bland, and 2) short on ingredients, particuarly vegetables, beyond a few sprouts. We mentioned this to the front-of-house staff and asked if there had been changes in the kitchen staff, but were told that the same chef was still there.

Given this quite bizarre turn for the worse, we think we may have to defect to Lemongrass next time around.

Wasabi

Japanese restaurants aren't usually happy places for vegetarians - which is a shame as our vegetarian half used to quite like eating in them in their pre-vegetarian days. Akin to the loathsome vegetable stack found all-too-frequently elsewhere, the standard sole option available is usually a similarly undesirable tempura vegetable dish. Wasabi though, a tepanyaki place in Dickson, has put a little more thought and care into the feeding of non-meat eaters, and presented us with a number of delicious treats on visiting last week.

Order the Vegetarian Banquet for a sequence of treats, beginning with miso soup, through sushi, and other dishes of seasoned tofu, baked eggplant, rice, soba noodles (and a desert we didn't stick around for). Usefully, they were also happy to serve this option for one, rather a usual minimum of two diners for the rest of the banquets. We were also told that a tepanyaki variation could also be served. Our meat-eating half also ate well with a scallops and salmon dish as a main, preceded by tempura prawns.

The place was full early on a Friday evening, and we were very lucky to get a table without a reservation, with a number of people arriving after us being turned away, although it did empty out a bit after 8:00.

Overall, tasty, not too expensive, and recommended.

The East Kitchen

Good bakeries are very good things to find, particularly if they are near one's place of employment and one is not very good at making lunch for oneself on weekday mornings. The bakery in the Student Union building at the ANU, for example, provided us with reasonable sustenance (try the garlic butter scrolls) for not much money when we needed it. Perhaps, at the other end of the sophistication spectrum, we have also enjoyed Silo and Cornucopia's breads and other goodies from time to time (when we are game enough to brave their eternal busyness).

Recently however we discovered that The East Kitchen in Dickson, which appears to be a fairly standard Chinese restaurant by night, also offers self-service Chinese bakery food at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Fridays. All your glazed, Chinese-style, white-bread bun favourites are there, including the ubiquitous BBQ pork bun. The red bean paste variant isn't that flash (the paste is too gluggy), but we do like the coconut and custard filled ones. While certainly not the best bakery experience you're likely to have - although you do get to play with tongs - it is cheap and fairly yummy for a quick lunch. It's next to Sfoglia.

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.

Sfoglia

One tyranny of life in Australasia these days is what might be called an ever-expanding 'manners of casualness'. Even when the most serious events are being undertaken, there is a widespread norm to maintain a lack of gravity, to keep "keep things relaxed" or, worse, "just chilled out".

While "laid-backness" has perhaps always been comparatively a feature of life in this part of the world, it does seem to be getting ever-more pervasive. Its intrusion has been particularly pronounced in the world of public affairs. For example, in a recent press conference a senior (male) executive of a major Australian firm announced the controversial laying off of 1500 employees, but did not feel the need to be seen wearing a tie. This would have been unimaginable 20 or even 10 years ago. We don't advocate formality and seriousness for its own sake, but simply that the gravity, complexities, and difficulties of life should be properly and honestly recognised, including in everyday activities such as preparation of food.

Accordingly, we like Sfoglia, a small Italian cafe in Dickson. While the food is excellent and well priced (try the $5 bruchetta), its main point of difference is that the staff seem to take their work seriously, in the proper non-pejorative sense of the word. There is little inessential banter and focused-looking faces. While the staff may not be continually smiling, they are certainly not unfriendly. Rather, they communicate a concern with serving delicious food quickly, as a third way between ingratiation or apathy towards customers. Refreshing.

Urambi Hills Bakery

One things we've noticed in passing recently is small businesses where older owner-operators don't seem to be able to let go or acknowledge change - in the sense of an apparent generalised hostility to any potential customers under the age of 50 or so. We grant that certain characteristics of certain cohorts of young people, in certain circumstances, are worthy of some disdain. However, if you are willing to categorically assume the worst about all young people, some self-examination, at the very least, is surely in order?

After coming across a couple such businesses in the space of a morning the other day it was refreshing to find the Urambi Hills Bakery on Altree Street in Phillip (i.e. the Woden Town Centre area). Instead of the embittered aged, we came across two teenagers being teenagers while happening to run, or at least front for, an OK sort of a bakery in the light industrial bit of Woden across Hindmarsh Drive. To eat we had a couple of antipasto pastries, which although perhaps not being Silo-class goodies, were nonetheless cheap ($3 each), and delicious. During their consumption we had the chance to read The Daily Telegraph (something we don't do everyday) left on the table by the previous customer, while two young men came independently of one another, flirted with the aforementioned teenagers, and then departed to sell cars and bicycles respectively. Cake paraphernalia, and signage about organic flour suggested that these were also specialities of the place, along with generally friendly, unaccusing service. Probably not worth a trip, but maybe a good option if you're nearby.

Turkish Pide House

In one of Pulp's less well known songs, Jarvis Cocker sings with lament of someone who is "like a friend" to him. At the beginning of the song Jarvis implores the said person to "Don't bother saying you're sorry/why don't you come in/come on in now/wipe your feet on my dreams". As the song develops Cocker runs through a string of critical analogies to this friendship: "the last drink I never should have drunk", "the car I never should have bought", "the party that makes me feel my age", and so on. Clearly, while he is accutely aware of the unreliability of this "like a friend", Cocker is also apparently compelled to forgive them for almost any transgression.

We too perhaps have similar relationships with a couple of restaurants and cafes around Canberra. We continue to go to Izumi freely despite one of us' gripes with the frequently shrinking portions and missing ingredients, and the other's frequently feeling sick afterwards due to the food's greasiness.

Our relationship with the Turkish Pide House can probably be seen in a broadly like vein. In this case the flaw we cannot help but to ignore is the variability of quality of the food we've both eaten in and taken away. At their best, the House's pides are wholey delicious and possibly the cheapest way to feed two people well in Civic for less than $15. At their worst, as we experienced recently, the pides are one or all of undercooked, understuffed, dry, or just plain dull. The "banquet" we once had there was also very mediocre in both food quality and pricing.

To clarify using other pop song staple themes, this is not a tainted love, a hopeless devotion, or an addiction. Rather, despite itself and its perpetual half-emptiness, the Pide House is a friendship of ours that we can't turn our back on, for reasons we can't fully explain. We'll probably take our chances there again.

Happy's

We're not sure why, but apparently the ALP has historically preferred to do much of its business in Chinese restaurants. In one of many instances of this phenomenon that we've come across, in his diaries, Mark Latham, for example, recounts members of his dining party adopting the persona of Kofi Annan and making prank calls to Gareth Evans' farewell dinner across town from the Civic restaurant The Chairman and Yip.

We have no idea if Happy's is likewise popular among Labor officials, but if we were ever to scout locations for a film featuring discrete deals among party heavyweights in a dim restaurant, we're fairly sure we'd put it at the top of our shortlist. Downstairs, off Garema Place in Civic, Happy's is what could be described as a traditional Australian-Chinese restaurant, complete with a giant mural of the Great Wall. Being underground, often slightly crowded - with only one way in or out - and with a few disorientating design oddities (such as the elevated bathrooms), the place has a feel of slight unease and surreptitiousness that perfectly insinuates where we think insider politics ought to be done.

