garagistes.com.au

Had a totally unique lunch today.
It was delicious, impressive and inimitable.
Service was a benchmark, not only for Tassie.
Wines-well my wife said her glass was one of the best she'd ever had.
We were both left very enthralled and inspired.
If only I was young again, I'd want to work here.
Make the effort to go, see whats possible,
Challenge yourself and revel in the virtuosity because
it's a rare thing these days and should be celebrated.

The yardstick has been raised considerably.

Snippets-us, those and them

I like to go to a new place as soon as it’s opened to get a feel for it. I find it very exciting actually. I love these openings, the build up and the expectation.

I think it’s important to let them settle in, you know, let the dust settle and they find their rhythm. Going in too early would just be inviting trouble

I always wait for a few weeks before showing up. Let the wannabes get in first because that all they’re about really, no substance at all, just getting there first

Look I don’t mind them, in a way its free advertising, that is if they like it mind you!

The difference is I have to pass my work over to a subbie then the editor before I get anything out there, they don’t, and it’s just blurted out, warts and all.

To be honest, I like the interaction. I feel I’ve really connected to my tribe, we all speak the same language and that language is publicity

You would not believe how much free shit I get offered! I mean is it so bad to accept things now and again? I do all of this in my own time and I guess I’ve learned that is worth something.

They shit me, pure and simple. Do they realise that they could do potential damage to my business? I fucking hate them.

Once a whole busload of them descended on our place, we send the meals out and lo and behold all of them are packing these phallic cameras and jabbing them at the plates-it was almost obscene

You think paid media is competitive and bitchy? Anyone that says that lot are a family are deluded, they’re just as snarky, insecure and egomaniacal as us, if not worse

My plan is to do this for a while, get noticed, then move onto one of the dailies, then its’ hopefully landing something at a glossy. It’s really just a stepping stone.

My life is pretty perfect really. I just want to share it with everyone. Is that so wrong?

Reviewing places is not for me, shit I’m in the industry myself so I can hardly slag anyone else off can I?

Shano and Mikey got this idea right. They thought we all just go around to all these pubs and try their schnitters, for a laugh and review them. Well fuck me if we don’t get offered a bloody book deal!

We have a duty to keep the public informed. After all we are the ones who are in the best position to judge what’s hip, up to the minute and happening. You couldn’t seriously suggest that they are capable of doing this are you? Good grief!

Sometimes I like to comment anonymously even though I publicly demand that people say who they are. Trouble is, you can’t say shit these days without offending someone

Chefs need to be bought down a peg or two. They aren’t gods. They frequently make mistakes and we, the public are still expected to pay. Not me, I say it how it is. I’m fearless.

If I had a buck for every try-hard that has sidled up to me cadging for freebies over the last year or two, I could retire.

To me it’s all about my brand. I have a Facebook page and I tweet also. It enables me to get my message out to my target clients. How many times they hit me shows that they love me!

Well I suppose I’m a bit introverted really, I’m not really interested in much online discussion, I just put my random thoughts out there-if someone reads them, fine if not, I’m OK with that too. I also have a stat counter.

A few of them are starting to behave like rock stars, I mean palease! How self important, just because they have a bit of an audience for crissakes!

I’ve spent my life enjoying these places and have travelled the world doing so. I relish informing the hoi polloi about the many experiences I know many of them will never be able to afford

I’m so not part of the ‘Look what I cooked last night’ and the ‘my DSLR is bigger than yours’ brigades. I take a more cerebral approach and quite frankly, that’s not for everyone. Put simply, I don’t want to engage with shallow morons. If that upsets a sub-class of people-too bad!

It makes me laugh that every time one of them gets a mention in the papers they go into a froth about it yet they all bang on about old media this and dead tree media that.

You know what I think? I think these sad arses need to get a life and leave us to make our living in peace. We don’t need them-but it seems they need us.

Pressed for time-cooking with integrity

We are all pressed for time these days. Why? Well thats up for discussion on another day so since I’m always pressed for time, I’ll make it brief
Firstly, as if to slow things up, I will say, if it’s worth anything to you at all, you’ll always make time for it.
Your friends, family, hobbies, interests, exercise regimen, sexual orientation, clothing choices and food preferences are all acutely aware of your priorities-they don’t need any more convincing.
However despite our self-imposed lifestyle choices, we still can find ourselves short on time. The chef and the tight-arse in me often do an internal battle when presented with the plethora of ready-made sauces, meal alternatives and replacements that are on offer for those of us that find ourselves on the outer of some sort of 50’s family stereotypical meal time-frame, replete with its gender typecasts. For instance I hate the whole notion of ‘Chicken ready-sauces’, ‘Ready-made’ pizza bases or even canned soups. I rationalize that these are the most basic of dishes in our collective repertoire and we all should be able to whip ‘em up ad hoc.
Throw into the mix the fact that one might be an industry professional and the whole issue of expectation gets ratcheted up a notch or two.
I have learned though, the humbling lesson of my children gnawing on our corduroyed couch, my wife fainting and my own awareness that the clock has struck nine before the chook has been roasted, the pizza dough has proved or the chick peas have been cooked for soup.
Meal times are a major hurdle for those of us who don’t want to compromise our food choices just because we pushed for time. As a result our family has a few very quick meal options that tick all the prerequisite options.

