Scoop Magazine, Autumn 2013

photo: Jenny Susanto-Lee

Chinese Whispers

It’s no secret that Perth’s dining scene is bursting its britches at the moment, and with that comes lots and lots of choice.  Where to begin? Chinese restaurants in particular are a veritable minefield: it could take years trying to sort the succulent Peking duck from the same ol’, same ol’ fried rice.

If you have a particular penchant for authentic Chinese food, follow the Asian community to Northbridge. According to a popular food website (oh alright, we’re talking about Urbanspoon), the three highest rating Chinese restaurants cite Northbridge as their physical address. The top end of William Street buzzes at all hours of the day and night with a plethora of Chinese supermarkets, restaurants and people. Duck into The Red Teapot or Shanghai Tea Garden for inexpensive, fair-dinkum Chinese fare that is worlds away from the Westernised lemon chicken or beef in black bean sauce.

Northbridge is also home to a Chinese institution – yum cha. Seriously, if you haven’t experienced yum cha during a weekend lunchtime rush hour, then you haven’t really experienced Asian dining. Small, enticing plates of fried and steamed yumminess are ferried about from table to table via trolleys, all washed down with oceans of Chinese tea (not booze, people!). It’s fast, noisy and delicious. You eat until you’re bursting, eat a bit more, and then stagger out the door. Your table will be filled in a flash. The best places to go in Northbridge for a true yum cha experience, complete with queues and ticket-taking, are on Francis Street (Dragon Palace, Joy Garden, Xintiandi), Roe Street (Regal on Roe, Northbridge Chinese) or James Street (New Moon, Golden Century, Oriental Inn).

But please, don’t just limit yourself to inner city eating out. If you cast your net wider, there are fab Chinese restaurants sprinkled all over the place. The pearl in Fremantle’s crown for Chinese cuisine is Joy Kitchen, while Aquarium Seafood Chinese in Ascot is a multi-award winner. Good One BBQ, Ten Ten and Chi are the go-to Chinese restaurants on the Vic Park strip, and Chin’s Noodle House in Leeming are best loved among locals for their Peking duck. In the north, Wing Soon is a family fave in Morley and Gold Garden Seafood BBQ in Balcatta packs them in for yum cha in the burbs. For ‘best quality’, you can’t go past the spanking new Silks at Crown Casino.

Most Chinese restaurants in Australia serve Cantonese food – that is, cuisine from southern China. Here’s why: during the 80s and 90s, when the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty between the United Kingdom and China became imminent, there was a mass exodus of a million Hong Kong Cantonese. The residents were concerned about what living under Chinese rule would mean for them, and fled to the UK, the US and – yes – Australia. These days, Cantonese wonton noodles and shark fin soup are an integral part of the English vocab.

So once you’ve found your perfect Chinese eatery, what on earth do you order when you get there? Most if not all restaurants with have even a middling reputation for a signature dish or two that regulars return again and again for (and, they hope, rave to their friends about). Rich, crispy-skinned Peking duck is top of the Chinese food chain. Served as one, two or three duck dishes, courses generally include pancakes, soup and san choi bao (minced duck served in iceberg lettuce leaves). Good Fortune Roast Duck House in Northbridge gets our tick. Deep fried squid tentacles are also very popular, as are char siu bao (soft, steamed buns filled with saucy barbecued pork) and Shanghai dumplings (thinly wrapped parcels bursting with soup and minced meat). For awesome handmade dumplings with a northern Chinese take, try Mom Dumpling House in Victoria Park. There are so many choices in Perth that you’ll be eating out for a month of Sundays – at least for yum cha, anyway.

The West Australian Newspaper: September 2013

image: The West Australian Newspaper

Restaurant Review: Food to Make You Feel Whole

There’s so much to tell about this place that, quite frankly, I don’t know where to begin. Should I start with its multi-award-winning hip-hop owner, Drapht (aka Paul Ridge) who, thanks to an impressive array of food intolerances, ended up opening up his own café just so he could eat out in safety? Perhaps the menu, which is all-organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, processed sugar-free and has a healthy dose of raw, vegan and vegetarian dishes to boot? Or the kitchen, with a dessert chef who specialises in raw organic sweets and a world-class head chef who’s well-versed in cooking organically and specialises in food intolerances?

