Best Restaurant in the Entire World!

As we are aware El Bulli will close for two years & in my belief its restaurants like the Lab at Hastings that will try to snatch the title of Best Restaurant in the Entire World

Review: The Lab at Hastings.

We arrived to an empty room & my first impressions were of melancholy & isolation.
The usually unflappable Silvano who runs the floor was not on so we had to deal with Gustav. And hehad no idea who I was!

Two points off.
We were sat at the front of the restaurant, beside the door. I think we were situated there to give the ‘we’re busy’ impression to passers by.
She who must be obeyed ordered a Campari & Duchy of Hohenstein Orange. Gustav looked perplexed. ‘Not just a Campari & Soda, luvvie, the oranges come from the Duchy of Hohenstein AND they make all the difference, tried it in Antibes last year & everyone’s drinking it’ said she.
Gustav looked perplexed. ‘I em werry sorry, but ve don’t hef zis orench’. Catastrophe!
Three points off.
Sensing trouble we quickly ordered two Moo Broo Mojitos instead.
The dining room could have been described as moderne by someone comfortable amongst the riot & clutter of contempory Shanghai but to me, it seemed soo Tokyo, 07. However a few surprises lurked, Napery is of recycled tire rubber & glassware is handcrafted in Risdon prison. Inspired! I also found the bubble-like Zirgatt stools a delight to sit on, a masterful stroke of interior design not lost on me!

Add one point.
The chef, formerly christened Shane Bevan who changed his name to ‘WD.40’ after spending the last decade apprenticed throughout the world in kitchens that are on the experimental side of the ledger. His food shows flashes of this experience & Copenhagen’s loss could be Hastings gain, we’ll see.
I was extremely excited to see that instead of a menu, we were presented a carved leatherwood cube, Gustav handed us the key & we unlocked it to find a small handwritten map with directions. The menu once located, was projected onto a wall & written in code which we had to decipher to order. This was done by i-pad directly to the kitchen. Very TriBeCa New York & very ‘This Summer’. Nice.

Add one point.
We returned to the Zirgatt’s, supped our drinks & waited for the entrees to arrive. Soon they appeared. Set before us were two gleaming kalosh’s of polished, anodised tin. Gustav lifted both up simultaneously. I dipped my nose deep into the porcelain bowl filled to the brim with the most intensely perfumed corn husk-air. Bravo! The Missus cooed with delight at the ‘Phallus de Cochon en gelee’ & pronounced it, ‘Tasty’.
Gustav returned to clear & then decant the special reserve 27ml bottles of Biodynamic, natural, single vineyard, single bush, single bunch, single grape, Burgundy. Served in Micro-Climate Tasting Thimbles tm. Impressive.
Add one point.
The mains arrived & I have to say this is where the experience took a turn for the worse. The dish read: Pan seared Trevalla with roasted tomatoes & salsa verde. What arrived was a piece of Trevalla, golden on the outside & moist in the middle. Seasoned with salt & pepper. Draped over it was several roasted vine ripened tomatoes & a pounded sauce of fresh herbs, egg yolks, capers & anchovies. What a calamitous disappointment! Talk about under-delivering, why can’t these chefs just know when to add more & more & more to a dish?! My beloved also winced her way painfully through the pitfalls of; get this, ‘Roasted chicken’. Goodness, I never realised that this place was so out of touch with ‘Real food’. Disasterous!

Five points off.
From here we were just too traumatized to ponder desserts although they seemed to get back on track with: ‘Barnyard floor with Farm Essence’. Maybe next time?

Summary: The Lab at Hastings.

As far as country restaurants go they are trying hard to shake of this out-moded country food thingy with some modern touches, but never quite pull it off. Shame. Yes it’s a zillion dollar fit-out, yes it’s very tekked-up but it fails reach its zenith on this occasion. If they intend to challenge Ferran Adria for the title-they’ve a long way to go in my humble opinion.
Score 13/20

Maggie Beer-Senior Australian of the Year

Fantastic news that Maggie Beer has been named as Senior Australian of The Year!

I'm positive that Maggie would be uncomfortable with the notion that she was a eligible for 'senior status' though!

I am proud to have worked for her as head chef of The Pheasant Farm & my experience at the farm had such a profound effect me & tempered the way I approach things to this day.

Maggie opened my eyes to the enlightenment of slow cooking meat & of course pheasants & other game birds, for which I am ever grateful & I continue to pass on to my own crew the same gusto she showed me.