Meal #1: 30 mins

A basic tomato sugo; A sofrito of 2 onions chopped, 4 cloves garlic and teaspoon dried oregano. A touch of sugar, three cans of chopped Italian tomatoes and one can of water. Reduce and add:
1 can of cooked borlotti beans
+ one packet of pasta 500g
or a bunch spinach
or 500g baby rocket
or a 300g can of Tuna in oil
or some chopped Italian or other variety of sausage
some anchovies, capers and olives
you get the picture.

Meal #2: 30 mins

Take a corn or flour Tortilla and add:
First, warm the tortilla under the grill to make it more malleable. Then add your fillings before wrapping up and serving or re-grilling for extra crunch.
Some basic tomato sauce with some cooked kidney beans, jalapeno chillies and some fresh coriander
Or some meatballs, lettuce and cheese
Or some felafel, houmous and pickled turnip
Shredded chicken, Viet carrot salad and some nuoc nam

Meal # 3: 30 mins

Cook 3 cups of long grain rice in the microwave for 17 mins
Meanwhile, sauté some bacon pieces, onion shredded cabbage and garlic
Add some frozen peas, some capsicum and continue to sauté.
Now add some Malay curry powder, sweet soy sauce and some oyster sauce.
Throw in a bunch of chopped coriander and spring onions. Garnish with some fried shallots and serve

We all do what we have to when the mealtime deadline approaches, but you don’t have to compromise-all that much!

A Primer for budding restaurateurs

Think you’re a restaurateur? Take this quick quiz.

Six friends drop by for dinner unexpectedly, do you:

1. Get flustered and say they should have called earlier
2. Tell them it’s leftover nachos and baked beans or nothing
3. Give a warm welcome, pour them drinks and retire to the kitchen to breezily assemble dinner

You realise at the last moment, an extra person has arrived but the table is set for the exact number, would you:

1. Glare at them, then make them wait at the breakfast bar whilst you set them a place
2. Get out the crap cutlery, kids mugs and plastic plates with a shrug
3. Get your guests to shuffle along to make room and make them welcome

Your partner who usually does the cooking has badly cut their finger and won’t be able to manage just as the party arrives, should you:

1. Just blurt out as they arrive ’it’s a total disaster, the whole nights ruined’ before self-medicating with NZ Sauv blanc
2. Surprise your guests with a bucket of KFC’s finest with all the trimmings
3. Get your guests a nibble with their drinks and consider your options, the show must go on

At the table, one guest gets very drunk and starts acting boorishly toward another guest, do you:

1. Charge their glass and egg them on to encourage more riotous behaviour for your entertainment
2. Try to ‘catch-up’ with them by drinking more grog, that way their behaviour won’t seem so bad
3. Quietly have a word in their ear and suggest non-alcoholic alternatives

As the meals, lamb pies, are being served, one guest tells you that they are vegans, should you:

1. Throw your hands up in the air and huff and puff loudly at the inconvenience of it all
2. Cheerfully offer to scrape the innards out of the pie and stuff it with nuts
3. Quickly assemble that stand-by vegan dish you had ‘just in case’

You’ve earned an enviable reputation as a host of considerable talent and skills, should you:

1. Announce to all with a glass brimming with Chardy in one hand that you intend to open the best restaurant in the country
2. Open up a place so your friends can hang out in for a free feed
3. Accept the compliments graciously and continue to strive for your guests pleasure

Several of your friends have offered to help you for your next dinner party, do you?

1. Get your dowdiest friend to help so you’ll look positively sparkling
2. Accept the offer of help from your friend with Tourette’s, just for a laugh
3. Choose the person whom you believe is the best person for the job

What do you think Chef de Partie means

1. A chef who is part-time obviously!
2. A chef that likes to Partay!
3. A chef who is in charge of a section in a traditional kitchen

If a guest at your table arrives wearing the Hijab, do you:

1. Tell them firmly that this is our country an our rules and we need to see your face-no offence
2. Quickly get out your red chequered tea towel and do impressions of Yasser Arafat, out of respect
3. Don’t make any issue of it at all

What would an appropriate dish be at your table?

1. Wrack-Off lamb
2. Nasty Goreng
3. Anything fresh and seasonal

Which of these people do you see at mentors?

