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.