Foodwise, we recall things being pretty good, although typically when we have visited in the past it has generally been in a celebratory mood, with large groups of friends. Similarly, the staff are generally friendly - unless it's 11:00pm on a Monday evening and your party (who have also been the only customers in the restaurant for over an hour) doesn't appear to want to leave any time soon. At about this point, you'll be given a plate of sliced fruit, which is apparently a sign that you should leave very shortly.

Overall, as well as perhaps incongruously transporting us to a world of factional struggles, for us, Happy's otherwise generally lives up to its name when we're looking for Chinese in Civic.

Probably the best subterranean restaurant in Canberra.

Starbucks (2)

Further to the previous post, it seems the "We're-too-sophisticated-for-Starbucks" meme has spread to Auckland. Local leading left-liberal blogger, Russell Brown has written:

"On a related tip, will the shoe drop here too, after Starbucks' decision to close 61 of 84 stores in Australia? I was quite surprised to discover that we have more than 40 Starbucks outlets here. As the Financial Times put it:

The chain has been the victim of an ill-fated push in Australia, a market it only entered in 2000.

Starbucks was snubbed by many Australians, who have grown up on a diet of quality European-style coffee introduced in the last century to Australia by immigrants, especially from Italy.

It's interesting to see how differently Starbucks' present global difficulties can be viewed. US author Bryant Simon contends that Starbucks "sold not coffee but elevated status", and that had been a key to its consumer appeal.

Not here it wasn't: Starbucks has never been cool in New Zealand, except perhaps to kids who should really still have been drinking milkshakes. It might play its role in more meagre coffee markets, but here it's strictly for dorks and tourists."

Hmmmm. Again it looks like a lot of people want to read this event in a certain way. Again, we are sceptical that the same Australasian publics who have thoroughly embraced any number of fast food chains of questionable culinary merit, have somehow drawn a line at Starbucks.

Yes, it is possible, but is it really that plausible? Especially considering that there are still a lot of other mediocre coffee outlets out there that do not happen to be Starbucks, and which don't seem to be going away any time soon through mass consumer rejection.

Brown's comments on status and "dorks" are telling. We suspect that "dorks" - understood here as unfashionable people, generally living and working in unfashionable places beyond inner city suburbs - are a much larger market than Brown gives credit to, and who would be more than capable of supporting the few dozen Starbucks, (let alone all the Gloria Jeans, etc.) outlets across Australia and New Zealand. In short, this is probably not about demand, but rather supply, and short-term head office strategy.

We could be wrong, but we think this episode all says much more about the self-image and practices of a certain broad milieu of journalists, rather than the discernment or consciousness of most consumers.

Starbucks

Being for the most part tea people, we don't really drink much coffee, and even less espresso. So, the news of the closure of a bunch of Starbucks around Australia, including all of the outlets in the ACT, probably has less impact on us than on others (and in any case, chains and such are not really our thing).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this event though is how it become widely framed as a triumph of Australian connoisseurship. We've seen stories in the SMH, the Canberra Times, the Murdoch press, and Crikey, all carrying the same basic narrative - Australian consumers have rejected Starbucks due to their superior tastes, predicated on the availability of superior espresso via mass Italian immigration. The evidence cited is that Australia is only the country, outside of the US, that has had stores shut en masse, coinciding with the firm running into financial difficulties.

Overall, this generally strikes us as a deeply spurious argument. As a corrective to Australian exceptionalism there is, as always, New Zealand as a mirror to the Australian experience. Trans-Tasman one-upmanship aside, coffee in NZ is generally comparable to that in Australia - the average espresso-based coffee in Wellington would match the average in Melbourne. However, Italian migration to NZ (and by implication the supposed "Italian immigration factor" on supply and demand) has historically been nothing like that to Australia, and can probably be safely ruled out as a variable. Yet, Starbucks will continue its current level of operations in Auckland, Wellington, etc.

Conversely, to examine the "Italian immigration factor" from another angle, Argentina, of course, was historically one of largest recipients of Italian emigration - probably to a greater extent than Australia - but according to Wikipedia, Starbucks will continue to operate there. Additionally, to undermine the "unique Australian coffee culture" argument further, it would appear that Starbucks will also continue doing business in other countries with indisputable "coffee cultures" (e.g. the Netherlands, or Austria).

All of this does not absolutely rule out the possibility of Australian exceptionalism - however, we need a bit more evidence to be convinced, including the more definitive ruling out of alternative explanations (e.g. exchange rate issues, comparative overstretch by the local subsidiary, the possibility of the sale of the Australian operations providing a relatively easy cashflow, and so on.)

As Nature Intended

Next to the Rydges by the lake, on the ground floor of one of the buildings that are part of the gentrification of Acton, is As Nature Intended, a cafe and grocery shop chasing the bourgeois-green dollar. While not perhaps actually typical of the clientele, one customer we saw on a recent visit seemed to personify the spirit of the place - a middle-aged woman, possibly having strolled from her (and accompanying husband's) new upmarket apartment across the road, wearing a polar-fleece and what appeared to be pyjama bottoms, but with the poise and confidence of possessing a certain amount of wealth.

As well as generally browsing through the (as you would expect) expensive organic grocery section, the other main purpose of our visit was lunch, which was a bit of a mixed bag of experiences. Foodwise, one meal (Beans and Sausage on Toast) was OK, if not outstanding. The other (Thai Scrambled Eggs with Tofu on Toast) was ordered knowing that this would be a gamble, and which turned out ultimately to not pay off. The eggs, though nonetheless excellent, were actually more of an omelet. The tofu was chunky and bland. Further, with both meals we were not impressed with the "toast" appearing to have come straight from a plastic bag, and not being toasted properly - for $15 meals we expect a bit more effort.

The effort of thought was also lacking in whoever chose the music that day - banal, vacuous cafe jazz/trip-hop - that sat uneasily with the underlying premise of the place on conscientiousness in consumerism. On the other hand, we did like the American organic farming journals from the 1960s scattered around. Views on the paintings of Australian pastoral scenes in bright oil paints on the walls will likely be a question of personal taste.

Overall, we would've liked to have liked As Nature Intended more, but it clearly needs to do some work on itself. However, wealthy baby-boomers, who genuinely believe they can eat their way to health, and are otherwise able to suspend doubt, may have a different opinion.

Notes on Adelaide

Back from a quick trip to Adelaide, where of course we had to keep on eating, if whilst sometimes wistfully thinking of Mount Ainslie and properly chilly mornings.

Along with the observation that if you've seen one vineyard, you've seen them all (made after a day in the Barossa), two meals stood out. Both were consumed on Melbourne Road, within North Adelaide, a Red Hill-like enclave of privilege, segregated from the outside world by parks and ring-roads.