1. Gordon Ramsay
2. The Swedish chef from the Muppets
3. Skye Gignell

A tour bus of elderly people arrives, do you?

1. Shout loudly to the kitchen, ‘Make sure the soup urn is full!’
2. Address them all in a slow speaking voice, as if to children
3. Respect them like any other customer

When a food critic drops in, would you:

1. Fawn all over them, after all, they are VVIP’s
2. Use reverse psychology and ignore them all night, that’ll get ‘em thinking
3. Respect them like any other customer

If a customer tells you their wine is corked, do you say?

1. ‘Well if you bought the good stuff, this wouldn’t have happened’
2. ‘Of course it’s corked, they don’t make it with Stelvin closures!’
3. Replace the bottle without fuss.

A health inspector drops by, do you?

1. See it as an affront to you personally and bar them entrance
2. Madly scramble to wrap all of the food in the fridges
3. Let them go about their business

A delivery doesn’t arrive on time from a supplier, do you?

1. Scream abuse down the phone to them
2. Just tell the customers that there’s no food today
3. Arrange an alternative quickly

You chance upon a lovely old building located on the fringes of an industrial estate, do you?

1. Have your architect draw up plans for an opulent French styled restaurant reminiscent of the Belle Epoque era
2. Narrow it down to your two options: a cupcake store or a Mongolian Barbeque
3. Keep walking

The accounts dept. of a supplier calls about an outstanding invoice, do you:

1. Become enraged that they dare question your integrity
2. Pretend you cannot understand English
3. Pay the account

At an awards ceremony, your nearest rival wins an award. Do you:

1. Heckle from the table and shout your displeasure in a drunken rant
2. Get hammered on the free grog
3. Graciously congratulate them and aim to emulate their success

Back at home, a learned friend tells you what they really thought of the meal, since you asked. Do you:

1. Thrust your Cordon Bleu certificate into their face and shout ’They thought it was OK!’
2. Shrug and say, ’But I’m not cooking for you, I’m cooking for those arseholes out there’ pointing to the street
3. Accept the criticisms, you asked for them and they were delivered honestly and respectfully

Channeling your inner restaurateur

Do you ever wonder what kind of person is attracted to opening a restaurant?
I mean, to borrow a phrase: ‘How hard can it be?’
When you consider that in today’s market conventional wisdom understands that the operating profit is between 3% and 5%, well that’s not much in any one’s language.

So why do people do it?

From a chef’s perspective and from mine in particular, the moment I donned my oversized and starchy whites on my first day of trade school at East Brighton Tech, I wanted to have my own place.
Back then I coveted running a top shelf restaurant but over the years I have hammered my vision of ownership over years of industry experience into the contours of a country café. This was mainly due in part to my longing to live and work rurally and the inspirational operators whom I was lucky enough to be guided and influenced by. Underpinning this I was also becoming aware of the seemingly unsustainable nature of high end dining.

I guess you must also have it in your blood.

Running a restaurant or café is not a job. In fact I would say if you walked into a place where the operators treated it as such, you would notice instantly. I like to think people will patronize a business that is run by someone who is motivated by more than just money or doing the minimum required to succeed than one that just opens its doors and goes through the motions.

About 15 years ago I was intrigued by the news that several Michelin starred restaurants in France had opened smaller eateries which offered the same attention to detail for food and service but far less stuffy and more casual.
These places became very busy and green-lighted the notion for many other chefs and restaurateurs around the globe to do the same.
The huge amount of money being poured into openings and operation of these top end places was quickly making it impossible for those with more modest funds to have a go.
Today we have the situation where highly skilled chefs that have honed their craft at the most lauded restaurants are starting to open their own smaller places from the inner suburbs to country towns and rurally.
Another driver of this migration is that large operations require large staff numbers, this, I believe is a major factor in chefs and aspiring restaurateurs wanting to downsize their stresses. Throw into the mix the fact that many of these people are sick of making money for someone else and you have a ripe ferment for change.

Many of the new cafés and restaurants are operated by a savvy demographic who are very tuned into a zeitgeist which is very modern. Many eschew conventional baby boomer ideals and associated business models. This has left many old timers scratching their heads in disbelief as they wonder about the rampant success of some operations, which, on paper, should never have worked.
Two cafés that were at the vanguard of this tipping point was Ray in Brunswick, run by coffee impresario Mark Dundon and perhaps Balaklava’s Wall two eighty. When we moved to the Brunswick area in 95 the area was a sleeping giant without any hip cafes. These days virtually every corner, back street and precinct bristles with modish cafes-who’d of thought?

On a recent trip to Melbourne I was astounded by the volume of vibrant, dynamic and cool cafes that have sprouted up in the most unlikely of places. I was also concerned by how much competition there now was.
It led me to question: How do they make money? How many will survive?
Has Melbourne reached critical mass? How many new places do we need?

