The applause reaches a creshendo, Lou Reed walks on stage, says “Hello”, and starts playing the signature chords of one of his most famous songs, Sweet Jane. The crowd goes nuts. Suddenly, he stops.

“So I thought I would explain to you how you make a career out of three chords.”

Laughter.

“I know a lot of you have been wondering that, and you younger bands, pay attention to this one: So you thought it was three, it’s really four. Watch.”

He plays the famous chord sequence. Bah, bahbah bah bah.

“Three. But what’s really happening…”

Bah bahbah bah bah BAH BAH. He plays the familiar chords again, just once; this time, highlighting the extra chord at the end – the one you normally don’t notice or remember – that joins them together when the whole thing is repeated. The crowd goes nuts.

“As in most things in life, it’s that little hop at the end…”
—
I was reminded of this the other night as I was having dinner at Balthazar, one of Perth’s finer eateries. That little hop at the end that separates goodness from greatness, that little extra bit that makes a place unique and special and different. And memorable.

That little hop might be the way the signature dish is presented, or the way the service is invisible. It could be the attention to detail, or the way the owners have decided to focus on only one thing, but do it exceptionally well.

I started the meal with some oysters with a pleasant rosewater and cucumber jelly sauce. The sauce itself was very good, but ended up overpowering the sea taste of the oysters. It might have been better matched with a middle-Eastern inspired lamb dish.

Balthazar is known for its wine list and its aged steak. Guess what I had for a main? The steak was served on a bed of aubergine mush (I’m sure it was described better in the menu, but it was just tasty mush) with some celeriac on top. The meat was cooked perfectly, as rare as I like it. Nicely aged too, as far as I could tell.

I had a couple of glasses of some cool climate cabernet blend from Denmark WA. It was properly poured for a by-the-glass: that is, at the table (I noticed other diners also got their beers poured at the table. Nice). The wine wasn’t bad, but it didn’t make me want to stand on the table and hoot like an owl. The by-the-glass selection was well-chosen, with a couple of local wines, some European ones, and the obligatory Barossa Shiraz.

I had some cheese after the meal – a very nice hard milky number, rolled in rosemary. Great if you like rosemary, which I do. It was matched with a sweet Riesling from Tasmania that I’d not heard of before. The waitress seemed quite knowledgeable about the wine selection.

Before I wrap this up, I want to have a whinge: A restaurant is not a place to show the world what cool taste in music you have. If you want to do that, become a DJ, get a radio show, or blog about it. Do not open a fine dining establishment and play your music so loudly that people need to shout to be heard. Ambient music. Ambient music that blends into the surroundings, like the chairs.
—
I’ve been in Perth for the better part of a week so far, and I’m still trying to figure it out. People have said it’s like a big country town that kept growing, a bit like Brisbane. I’m not so sure. There’s something else going on here, but I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on exactly what it is.

The city seems bitsy, as if it’s still discovering what exactly it is, and still learning how to be a city. There are bursts of unplanned development, and things seem to be layered on top of each other for no apparent reason. Nothing really seems to connect with each other, and things are put in places mostly because that’s where there’s enough room for them. There doesn’t seem to be a plan, or even a style; things don’t quite seem to hang together properly.

Balthazar is a microcosm of this feeling I get from Perth in general. It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, so it ends up trying to be everything. A bit like a first film from a new director, it’s kind of all over the place. The staff shout orders at each other from across the floor, but at the same time, they try to be invisible to the diners. The room has an industrial ambience when looking up at the ceiling; the floor is right out of an Italian delicatessen or market, and the middle seems all about generic café or Ikea. It’s “modern anonymous”. No style – or perhaps too many different styles.

It wants to be too much, I think. It’s trying to be three or four different restaurants. While it’s managing to pull this off quite well, in order to be great, it needs to have more focus; it needs to figure out what sets it apart from other restaurants. Am I being too picky? Maybe. I was told this is a great place, so I went in expecting greatness. Turns out it was only very good.

Balthazar, good as it was, did not hop at the end.

We bought The Age God Food Guide today, and used it to find a new restaurant to try. We ended up at Pizza Vini Spuntini, a medium-sized place just off Glenhuntly Road in Elsternwick. Turns out it’s just one door away from Arabesque, a perennial favourite of ours.

The menu featured a good selection of Italian fare, with an emphasis on Sicilian regional choices. Everything about the experience, from the room to the service to the food, was simple, satisfying and unpretentious. I had a grilled (actually seared, but I’m being picky) yellowfin tuna on a bed of greens in a simple balsamic reduction. Mica had what was possibly the lightest risotto dish ever, and Lola had calamari, presented with three dipping sauces (they matched the colours of the Italian flag, a detail not missed by us discriminating connoisseurs).

Dessert is always a tricky thing, because in too many restaurants it ends up being an afterthought. I use dessert as a bit of a test of the attention to detail in an establishment. The half-dozen items in the dessert section were varied and well thought-out. Lola ordered the lemon raspberry crêpes and proclaimed them the best crêpes she’d ever eaten. That’s high praise. I ordered the custard and rhubarb millefoglie, which is a kind of multi-layed puff pastry sandwich, filled with (in this case) custard and rhubarb compote. Holy crap. However good the tuna was, this was even better. A truly magnificent dessert.