The first, at The Himalayan Kitchen, was accutely disappointing. Perhaps extremely small portions of tasteless food may be authentic Nepalese-Tibetan cuisine, but we doubt it. Plus they had the gall to price a Coopers Sparkling Ale for $6.80 and Heineken for $7.50. Plus the front-of-house staff member (who appeared to be a privately-schooled hippy) was entirely unmoved by our protests, suggesting lazily that "you can't please everyone". Walk on by.

The second meal, from across the road at Yakatori Takumi, was at the complete opposite end of the satisfaction scale. Delicious, well priced food, served by supremely polite and cheerful staff. More generally, in the aftermath of this comparatively delightful experience we were also struck by the thought that yakatori is almost always what tapas is inevitably not - tasty, cheap treats, that are the perfect companion to drinking. Canberra would definately benefit from more places like this - preferably within walking distance of our home.

Maestral

Urban myths are funny things and often have two characteristics. First, they are obviously not always true, while perhaps having some factual basis. Second, their origins are always a bit hazy, and you're never quite sure where you first hear a given myth.

For us, we're not quite sure where we heard it, but someone once told us that Maestral, a Croatian restaurant in the Weston shops was John Howard's favourite restaurant in Canberra. However, on a recent visit we busted this myth. After our meal we inspected a framed photo on the wall of the former Prime Minister with the waiters and chefs (that may be the factual basis of the myth). This grabbed the staff's attention. In the chit chat that followed, however, it emerged that Australia's second longest serving PM had only been in there once - in 2001.

Having only made one trip there, it appears John missed the opportunity to fully explore Maestral's extensive menu of Balkan treats. Whether your heart is in Split, Sarajevo, or Sofia and you're looking for comfort food, or whether you just like good seafood and grilled meat dishes, you'll probably enjoy a visit. The prawn and scallop skewers, and tomato soup, are exceptional. On the downside, like other popular restaurants crammed into commercial units in suburban shopping centres, on both times we've been there, it's been a little bit too noisy (and hot) to be fully comfortable. Some visual respite can be found (especially for the nostalgic ex-Balkanese), however, in the slightly faded but still stunning posters of Dubrovnik and the less known, but almost equally picturesque, Adriatic town of Trogir.

A Bite to Eat

For as long we we've lived in Canberra, Silo in Kingston has been viewed among most of our friends (and this being a view which we've shared), of being the best cafe in Canberra. After having visited A Bite to Eat in the Woden suburb of Chifley the other day though, we think it may have a peer. We'd heard good things about Bite, and it turns out those things were all true.

Despite their mutual food excellence (and reasonable pricing) the two cafes have a number of notable differences. Silo is minimalist and monotone in its decor, whereas Bite is bohemian bright and multicoloured - each table and chair set is different to the next. Silo is favoured by the elected representatives, bureaucrats, and lobbyists of the political elite, the main demographic at Bite on our visit on a midweek lunchtime were middle-class women dressed for comfort. Silo makes Canberra's best fresh bread and has a cheese room, Bite has Zierholz beer on tap - and so on.

We ate duck and potato pancakes, and felafels with chili-tomatoes on sourdough - both of which were delicious, and the latter costing less than $10. And importantly, whereas Silo is often too popular and crowded to be easily enjoyed, while Bite was busy, it was in no sense the upper middle class feeding frenzy that Silo can be on many mornings.

Overall, while Bite doesn't surpass its Kingston competitor, it does seem to suggest that the latter does have a rival - and that quality food in Canberra can be found beyond the fashionable suburbs.

The Civic Pub

Your attitude to The Civic Pub in Braddon will largely be determined by your attitude towards Australian working class people and their culture. If you have limited sympathy or interest, you will probably think of it in similar terms to a couple of our friends who (on separate occasions) have described the place as full of "meatheads" and with a "Cronulla-like atmosphere". If this is likely to be the case, we recommend that you keep on walking up Lonsdale Street and join the self-admiring middle classes at Debacle, or turn around and go back to Cream.

In short, The Civic Pub is a quintessential contemporary Australian pub without pretension. In fact it barely even pretends to be a pub, with most of its space being turned over to pool tables, and recently, the self-grilling and eating of steaks. It is poorly lit and ventilated. There is a TV within almost any possible line-of-sight, and this TV will be showing either men playing sport, or wrything, under-dressed pop singers. The beer available on tap is generally served with a smile, although the products themselves are entirely unremarkable. The primary features of the decor are contemporary advertisements for brands of alcohol, and faux-antique posters for Asian brands of cigarettes.

If you like beer and playing pool, and your self-image doesn't rule out the possibility of choosing to be in close proximity to workers in the building trades, car salesmen, office administrators, and less precious students and public servants, The Civic Pub could be for you.

My Rainbow Dreams

Hippies as a social category, we think, have a few unfair, and indeed paradoxical, reputations. While they are widely derided as dirty or otherwise lacking in hygiene, the best (if not necessarily the cheapest) soaps always seem to be made be hippy-sounding concerns. We're talking about those bars you can find in certain shops made from organic goats milk/olives/coconut butter et cetera with quaint packaging, but smell/lather/feel the bestest. Similarly, despite their rep for being simplistic, earthy, and possibly naive types, hippies and hippy cafes, in general, make better, more sophisticated food than the fast food chains and most cafes that feed the mainstream.

With its certain hippy resonances, recently we've discovered and enjoyed My Rainbow Dreams, a cafe in the pedestrianised part of the Dickson shops. Apparently run by some local group within the Sri Chinmoy movement, it offers delicious and cheapish vegetarian food for lunch for the remarkably socially diverse mix of people who can found wandering around Dickson around midday on a weekday. On the wall is a picture of Sri in a down jacket, smiling and gazing blissfully into the distance, among cherry blossoms. Behind the counter are twins, and another woman who seems to have trouble multitasking, all in saris. Everything is pretty good, though the changing selection of quiches are favourites, along with the savoury pies. Possibly not worth a special trip, but a certainly a good place to go for a quick lunch if you're nearby.

Izumi

We've been meaning to write about Izumi for a while, but haven't really had occasion till our motivation was jogged from a visit last week on a evening when we didn't feel like cooking.

Like a lot of other former and present ANU students, Izumi has at times been something of stable stand-by in the feeding of ourselves, being the closest off-campus food outlet, and open in the weekend and evenings. We've eaten there on chilly Canberra winter evenings when the neighbouring carpark seems particularly cold and barren, and at midday in mid-summer, eating Bi Bim Bab while hopelessly trying to swat away the thousands of swarming and fearless black flies.

The food is OK, slightly greasy, but yummy Korean staples. The signage says that it's also a Japanese place, but I've told by people who know the nuances of the these two cuisines that this later claim is really just marketing. In the past things appeared to be overseen by an older couple who we haven't seen for a while - with things now seemingly passed over to students who unfortunately can be a bit surly, and also have had a tendency to cut back on the size of the servings. Overall, while certainly not the-best-place-ever, it compares very favourably to almost anything on offer at the ANU.

Tip Top Gourmet Restaurant

When a VB is the high-point of your meal, and the most prominently printed thing on the menu is the phrase "No added MSG", it should be clear that a place should have been avoided.