She was also a leader of the paddock to plate philosophy way before it became mainstream & familiar on TV. but understandably became the poster girl for regionalism & particularly Barossa localism. Her celebrated books & the enormous success of 'The Cook & the chef' TV Show on National ABC has truly cemented Maggie Beer as a cultural cooking icon up their with Margaret Fulton & Stephanie Alexander

Finally, I guess I've never said this before, but my experience at the Pheasant Farm was a watershed one for me which truly defined the kind of cook I wanted to be & continue to aspire to, one with Maggie's skill, gusto & chutzpah.

Thank you Maggie & my heartfelt congratulations go out to you. Col, Saskia & Ellie & their respective families must be so proud of your achievements & so should you!

Cheers Steve

Slow hands

I have a penchant for long slow cooked meat dishes. In fact I enjoy them any time of year, not just in the cooler months. Of course a rare grilled bit of meat on a sizzling wood barbeque is pretty bloody hard to beat but there’s something about the lingering richness of braising & wet roasting as you breathe in the aromas, which heightens expectation & enhances my anticipation like some sort of olfactory MSG.
Before I can get my mitts on it I must endure a cruel & agonizing interval as the meat should properly rest before it can be liberated from the desperate clutches of bone. This necessary step is crucial to keeping the meat as unctuous as possible & to rush it is to possibly ruin its gelatinous grain.
I love to gently tear it away from the bone, smoothly sliding my fingers down the arc of a rib & watch it peel away with a plop. Your hands become lubricated with the collagen & start to get sticky after a while & it clings creating a web between your fingers not unlike like Aqua Boy. Frequent dips into hot water are required to release the fat & gelatine to keep your hands unclogged.
Sage words once uttered ’If the bone comes away clean & white like a bleached bone in the sun, you know it’s cooked perfectly’. Never a truer word spoke in my opinion.
I relish slowly twisting a bone from the meat & see it emerge glistening & pure, whilst the flesh from which it came, seems to sigh in exquisite relief.
But when I really stop to analyze my appetite for braises I am left with a morbid consideration.
The way the meat kind of ‘gives up’ & relinquishes that suppleness that connective muscle & tissue have & morphs into a cadaverous ‘looseness’. It’s this thought that repulses me momentarily.
All of a sudden the slap of fresh meat, its crimson hue, the rawness & its bloodiness, though obviously dead, still appear more lively by comparison, becomes more attractive a proposition. I visualize a barbeque to break my train of thought.
But what is it about the lure of slow cooked meat? I was always told you could measure the skills of the cook by not how they grilled a steak but how they slow roasted a cut. I suspect this might still be true.
I have encountered many chefs & cooks over the years that are extremely versatile & highly skilled but are routinely at a loss when it comes to slow cooking. Whys is this the case? Is it a generational thing? Are we so preoccupied with the fastness of everyday life that slow cooking is seen as an anomaly, even though we are being told its trendy now?
I’ll leave you with those queries as I get downstairs & get my fingers into some well rested lamb-waiting time is over!

Recipes-to follow or not to follow

For as long as I can remember I have never followed a recipe to the letter. Sure, there have been times when I have had to but in many kitchens I’ve worked in, methods & techniques are demonstrated rather than handed to you on typed A4.
This is often because many chefs don’t keep proper records of dishes or recipes. Sometimes a dish that started out evolves into quite another thing & writing it down in a busy kitchen is usually the last priority. Throw into the mix the embarrassing but inescapable fact that many chefs are not only notoriously bad spellers but many simply cannot write to save their lives, yet alone save a recipe for prosperity. Before all you literary cheffy types start a furious two fingered jabbing response on the keyboard, there are always exceptions

I am also of an age that knew some old school chefs who would deliberately not write anything down for fear that some kitchen grommet might escape with their yellowing repertoire of a lifetime of recipes, gleaned from hardship, burns & much berating, not easily ‘given up’ to the first uppity arriviste that asked. I can sort of understand that logic to a degree however it does seem a little incongruous that the very people who are manning your cook stations surely need to be equipped with the information to translate the menu effectively?
Maybe not translating them effectively is the aim after all. You see this gives the snarly old chef the ammo to humiliate & cajole underlings who haven’t a hope of ever reproducing the dish to the chefs liking which bears a self full filling prophecy of bastardization that was the oxygen of many old school kitchens.
In my own case, many of the poor chefs I have worked with have had to fumble their way like a blind person through the recesses of my darkened register of dishes until they eventually become familiar with my modus operandi & begin to approximate the dish into what I had once done or hoped to achieve again.
As a journeyman chef I relished the occasional opportunity given to me to interpret an idea that the chef had pondered & felt chuffed that my skills & ability to channel were being recognized by the boss however I didn’t always nail every one of these challenges