Let’s start with the beverages. Forget your soft drinks and reconstituted OJ – this place is all about coconut water, made-to-order fruit juices and smoothies, and kombucha probiotics. You can also order from a range of coffee and tea, but it’ll be with rice milk or almond milk. When the muso and I visited for dinner, we went with the fruit juices - a ‘kidney cleanse’ (watermelon, green apple and carrot) and a ‘liver love’ (carrot, apple, kale, celery, lemon and ginger). We couldn’t help but feel refreshed after all that colour.

To the food and, to be frank, if we weren’t already au fait with many of the ingredients we may have been a little put off. Quinoa (pronounced ‘keen-wah’, not ‘ka-no-wa’), agave and coconut oil feature fairly heavily on the menu, and if diners aren’t down with these terms they may feel a bit bereft. Saying that, there are plenty of familiar ingredients to fall back on. Grass-fed lamb cutlets crumbed with garlic, lemon and fresh oregano gave us lean, clean flavours, while a side dish of beetroot chips crisped up in the dehydrator were healthy and moreish (yes, the two terms can co-exist). A warm winter lamb salad with parsnip, purple carrots and slow-roasted tomato was, like many of the dishes, massive. The food is filling, but not in a bloaty, I’m-going-to-have-to-go-have-a-lie-down kind of way. In other words, it’s real food without any of the preservatives, emulsifiers, additives, improvers and refined white stuff that make most of us feel a little bit meh. This was a good thing, because the dessert card rocked. At Solomon’s the sweets apparently take two days to create. They’re raw, 100% organic and extremely popular, as we discovered when we were advised the raw Snickers had sold out (noooo…).  In all, it had ten organic ingredients in it that we were itching to sample, but what can you do. We went with a choc-banana cheesecake and the last slice of chai caramel cheesecake (ha!). To get an idea of the amount of grunt that goes into these desserts, let me list the ingredients of the latter cheesecake: almonds, cashews, rice syrup, coconut oil, Celtic salt, vanilla cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, chai tea, ginger, dates and tahini. It cost $14 and was sensational.

Is Solomon’s expensive? Yes, it’s up there, but then I imagine so would the eatery’s organic shopping and specialty ingredients bill. The service is smiley and passionate – staff know their stuff and so they should, because they’re bound to get asked lots of questions about the ingredients. The sprawling venue seats around a hundred people, and if you keep an eye on the pass you may get a glimpse of a calm, self-possessed young man going about his business. Mark my words, Solomon’s is a taste of things to come.

_________________________

Score – 14/20

Address – Solomon's, 487 Beaufort Street, Highgate

Tel – 9328 7995

The Buzz – A Mecca for anybody who enjoys organic wholefood, and an absolute haven for those with food allergies and/or intolerances. Solomon’s fills a growing hole in Perth’s dining out scene.

Click here for link

The West Australian Newspaper: July 2013

Books for Cooks - Book Reviews

'Toscano’s Family Table' by Joanne Toscano. Published by Slattery, RRP$50.00

Melbourne-based Italian greengrocers Toscano’s is a family business that’s been chugging along for more than sixty years. In this book, granddaughter Joanne showcases what her extended family do with all that home-grown goodness in the form of a cookbook that covers over seventy classic Italian dishes. But it’s not all fruit and veg: we’re also talking truffle fettuccine, roast lamb shoulder and mango tiramisu. There are also lots of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your fresh produce, too.