Recently, the Always Hungry team was feeling a bit adventurous and walking through Civic decided to try somewhere they had heard nothing about before. In doing so we stumbled upon Tip Top Gourmet Restaurant in Garema Place, upstairs from Clouston's academic remainder bookshop. Upon entering we were a little wary as the place was half-empty on a busy night and the food on the tables of some of the people already there looked a bit average. We decided however to stay - which turned out to be a decision we both regretted.

While the menu was impressive at face value, containing all of our favourites from restaurants in Australia serving dishes in Chinese, Malaysian, and Thai traditions, the execution of these dishes was appalling. Bland sauces, poorly cooked vegetables, and so on. We have never eaten so poorly in Canberra (apart from maybe at the ANU). And while perhaps being on the cheap side, the pricing is certainly not outright cheap.

And the toilets were disgusting.

Tudo

In thinking about how to write up our lunch at Tudo this weekend we struggled. There just didn't seem to be an obvious angle - until - we decided that this absence of an angle would become the story. Thus, in sum, we have decided to pronounce Tudo, a little Vietnamese restaurant in the O'Connor shops, as average, ordinary, and unremarkable, in the true, non-pejorative senses of those words.

Tudo doesn't really do anything wrong (or at least didn't on this visit) while at the same time, its food (in both quality and price), service, atmosphere, and so on are just not really that distinctive. It is perhaps an archetypal Vietnamese-restaurant-in-Australia. Within Canberra, it compares neither favourably or unfavourably with Rice Paper (Civic), Au Lac, the Asian Noodle House, or the place in Erindale we reviewed a while ago.

On our last visit we had the Red Cooked Tofu and the Lemongrass and Chile Beef, both of which were aromatic and tasty. On a previous visit one of us greatly enjoyed the Special Beef Soup with Rice Noodles. Generally, the soups seems to be the strengths (and most popular items) of the menu. While this time the service was fine, on other occasions one of us dining alone felt that they were treated with rudeness and disdain for taking up table-space as sole diner on a busy weekday lunch. Overall, we're a bit ambivalent about Tudo.

Four Rivers

Something all too prevalent these days is firms - including those in hospitality - treating their customers disrespectfully. By this, we mean those in customer service, front-of-house, or whatever, whether by dictate or otherwise, frequently confusing friendliness with acting-as-if-I-am-your-friend.

Emotional labour is a tough business, which is why there were once (in certain times and places) widely-observed tacit social rules to protect both such workers and customers from the pitfalls of insincerity, rudeness, awkwardness from both parties. Underlying these rules and their concern for mutual respect was the avoidance of servility on one hand or over-familiarity on the other. Or put otherwise, we will treat each other in a friendly (rather than hostile or contemptuous manner), rather than affecting that we are in fact friends (and thus implying a degree of intimacy), or masters-and-servants.

Four Rivers in Dickson seem to have got this balance refreshingly perfectly. On a visit earlier this week we were made to feel, among all possible emotions, precisely welcome. A restaurant on Challis Street (further down from Bollywood Dimensions) in the Szechuan tradition, we enjoyed an excellent Mapo tofu and a less memorable (but still OK) five-spiced duck pancake dish. The menu is extensive (and contains a couple of pages of detailed explanation of the cuisine), and generally well priced for the Inner North middle-class and Chinese students types who make up the clientele. For entrees, we had some average spring rolls but delicious crispy shallot pancakes. The only thing perhaps detracting from the cosiness was the interior fitout - which at the end of the evening still felt like a partially disguised commercial unit shell. Overall though, definitely worth a look.

Things Mexican: Zambrero and the Fiery Aztec

Over the past few weeks the Always Hungry team have come across a couple of vaguely Mexican things of note.

The first is the Wig and Pen's new seasonal (i.e. winter) stout, which they have named Fiery Aztec. As a good stout should be it's thick and tasty, although with more of the consistency of Coopers Extra Stout than Guinness. One of us made the observation that it was not unlike chilled, alcoholic coffee. Definitely worth a taste...

The second is the wannabe Mexican-style chain Zambrero. Their first outpost (that we know of) was in Lonsdale Street (Braddon), and they have since opened for business on a corner of the Sydney Building in the Civic bus interchange, where you would think a hospitality business might thrive but for whatever reason, they historically seem not to. We are in two minds about our Zambrero experiences. One of us is enthusiastic about it, and thinks highly of the burritos they've had, while the other is less impressed, thinking the food average and a bit over-priced. You would think that Canberra (and Australia more widely) could support a successful Mexican chain (which it doesn't have at the moment) - however whether Zambrero has got the formula right is less clear. If they up the quality on the food a notch, and knock a dollar or two off the prices for their main menu items we think they might make it.

Flatheads Cafe

The inclusion of "cafe" in Flatheads' name is perhaps something of a misnomer - the place is a fish and chip shop, if with a few frills in the decor and the menu. Located next door to All Bar Nun in the O'Connor shops - it seemed to attract a reasonable cross sample of the suburb's population on our visit on a Saturday afternoon. Sitting next to us in its pleasantly sunny, warmly painted interior were a baby boomer threesome talking property speculation, over from them were a couple of fashionable 20-somethings, behind us was a parent with a couple of kids apres-Saturday morning sport, and outside was an art-student-looking type reading Camus.

Being a fish and chip shop, I imagine that the owners of the place could expect that there would be customer resistance to them charging real-cafe prices, but they seem to get away with it. Quality-wise it was a bit of a mixed bag. The vege burger we ordered was quite possibly the best vege burger either of us has eaten - with an excellent lightly fried patty, crisp salad and buns, and delicious tatare sauce. However, the fish was a bit of a disappointment and the chips were average (and only warm, rather than hot). Specifically, our complaints with the fish were waaaaaay to much batter and the use of fillets teeming with sharp and nasty bones that seriously detracted from the experience. It's a bit of a tough one in terms of making a judgement, but fish issues aside, that burger would probably tempting enough for a future visit sometime.

O Stratos

On Lonsdale Street, across the road from the Civic Pub, next to an art gallery, and a shop for surfing-and-snowboarding middle-class kids is O Stratos, one of Canberra's few Greek restaurants. We've been here a few times, making a point of sitting by the window to allow gazing at Mt Ainslie and passing junior civil servants on their way home to the 1- and 2- bedroom apartments of Braddon. And generally we've enjoyed ourselves.

The food itself is a bit patchy, with us experiencing repeated evidence of the microwaving of key elements of meals prepared earlier, but while not being cheap, it is also not that expensive (i.e. $16-26 mains). The spanokopita (fetta and spinach pie) and prawn meals we had last time round were OK, but certainly not outstanding. The bread and dips as entrees were somewhat more memorable, and the service has been consistently friendly and efficient time after time. Perhaps, in sum, O Stratos lives up to its self-categorisation as a taverna - complete with representations of white-washed villages above the Mediterranean on the walls - rather than a fine dining establishment, and should be appreciated in these terms.

Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal is a true hidden gem of Northbourne Av eating. Located upstairs and next door to an 'Adults Only' establishment, its discovery requires a certain willingness to get off the beaten track (i.e. to keep walking by Lemongrass, Mezzalira, Zen Yai, etc.). We were first introduced to this rather charming Indian restaurant by a friend with a fondness for joints stashed away from the 'bustling' al fresco hubs of Civic (e.g. he also introduced us to Happy's Chinese Restaurant and The Cube).