The books of national Restaurant business brokers are bulging with businesses for lease or sale. Many people get into this game without fully understanding or resolving some fundamental issues. Like: just because it’s a nice building, doesn’t mean it’ll make a good café or it’s been a good business for years so it’ll be OK when we take over. I know of a country town which has seen five different operators in the same building over a three year period.

Mind you, there are experienced operators who buy a business, squeeze all the juice out of it for a few years, then, on-sell it at a premium. They have about as much real interest in great food and service as the people just doing it for a job. They create nothing, inject nothing and pass on nothing. They are empire builders.

My old home town of Melbourne its fair share of empire builders and to a person, they are generally not the most fondly thought of, nor respected people in the business. The empire builder has a knack for gathering creative talent but is prone to discarding them when they realise the high cost of employing said creative talent could be replicated by hiring a more malleable and junior version of it for half the cost. Very few people don’t end up getting burnt by the empire builders especially staff, suppliers and ultimately customers

Then there are the remarkable operators who come from a rich cultural background to whom food plays an intrinsic role in their lives. Its ironic then that they decide to run places that serve food of the lowest common denominator because it simply makes more money that doing food their time honoured way. How do they put their love on food ‘on-hold’ whilst serving shite is beyond my understanding?

The old adage of location location location may not have the same ring of truth these days as many out of the way places thrive for being different however it is important to remember your offering must reflect what the local market will be prepared to accept and enjoy. It’s not a matter of snobbery to suggest that a Siphon coffee bar wouldn’t work in Chigwell but it does test this theory when a sushi bar opens in Geeveston!

How hard can it be?

Free range pork-the facts minus the emotion

ABC's Landline free range pork program

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2010/s3059325.htm

Whats in a name?

Changing the names of foods that we know is a tricky business but it can be done.

I’m referring to way that the powers that be try to dissuade the populace from referring to a particular item by their conventionally accepted name.
We all know it failed spectacularly in the case of Vegemites’ ‘i-snack2.0’ which then morphed into the less problematic but still weird ‘Cheeseybite’.
While I’m on it, did anyone notice that the moisturizing cream ‘Oil of Ulan’ changed into ‘Oil of Olay’ and now is simply known as ‘Olay?’ Did they finally realize that Ulan is a Turkish swear word? Well that didn’t stop the Mitsubishi car company from re branding the Pajero when they found out it meant ‘Wanker’ in Spanish.

Why do they attempt to do this? Well the reasons are varied.

In the case of the US backlash against the French Governments decision not to get involved with the ‘Coalition of the willing’, in the so called ‘War on terror’, bore new pressures on their relationship.

All of a sudden, anything remotely French was derided as being inferior or wimpy. Democratic Presidential candidate, John Kerry found himself being described as ‘Looking French’ by the right wing press due to his criticisms of the Bush Administration’s policies on Iraq; this is especially ironic because apparently his lineage goes back to Vienna?
However the thing that I thought was interesting was the notion of re-naming French Fries as Freedom fries by a group of Conservative Republicans. This was taken up by a few hardcore restaurant chains and some still doggedly persist.

This situation is not new to America nor is it to the rest of the world.

During World War I, anti-German sentiment prompted Americans to rename German foods, Sauerkraut was renamed ‘Liberty cabbage’ Dachshunds renamed ‘Liberty pups’ and Hamburgers renamed ‘Liberty steaks’ or ‘Salisbury steaks’ which are sometimes still used today.

In Australia during WWI, jam-filled buns previously known as Berliners were renamed Kitchener buns, and a sausage product previously known as ‘Fritz’ was renamed ‘Devon’ but the word ‘Belgium’ is also used today in some states.

Whilst in the United Kingdom during WWI, the German Shepherd was renamed the ‘Alsatian,’ and German biscuits were renamed Empire biscuits due to strong anti-German sentiment. Perhaps most famously, in 1917 the name of the royal family was changed by George V to Windsor from the German surname Wettin and house name Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Prior to this, London had a large number of German bakeries operating and the ‘Coburg loaf’ became the ‘Cobb loaf’

What’s next? Will we change ‘Persian fairy floss’ to ‘Passion fairy floss’, ‘Lebanese bread’ will become ‘Appease bread’ and Turkish coffee will end up as ‘Dervish coffee?’

Staff wanted ASAP

Hi Readers,

The Red Velvet Lounge is very busy and I have recently lost two fabulous front of house staff members to other commitments so I have various shifts available for an experienced waitperson.
If this sounds like you or you might know of a person who might be similarly qualified, please email me at theredvelvetlounge@bigpond.com or call me on 0428 629 555.
Cheers Steve