'Ancient Grains' by Catherine Saxelby. Published by Arbon, RRP$34.99

It’s International Year of the Quinoa, did you know? With that in mind, Ancient Grains covers a silo-full of whole grains (including the aforementioned) and what their health benefits are. Thankfully, the book includes over one hundred recipes too, because quite often the question with grains is not whether or not they are good for us (we know they are), but how exactly do we prepare and cook them? If you’re into grains, or are thinking about extending your repertoire, this will surely be your go-to book.

'Not Quite Nigella' by Lorraine Elliott. Published by Penguin, RRP$29.00. 

With a quarter of a million unique readers a month, Lorraine Elliott is arguably Australia’s food blogging queen. Formerly a media strategist, Elliott takes the reader on a journey through her life as a fully-fledged, full-time food blogger, from doing a stint in jail (in the name of research), to gatecrashing exclusive parties, media famils and interviewing celebrity chefs from all over the world, including, finally, her blogging namesake, Nigella Lawson. Throw in a few recipes, and you have a fun and interesting insight into the life of a food blogger.

'Kumar’s Family Cookbook' by Kumar Pereira. Published by Allen & Unwin, RRP$29.99

There are lots of cookbooks geared towards the family on the shelves at the moment, but this one caught our eye for its Sri Lankan bent. Kumar, a former MasterChef contestant, began writing out these recipes (complete with gorgeous drawings) for his sons, and they have gradually snowballed into a book. It includes Sri Lankan dishes (lamprais curry; roti) as well as everyday family faves (crispy-skinned pork belly; sticky toffee pudding), showing off Kumar’s talents as a cook, artist and all-round family man. 

The West Australian Newspaper: April 2013

Restaurant Review: A Spicy Affair

The Buzz

New suburban Indian restaurant serving up consistently tender curries. Cosy, welcoming and fast becoming a local favourite.

This fairly new place on the Victoria Park strip feels like home away from home - if I was living in Bombay. The Indian eatery is tucked away at the southern end of Albany Highway, two doors down from The Prophet, and is as cute as a button, with the chatty young owner ensuring everybody feels, well, right at home. There is indoor and alfresco seating to choose from, and on a weeknight, both areas are bursting at the seams. Yes okay, we’ve been here before, but apart from the awesome food and friendly owner, the main reason we keep boomeranging back is because the food is consistent. Too often I’ve found that Indian restaurants serve up a dish that’s fantastic one week and dreadful the next. Here, if you order the goat curry, you’ll get the same succulent, fall-off-the-bone goat curry every day of the week. But more about that later.

Décor-wise, it’s trad Indian. Chilli-red walls, gilt-edged Indian oil paintings and tapestries, with Indian music on the sound system. They’re just about to undergo a re-fit though, so don’t quote me. The service is old-style: free pappadams and tap water for the table without having to ask for it. It’s fully BYO, and corkage is three bucks. None of the dishes on the menu make it over $20, and judging by all the foot traffic, take-away is a popular weeknight can’t-be-bothered-cooking option.

When I visit with the family, we always order the same dishes, hence why we know they’re consistent with the meals. The yellow dhal is a classic comfort food, chunky and soupy with just enough bite to raise a bead or two of sweat. And then there is the goat. A bit of bone but not too much, immersed in a thick gravy brought to new flavour heights by the fattiness of the meat, and so tender barely any chewing is required. They nail it every time. Generous dishes of saffron rice and naan done just right help to mop up all the glorious liquid.  Generally, butter chicken comes in a galaxy of combinations – some are too creamy, some have too much tomato. Others are too spicy, and when you have a six year old addicted to butter chicken, too much heat does us no favours on the eating front. Spicy Affair’s version has a perfect balance of all these flavours and again, they do it the same way every time, so we don’t have to worry whether our child will be eating or not that night. The sauces meld into a happy slurry on the plate, and more bread is usually required.

Dessert is but one choice – gulab jamun. Two balls of hot, syrupy and extremely sweet milk dumplings that is made in-house, and we’re done. I’ll be dreaming about that goat.

A Spicy Affair, 909A Albany Highway, East Victoria Park. Telephone 6162 8767

Score: 13.5 out of 20