Everything about this place is so nicely and competently done that we wouldn't be surprised if it was still here in 20-30 years time. The service is impeccable, the food delicious and promptly delivered, and the prices just right. We have now sampled a few dishes and really like the vegetarian malai kofta, lamb madras, and chicken korma. Dahl is available as a cheap and yummy side dish, and the chapati (roti) bread is excellent. The true Taj Mahal secret, however, may be in its soothing and intimate atmosphere - the background music and the decor are tasteful and the lighting soft without being seedy.

Taj Mahal, you should be proud of yourself.

Erindale Vietnamese Restaurant

If Middle Australia were a place it might be the Erindale Centre in Tuggeranong. Unpretentious members of "working families", kids in hoodies loitering outside fast food shops, a few burger wrappers, pizza boxes, and discarded bottles in the gutter - against a backdrop of gaudy yet essentially generic signage and sprawling carparking - it's got most of the basic elements.

Also, tucked away around a corner of one row of shops is the Erindale Vietnamese Restaurant - where time seems to have not moved on from the late-80s or early-90s. Orange vinyl upholstered seats are set around wood-patterned formica-covered tables. Payment by credit card still takes place via an old sliding zip-zap contraption with paper dockets. There are real orchids, low prices, and menus with quirky spelling and grammar.

That all said, the food is OK - tasty and relatively light. Funnily enough the retro-aesthetic also extended to one of our dishes. Made with the restaurant's "special sauce", one bite immediately stirred memories of Chinese takeaways in another unremarkable suburb of a decade or so ago. This perhaps sums up the place, along with Erindale, in that they both seem like they could be anywhere, yet for us at least, also feel profoundly homely and familiar.

Redback Cristal

One way of categorising Australasian cities is distinguishing between those whose inhabitants (or former residents) are somewhat more parochial about their home-town, and those who while they may like a given city, are less prone to praise-singing. Generalising, we would say Sydney, Brisbane, or Auckland would clearly fall into the latter category, whereas parochialism is more pronounced among those with ties to Melbourne, Wellington, and Perth.

While neither of us have been there, so we've been told, the weather is better, the grass is greener, and so on in the WA state capital. Growing up, one of us recalls a school friend, who along with being generally enthusiastic about their time growing up in Perth, was in similar terms fond of Redback Cristal, a wheat beer from "over there". Accordingly, he on occasion made these beers available for didactic purposes, and it was agreed at the time that they were indeed estimable.

Now, as we still enjoy a good wheat beer - which when done well have a certain energy - we recently purchased a sixer of Redback, to see if memory and taste were still in concordance. Unfortunately it seems that during a 10 or so year interval between tastings, something happened. While, to be clear, there isn't much offensive with Redback circa 2008, it also doesn't seem to do much else for us, other than being rather bland. Importantly, it doesn't actually really taste like a wheat beer at all. Given their premium pricing (i.e. about $19 a six-pack), this can be seen as a not insignificant failing. We like taste, and if we buy a high-priced wheat beer, we would hope it would taste recognisably as a wheat beer. Given that WA is home to Australia's wheatbelt, it might be hoped that wheat beers from that part of world would be a bit better.

Lynwood Cafe

Yesterday afternoon we paid a visit to the well-regarded Lynwood Cafe, just off the Federal Highway in the small hamlet of Collector, at the northern end of Lake George. On a sunny winter's day, with the blue sky, yellow tussock lands, neighbouring creek, aged leaf-less trees, and restored white colonial cottage, it's all bit of a contemporary Australian-Arcadia.

As an Arcadia, from this and previous visits, it is one populated primarily by upper-middle class baby boomers on their way between Canberra and Sydney. By way of example, a waitress asked the three couples in the small room we were sitting in, if we had seen the National Gallery of Australia's recent Monet-Turner exhibition. One of the couple said they had just come down to see it yesterday...

For the most part, the Lynwood Cafe does a good job reflecting this certain demographic - comfortable, visibly successful in worldly affairs, but not too flashy. Cream it most certainly is not. One absolute strength of the place is the service - which was friendly without a hint of ingratiation or world-weariness. Funnily enough, our only quibble was with the food. While the basil, tomato, and onion semolina gnocchi we ordered was delicious (with a tangy smokey flavour), the gorgonzola and mushroom risotto was a bit average (Chats at the ANU, does a much better and cheaper job). Like its upper-middle- class clientele though, such a flaw did not seem to much damage its general projections of overall authenticity and deserved esteem.

Au Lac

Dickson is somewhat locally well-known as being Canberra's "Chinatown", although there are very few dragons or pandas lurking around. Apart from a few importer-grocery shops, and the legend of a young Jackie Chan having walked its streets, there isn't really much, at least from a superficial glancing, to support this imagination of place. It could be equally argued that American fast-food chains appear to be just as prominent in the commercial area's streetscape.

However, what Dickson does have is Au Lac - one of the city's better fake meat places (along with the nearby Kingsland). Fake meat, for the unacquainted, is a textured soy-based product that can be made into meat-ish dishes, typically by South-East Asian Buddhists. White meats (i.e. fake chicken, duck, or fish) are typically far more convincing than attempts at imitating red meat, and when done well, can even be tasty.

Accompanied by a soothing indoor waterfall (more restaurants should have one), guests at Au Lac ought to order the "Noodle Laksa" for $10 - and within 5-10 minutes they will be presented with a delicious spicy bowl of coconut milk, spice, veges, and radically tranformed soy. Most of the other dishes are OK, but the laksa really is the stand-out.

Asian Noodle House (Northbourne Ave)

The Asian Noodle House in the Sydney Building in Civic is a bit of a mixed bag. It has a few quirks that detract from it, but at the same time it excels in providing what its name suggests - noodles cooked in an Asian tradition.

Although many places offer meals associated with perhaps one or two countries, the Asian Noodle House is a little unusual in being explicitly pan-South-East Asian and doing a good job of it (i.e. on the menu are Thai, Malaysian/Singaporean, Vietnamese, Lao, and Chinese dishes). One of us had the Kwangtong noodles, the other a Laksa - and both were very tasty (although I would have felt the noodles would be a small serve if one was reasonably hungry).

However, the service was a little slow for a quiet Sunday evening, and some apparent simmering mother/daughter front-of-house tension made for a bit of a weird tone. Also, we had differing views on the entrees, with the quality of the tofu blocks and spring rolls being debatable.

Overall, as a parting thought, we would suggest that the place is possibly not called the Asian Entree House for a reason - stick to the noodles.

Turkish Delight

We've been to Turkish Delight in Belconnen a few times now and generally leave feeling satisfied.

Tucked away off Weedon Court in the town centre's light industrial area, the restaurant's interior decorators have managed to make what would otherwise be a stark commercial unit, in a relatively desolate area, feel kind of cosy. Rugs, orientalist prints, and an obligatory portrait of Ataturk all make you feel that you are at least partially sheltered from the barrenness of the concrete-and-low-rise landscape outside on a cold May evening.