What I find interesting is that in most instances you get two seasoned cooks, give them a recipe & you’ll usually get two different versions, sometimes so far removed from the other that it’s a wonder that they were working from the same card.
Conversely, you can show several people how to do something without any printed guide & be surprised at how close everyone comes to replicating the same dish.
Recipe books by chefs are scandalously reputed to need the most amount of a publisher’s time in order to ‘test’ the recipes for accuracy. The yardstick is usually the more famous the chef the longer it takes to proof read & recipe test.
The consistent outcomes of recipes in say The Woman’s Weekly series of cookbooks has earned them scores of devotees because as they will attest, the recipes work.
Whilst I admire the fastidiousness & thorough testing before these books go to print, I could not dream of anything worse than cooking the same recipe over & over in order to proclaim it doable.
I tend to look at recipes firstly through the ingredients then the technique. After I have gotten the gist the most important thing to me is the ‘feel’ of the dish. Once I get this I quite often discard the recipe entirely & re-interpret it my way. I just can’t help myself & I am compelled to put my mark on it somehow, like a culinary Daubist. The exceptions of course is when I do a homage to a fellow chef or cook by doing one of their dishes when re-interpreting just isn’t good form or respectful.

Recipes to me are kind of snapshots of the now, which become then, stems that have been trimmed & look green for a while but inevitably brown with age. On one hand they can be great instructors, illuminating & awakening in one the wonderment of a dish. But on the other hand they can be mean, rigid & unyielding disciplinarians, ever eager to lash out with the stick should one dare stray from their stern path.
Like rules, some recipes are made to be broken, added on or embellished. Recipes, like language, are by their frequency of use, always on the move & always evolving, never static The ones that don’t are destined to be regarded as historical & cultural markers & the only way to keep them breathing is to refer to & use them with more regularity. This is why I love looking at old cookbooks. It’s extraordinary how much inspiration one can get by the works of people whom had cooked long before, from aged & gnarled old books through to even last months food glossy.

My old blue shirt

Made from corduroy somewhere in Europe
No cultural cringe, just stating a fact.
It was already weathered; it had a history, this shirt.
I liked the way it hanged on the rack,
The way it conveyed its journey to this store
It ticked all the boxes, it spoke to me, there was a connection, we both felt it,
& it was Royal blue, the clincher.
OK I’m not a royalist but I do acknowledge & refer you to the classic colour wheel.
I bought it at Episode, the once cool 2nd hand store in Brunswick, maybe ten years ago
I always loved the bleached effect that many Aussie work shirts, be they King Gee or Hard Yakka acquire after much outdoor exertion in the elements.
I thought about the prior owner, what did they do?
Considering how well it looked, I surmised, not much.
I wore it proudly in the inner suburbs of Melbourne when I would butch-up for DIY tasks any time I needed to look like Scott Cam of ‘Backyard Blitz’.
It always felt like Pantomime though like any minute Jason Donovan might appear.
That was until we lived on a farm!
My shirt looked right at home, it fitted in & it wasn’t trying hard.
In fact it started to get out of its comfort zone, started to be called into account in fact.
The culture shock of not being a ‘protected species’ anymore began to take its toll.
First the cuff buttons jettisoned, then the pocket ripped & finally the collar started to fray with stress.
My shirt quickly aged with real years not dog years
Finally the day came when the inevitable truth was thrust upon me
‘Where are you going? The terse accusation stinging
‘Ahh, the shop?’ me confused
‘Not in that bloody rag your not, looked in the mirror today have you?’ from guess who.
Now this could be seen as a positive, for it implies a total lack of vanity on my behalf, however those who’ve witnessed my preening will disagree.
But sadly, my beloved shirt was drawing attention for all the wrong reasons.
In its twilight, my wearing of it was confined to within the boundaries of the farm, coming a distant second to even the preference of me working ‘shirtless’ & that is saying something.
Who would honestly prefer to regard a sweaty, impossibly hirsute, mildly obese 40 something man labouring in a paddock over one clothed within the confines of Royal Blue corduroy I ask you?
It is almost too fragile now to even wash, let alone iron. Too past it to be enshrined behind glass, like a Premiership footy jumper.
I hold it, smell it one last time & say goodbye
A part of me peels away & I grieve another chapter closing