On Saturday nights belly-dancers are put on, and which are, I think we are in consensus, a mixed blessing. Done well, with an enthusiastic crowd, it a reasonably interesting form of entertainment. If either of these elements are missing (and particularly the latter), it gets pretty sad very quickly. Also, we query if the dancers asking guests to dance with them is a good thing - generally we think it makes most people feel awkward, and detracts from the performance, as the shy sit in fear of immanent mortification.

Anyway, the food. On the whole it's pretty good, and reasonably priced, although we would recommend staying away from the baked dishes and sticking to the grilled meats and pide as mains. The dips and bread are strong points (notably in comparison to our experiences of the Turkish Pide House in Civic), and the Turkish wine is worth trying. And, of course, the namesake dessert is fine.

Coopers Extra Stout

It is more or less redundant to note that the Coopers brewery is (along with the Little Creatures crowd) one of the two best makers of mass market beer in Australia, or for that matter, Australasia (although we do think the "family brewed" tag is stretching it a little - what proportion of the Coopers workforce can really be family members?)

However, while being well familiarised with most of their other products we hadn't though previously come across their Extra Stout. In short, this is probably the best (mass market) stout we can think of this side of Ireland (along with perhaps New Zealand's classic Vita Stout). While not as rich and thick as Guiness (obviously the benchmark for the style) Coopers have actually managed to create a complex, textured drink. This unfortunately has been all-too-rare among the attempts of most brewers in this part of the world's attempts at making stouts, porters, and other darker beers.

Definitely worth a try for the uninitiated.

Pub Lunch: All Bar Nun

We like O'Connor. If we had been born ten years earlier, we might have even been able to buy a nice little cottage there. Alas, the baby boomers with their property speculation, dreaming up of the HECS program, and other little schemes to more or less squeeze Generation X, have made sure that plan is not likely to happen anytime soon. We can still occasionally, though, seek comfort from a glass of beer and a pub lunch.

One place we have done this a couple times recently is All Bar Nun (ABN hereafter), a sprawling complex that seems to be possibly, if slowly, taking over the O'Connor shops. We're not quite sure what the appropriate label for ABN is - pub, cafe, restaurant - it's kinda none and all of the above. Luckily, the place is so well known, we needn't bother...

So, what are its most appealing features? Well, first and foremost, at least (and somewhat paradoxically) for the Always Hungry team, it's Little Creatures (Bright Ale) ON TAP! We absolutely love this beer - a choice that recently receved the stamp of approval from one of the Braddon Cellars staff (see earlier post about Braddon booze shopping alternatives). ABN seems to be one of the few places that has it on tap - ON TAP! Anyway...

ABN has a few other things going for it - namely the food and the space. The food is really good pub grub I guess - some of our favourites include the fungi pizza (with blue cheese and red onion - yum!), bean tortilla, and possibly the best beer battered fries in town (served, predictably, with garlic aioli and sweet chilli sour cream). The falafel burger is also good. As you can perhaps tell from our choices, we've stuck to the vegetarian options - we like to share - so can't really say much about the meat stuff.

Finally, the space then. It's handy to our key haunts (home and work) and has lots of seating (inside and out) and much of it rather satisfactory - unless you're determined to have your spot in the sun on a Sunday afternoon. The outside seating is a little cramped - something that becomes particularly salient when you find yourself next to a tableful of 18-22 year olds discussing their inevitably thoughtless, inconsiderate, disloyal, etc. significant others.

All in all, All Bar Nun - a job well done!

Rama's

Rama's is a (Fijian-)Indian restaurant in the Woden suburb of Pearce, set along with an Ethiopian and a Vietnamese place in an archetypal National Capital Development Commission concrete 1960s local centre.

Perhaps due to a perception of being a "hidden gem" given its somewhat out of the way location Rama's has quite a reputation - to the extent that reasonable people talk of it as being Canberra's best Indian joint. Correspondingly, every time we've been there it has been very full (and very noisy), with patrons stuffed into a large number of small booths in a not very large space.

So, how does it stack up in May 2008? Lest there be no mistake, we will say right now that Rama's is competent. However, while Rama's is OK, we would have to question the reputation of it being "The Best Indian in Canberra". Specifically, (along with the noise) the menu was rather unremarkable (i.e. it featured the standards, and only the standards of Indian restaurants in Australia), and the food, while fine, was not particularly memorable (with the possible exception of the Palak Paneer).

Costwise, meals were a couple of dollars more than you might expect for equivalent dishes in other Canberra Indian restaurants, but this was in part offset by generous servings of rice, complementary poppadoms, and no corkage charge. The service was also friendly, efficient, and generally excellent.

In sum, we would probably lean towards one of the Blue Elephant (Braddon), Flavours of India (Garema Place) or the Taj Mahal (Melbourne Building) if we were to make a judgement of "The Best Indian in Canberra" (if it were possible to be so unequivocal), but if you were to go to Rama's on a quiet night with a freshened menu, it would probably be comparable.

Notes on the Bottle Shops of Braddon

Here at Always Hungry - in Canberra, we are sometimes also a bit thirsty. This thirst therefore necessitates us visiting the bottle shops of Braddon, of which there are three.

The first of these is the Braddon Cellars, who style themselves as the "The Friendly Sellers". On this they are not wrong, with always friendly staff, in opposition to their name proper given that the shop is clearly not situated in a cellar. The place is bright and functional, if also catering to booze-hounds stumbling over from The Civic Pub or wherever. Prices are low and the selection is satisfactory for the likes of us, and so we thoroughly recommend it.

Further up Lonsdale Street is The Bottle-O, apparently formerly run by the owners of Debacle but now sold-on to a local chain of booze shops. While it was run by the Debacle crowd there was clearly an emphasis on an uncluttered aesthetic, but which has now been replaced by more hustle. The prices are notably up a notch from The Friendly Sellers, but rather than working class men and male students doing serving, customers are presented with middle-aged middle class men who affect knowledge on things boozy, along with female students behind the counter. One bonus is their stocking of the Rewined range of very drinkable local Canberra Region wines sold on a deposit basis (i.e. customers receive a $3 discount on the return of a bottle).

Finally, over on Mort Street is a bulk chain whose actual name currently escapes us, but possibly contains the words "Discount" or "A-1" or something. Anyway, it's a bit scary in that its staff are apparently strictly obliged to great you in an over-friendly manner (another tyranny of the age), but has an extensive and very cheap range of cheap own-label wines.

All in all, given the more or less equivalence of choice and pricing we would recommend the slightly edgy and untamed feel of the "Friendly Sellers", but of course, the choice is yours.

Canberra 1989

One of the major critiques made of the enlightenment, and subsequently modernity, is that "progress" can be a funny thing. What may seem to be liberatory may simply turn out to be a new prison. What does this have to with eating in Canberra - we can't quite put our fingers on it, but maybe call it a vibe...

We've been recently reading through an old Lonely Planet guide to Australia from 1989, back when Hawke was PM, and locally, the Raiders used to win things. Heady times indeed.

Anyway, along with suggesting that you might go see a cultural institution or two, the book inevitably also recommends places to eat and drink - and on the whole, Canberra doesn't sound all that bad, especially in the context of the frequent contention made in food pages and food shows that we - middle-class consumers - are now all so much more sophisticated these days. To oversimplify the stock story, over the last two or three decades, middle Australia has been allegedly led, by courageous pioneer figures (usually with non Anglo-Celtic surnames), through the initiation rites of espresso and outdoor dining, to a nirvana of mass taste, discernment, and connoisseurship.

Being too young to know better, we wonder if it ever really was that bad, and observing the frequent, if glossily packaged, mediocrity we see around us now in the hospitality industry, with apparently willing consumers, it does make us wonder how far Canberra has come.

Reading the Lonely Planet, a few things are striking. First, is the turnover of places - only Mama's in Garema Place, the Pancake Parlour in Civic, Gus's, and Rasa Sayang in Dickson seem to have survived the last 20 or so years. Gone are the other dozen or so places suggested, some of which sounded ok.

Second, perhaps unsurprisingly given the period, is the paucity of Asian food places. Also interesting is their generally very straightforward naming. The Vietnamese place is Canberra Vietnamese Restaurant, the Malaysian place in Civic is the Malaysian Restaurant.

Third, is the decline of live music and particularly jazz venues. It may be arguable, but the replacement of live jazz venues with the doof-doof music, could perhaps be seen as precisely the sort of uncertain progress of modernity we began with.

Aldi - Less Choice is Sometimes More

As the discussants at the fellow Canberra blog Crazybrave point out, there is less choice at Aldi. We, the Always Hungrys, believe that this is its charm.

Aldi, in contrast to other supermarkets, is premised on the idea that at least some consumers actually want less - what we contend are more or less pointless - choices for certain products. These consumers, in our understanding, want a certain level of comparative quality in combination with low prices. This, of course, contrasts with a certain unqualified rhetoric often found in advertising asserting that consumers want more choices.

This call-for-choice is usually predicated on two grounds: that competition engenders quality, or that choice allows the consumer to express their own unique-as-a-snowflake identity. Although consumption may indeed be a manifestation of one's social identity as sophisticated, Australian, or young-at-heart or whatever, the idea that more or less mass-marketed goods make an individual can scarcely be considered as much more than, at best, problematic. We find it hard to see how being able to choose between 20 types of widely-available, say, toothpaste or bottled water produces individuality. Rather, Aldi's less choice of essentially generic products of a comparable quality to its competitors at usually much lower prices provides greater value, and leaves identity to more substantive aspects of life.

We grant that Aldi is not perfect - for example, we are skeptical of the value of its bulk packaging to facilitate faster scanning against environmental impacts. We are glad that we have choices elsewhere in purchasing certain food and drink products. However, within many aspects of cooking and eating, we like it that Aldi is orientated to an alternative model of the consumer and provides an alternative to choices not worth making.

Pizza = La Posada (Not La Porchetta)

I really like pizza. It's not only yummy, it's also super easy to make - and to make it well. This is especially true if you stay away from apricots, tandoori chicken, and pineapple (sorry all you Hawaiian fans out there) and stick to the few basic ingredients, such as good quality bocconcini, some basil, and a tomato base with plenty of garlic, pepper and olive oil. Although I make my own pizza bases (using spelt flour - you may cringe at its hippy connotations, but it tastes delicious), even store bought bases can be OK if treated with some forethought (i.e. a really hot oven).

Anyway, the point of all this is that if I'm going to pay someone else to make a pizza for me then I expect, well, awesomeness. At La Posada (Civic), awesome pizza it is. This cute and cozy restaurant may also do a good job of pasta, risotto, etc. - but we wouldn't know. Having received some insider advice early on to stick with pizza, that's exactly what we've done. Some of our favourites are gorgonzola (I know I made a rather 'purist' pizza statement only a paragraph ago, but blue cheese really works on this one), veggie deluxe and chorizo. I won't go into the whole thick crust/thin crust thing - suffice it to say, the crust is just as it should be. Also, we highly recommend the chilli bread (a spicy alternative to the usual garlic/herb varieties) and the orange pudding for dessert, if there's any space left. Speaking of space, one large pizza ($20) should be plenty for two adults - it is, as the name suggests, large.

Not that this should be seen as something unusual and therefore worth mentioning, but the staff there are just so damn good - it's kinda hard to explain, but I think we've decided that they treat us like people, rather than customers, if you know what I mean.

Oh, and it's not that I have anything against La Porchetta, but you can do so much better...

Gus's

Gus's is something of a celebrity among cafes in the Canberra hospitality cosmos. It's reputation as fashionable and superior is often quickly communicated to newcomers and visitors to the city. It even has its own Wikipedia page, repeating the locally well-known battles of the original Gus-from-Vienna in establishing outdoor eating at his venue (the page also suggests that the original Gus has long moved on (presumably) to al fresco dining in the sky). However, it is the contention of the Always Hungrys that like most celebrities, it is usually a disappointing experience when they are encountered in person.

Whatever the merits of Gus's in the past, it is clearly now no longer a leader among Canberra's cafes. This decline is both relative - i.e. in part due to the existance of many superior alternatives - as well when simply compared to the Gus's of a couple years ago.

An analogy with major fast food chains might be fruitfully made. The menu is predictable - in this case, stock-in-trade Australasian cafe food (mushrooms on toast, wedges with sour cream and sweet chili sauce, generic pasta dishes, and so on). Often, it would appear that they are prepared without a noticebly high level of care. Further, to stretch Haywood's observation below that the only acceptable substitute for good beer is very cheap beer, the food is not particuarly cheap - being priced at standard Canberra cafe levels (i.e. you could eat at the apex of local daytime eating, Silo, in Kingston, for around the same money). In sum, as with major fast food chains, one is probably going to be served food that only the young and callow are likely to be uncritically satisfied with.

To be clear, this is not to suggest the current Gus's is any worse than an all-too-large number of Canberra cafes, rather, that you can probably do better.

The Wig and Pen Assessed against the Haywood Framework

From Christchurch, the author David Haywood has recently put forth a five-point framework of the key characteristics of the all-too-infrequently found "good pub". The original piece is worth reading in its entirety, containing compelling insights including, "The only acceptable substitute for good beer, in my opinion, is very, very cheap beer" and, in setting an appropriate atmosphere, "A stuffed fish is a welcome addition to any pub".

In short, the five essential components of the good pub can be summarised as:

1. Good beer (i.e naturally fizzy, non-sweet, well-headed, hand pumped beer).
2. A total absence of recorded music, with live music allowable in very restricted circumstances.
3. The absence of activities requiring physical exertion. Darts and dominoes are fine, pool is out.
4. Bar staff with gravitas appropriate to serving good beer. Trivial bonhomie is dimly viewed.
5. Dark, sombre, yet comfortable decor.

With only minor qualifications, we are willing to accept Haywood's criteria as being of value. This of course leads to the further question of which pubs in one's own place of residence fulfil them. Haywood himself notes that no one venue in Christchurch meets all of his criteria, with various otherwise meritous establishments each having significant flaws. Drawing on our collective experience of drinking in Canberra, it is clear only one pub comes close to clearing the high bar set. This, of course, is the Wig and Pen, whose beer in taste and its service is well above the offerings of any and everywhere else, and lacks only for seating comfortable for extended visits.

Unlike Haywood, we are willing to entertain arguments for pubs other than those that tend towards his archetype clearly derived from a very particular understanding of the United Kingdom and Ireland. We are willing to acknowledge, for example, the pleasures of the Civic Pub, or the Phoenix as an occasional corrective. However, in most circumstances the discerning, reflective, adult Canberran cannot venture past the W and P.

Borsch i Vodka

Recently the Polish Club in O'Connor decided that its future did not lie with problem gamblers. So, breaking with standard club practice, it cleaned out the pokies and turned the place over to a restaurant serving Polish cuisine - Borsch i Vodka.

The exterior of the Club building housing the restaurant itself is, to at least one pair of our untrained eyes, quite attractive - typical Canberra 70s brutalism-meets-Frank Lloyd Wright, and opened by Pope John Paul II before he was Pope John Paul II. Upon entering, you are presented with a view straight into the kitchen, with the back-of-house staff looking believably Polish. The dining room itself is off to one side, and feels appropriately enough, perhaps how you might imagine a 1970s-80s Polish restaurant open to people with hard currency might look like.

The Always Hungrys have been to the Club three times in the past few months. Once on our own, once with a couple of friends, and once on a Saturday afternoon when after lunch across the road we chanced upon markets in the main hall selling fresh pork products, sausages, and canned and sachet goods imported direct from Gdansk or wherever.

The food at the restaurant proper has generally been excellent and reasonably priced ($15-20 mains). Just keep away from the deserts - which on both occasions were not that flash. Otherwise, as you would hope, the borsch was delicious (and bright pink), as were the cheese pierogi (dumplings), meat pierogi, and cabbage rolls. These, of course, were well accompanied by freshly pickled, but not-too-sauer, sauerkraut.

Funnily enough, we haven't actually had vodka there, but the various Polish beers we have tried from the bar were also tasty. With a few families, and far fewer young APS-types and graduate accountants, All Bar Nun it is not, the merits of which or otherwise will not be discussed here. However, if you are looking for something different, we would definitely recommend it.

Poorly Nourished Minds? The Sorry State of Food At The ANU

You might think that, being perhaps more refined and cultivated than the average Canberran (for argument's sake), and often not being particularly shy about voicing their opinions, the staff and students at the ANU would contrive to eat well. You'd be wrong.

Both of the Always Hungry team have been hungry at the ANU for periods of several years. These are the exasperated views of one them, who has now moved on to better lunches elsewhere.

Although it routinely claims to be among the world's top 20 universities in terms of research, unfortunately its on-campus catering is unlikely to be near the top of any league tables. All but one of the cafes, restaurants, and food outlets across the sprawling green fields and trees of Acton seem to be systematically incapable of consistantly providing quality food at a reasonable price - whether we are talking about student or professorial budgets - or for that matter any price. To be sure, some cafes do manage one or two OK meals for periods of time, before seeming to eventually, inevitably resume the standard offering of (overpriced) mediocrity.

To clarify, I contend that there are essentially two markets that are not being met. The first, is for a simple sandwich for a student's everyday lunch for, say, $5-6. These do not exist, and have not existed since Calypso became the god-awfully renovated Degree and upped its prices to pay for its contemporary-tacky decor. Second, all of the places catering in the $12-18 cafe-style lunch market - bar Chats in the art school with its risottos and Ocker-service - are problematic. At best, including the sometimes praised Gods, they will consistently have at least one or two dogs or lemons in their menu; at worst, all of their dishes are poor, almost all of the time.

This raises the questions of how and why? On over-pricing, a friend of mine involved with student politics once put forward the argument that, compared to alleged practices elsewhere, caterers on campus are unable to get away with underpaying their staff. I have subsequently put this theory to another friend who works in a managerial role in the hospitality industry in Sydney - who called bullsh*t. A more sophisticated explanation is required - anyone who has eaten in foodcourts or any number of cafes in Sydney or Melbourne knows that better eating at lower prices is possible.

It is perhaps then no wonder we routinely see the V-C choosing to entertain at Mezzalira.

Blue Elephant

So you’ve made it almost to the end of Lonsdale St (Braddon)—most likely on the off chance that you’ll manage to squeeze your way in to the trendy, crowded, and noisy place that sells average pizza and reputable European beers. Yes, some people really get off on that kind of thing… In search of something a little different, we (have on many an occasion) decided to give the ‘scene’ a miss and try our luck across the road—at Blue Elephant.

Up the stairs and pass the “Australian Republican Movement” office (yes, you read right) the first surprise awaits—the most lavishly decorated and comfortable take-away waiting area ever. Behind the counter is one of the friendliest elderly restaurant owners (we presume) we’ve ever come across—not friendly in a smarmy way, just a genuine “I’m happy to be here and I’m happy you’re here” vibe. Nice. We call him “The Guy”.

The Guy is the only person on the ‘floor’—he sets your table, takes the order, and brings the food, once the invisible chef downstairs has finished doing his/her magic and the bell rings. How cute and retro! The food is, like, seriously good. Oh, damn it, it’s delicious, OK? Because one of us is a vegetarian, we tend to go for the veggie options—malai kofta, devilled paneer, potato and spinach curry, and eggplant curry are favourites, with naan and saffron rice. We once had a thali (me a non-veggie version) and weren’t impressed—so, stick to the menu. Oh, and Kingfisher beer is a must—it’s perfect with the creamy, spicy and fragrant dishes they serve here.
What puzzles me most about this place is just how good a time we seem to have every time we come here. I don’t know—it’s welcoming, and calming (weird, I know), and sort of homey. A place at peace with itself, and with its guests.

In the Beginning...there was Lemongrass

Hello there.

This blog has emerged on a whim from a dinner at Lemongrass in Civic last night where we - myself and my partner - decided that we should use our expensively developed observation skills, cultivated palates, and withering wits to write about our experiences trying to feed ourselves in Canberra.

We are aged somewhere between 25-35, and seem to spend a lot of our spare time collecting, preparing, and consuming food and/or drinks. The plan is to relate our experiences eating in and eating out, and otherwise being consumers of markets, supermarkets, bottle shops, restaurants, fastfood joints, food and booze industry media, in the ACT, or whereever else we might happen to visit. We call Australia home, although we were both born elsewhere. One of us is also a vegetarian, who nonetheless enjoys cheese and a good omelet.

Anyway, introductions aside, last night we went to try the Thai restaurant in Civic, Lemongrass, after years of devotion to Zen Yai, its competitor futher down London Circuit. Having a bit of loyalty to the latter, I at least, had a critical eye, noting divergences from my old favourite. On the whole, Lemongrass did not disappoint, if though it didn't have the same feeling of comforting familiarity. The food was excellent (a vegetarian Pad Thai, and a spicy beef salad), if slightly more expensive than Zen Yai, and the staff were a little too keen to move us along to manage their bookings. Generally, the place also had an older crowd than Zen Yai - more fifty year old plus senior manager types dining with similar looking friends or their kids - than Zen Yai's 20-somethings dressed up for a night out. Overall, it was all very adequate, but didn't really do enough to really make me want to reconsider entrenched habits the next time we feel like Thai.