The service was friendly and efficient, and the food arrived promptly. This isn’t a place to linger over a romantic candlelit dinner – it’s designed to be a trusty local restaurant, a place where you can take your out-of-town rellos for an impressive meal without breaking the bank. The owners started off with a by-the-slice pizza place in Chadstone, but don’t let that turn you off this excellent local restaurant. The Good Food Guide gave it 12.5/20, and that’s a fair grade, although their reviewer complained about an “overpriced” swordfish dish. Because I didn’t have the swordfish, I’d rate them more highly; a 14 or so. In short, if you live nearby, it’s worth a visit (or two or three), but it’s not worth crossing the Yarra. I’ll be back.

That robot we sent to Mars is sending back some very interesting information, primarily on the agricultural fronts. We all know about the shortage of good soil in which to grow asparagus on Earth – Victoria’s recent good fortune is due to the favourable soil conditions in which to grow this rare and highly sought-after vegetable. All that will be coming to an end soon, as the Mars Robot has discovered soil on Mars that is capable of supporting asparagus cultivation and harvesting.

Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, explained that “it is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us.”

No more asparagus shortages on Earth! All hail the Mars Robot, discoverer of an entire planet suitable for growing asparagus! The “red planet” shall henceforth be known as the “green planet”. Onwards!

[Edit: Image courtesy of Michael Wood, esq.]

Excellent beer selection. Lots of interesting beers on tap – some not available anywhere else. Even more beer available in stubbies. The wine selection was very small, but contained a well thought-out variety, all of suitable quality. The food was well above average; with my shredded duck being excellent. Prices were very fair.

The service, however, was lousy. If an establishment is unable to provide adequate table service, then just don’t do it. Don’t pretend that you’re able to, and do it poorly. We were ignored, insulted and ignored again. I might come back for a beer, but I certainly won’t be eating there again.

The discrepancy between the quality of food and service was so great that we decided not to tip the waitstaff, but rather hand the tip directly to the kitchen, along with a personal thanks for a good meal.

Moo Brew, from the Moorilla Estate winery, produces a very decent range of beers. Their pale ale is really quite nice – a bit more bitter than many pales, but refreshing nevertheless. I’m looking forward to the warmer months when pale ales really come into their own as good refreshing backyard beers.

Their beers are good, right… but their beer mats are bloody brilliant:

It’s chilly in Melbourne today. 10.9c at 2:30, by the official weather people indicator. Being that it’s Friday, and I have lunch out on Fridays, I walked down the Windsor end of Chapel Street in search of some food. Specifically, I was looking for soup. Soup soup soup. I’ve got a cold, and it’s a cold day – nothing better than a nice cream-of-something-nice soup to soothe the throat and nourish the body. With the amount of cafés per capita approaching 1:1, it shouldn’t be that hard to find some soup.

Stop number one: IGA. While IGA might seem like a strange first stop, I was actually hoping they would have my new favourite instant food: Pitango Soup. They make soup in little plastic baggie things and sell them in supermarkets. They are all organic, they have no weird numbered ingredients, and they taste fantastic. I happened to meet the owner/chef guy at the Melbn Good Food And Wine Show a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m a customer for life (or at least during the winters of my life). Fantastic soup. Anyway, IGA didn’t have any, so I went back to the street again.

Stop number two: Teegee’s. I don’t like the place much – something about it just seems to precious and not authentic enough. Anyway, I figured they’d probably have soup, and I was kinda right. They had a container for soup, but it was empty. “Sorry!” said the cool chick behind the counter. I smiled and left.

Stop number three: Buddha’s Belly (otherwise known as “Ten owners in the past two years”). The service was great, one of the identical boys behind the counter asked me what I’d like. I said “Soup”. He said, somewhat apologetically, “It’s bacon and mushroom”. I thanked him and left. Unless it’s a Japanese restaurant, or I’m paying $50 for the bowl, mushroom soup uses those awful Bolshevik mushrooms that were grown in underground Soviet missile launching sites, and are still being sold as surplus around the world. Yuuuuch.

Stop number four: Café Orange. Generally good food, rushed service and cute waitresses. And, in this case, inedible soup. It was bacon and brussel sprout. Ummmmmmmmmmm no. Would anyone eat that soup? Is this a contest to make inedible dishes? I asked a little while ago if there’s a Melbn Bad Food And Wine Show, and it looks like there would be. Bacon and brussel sprout soup would have a booth all to its own, right next to Red Rooster.

Stop number five: After walking up and down the street, I went into the place I was consciously avoiding: Café Zen. They changed owners a few weeks back, and I was a fairly regular customer before the change. A week after the change in ownership, I went in for lunch, ordering a caesar salad. It was unbelievably fishy. I know that one of the ingredients is anchovy, but it needs to be used as a flavour enhancer, to bring out the tastes of the other ingredients, not dominate. If I wanted anchovy salad, I would have ordered anchovy salad. Anyway. I was planning to give them a month or so to sort things out and get going. But their footpath signboard said “Minestrone Soup $7”. Hello, that’s for me. So I went in, grabbed a copy of The Age and asked the cute French waitress for soup and a glass of red something. I read the newspaper. Presently, it dawned on me that I was waiting quite a while for my soup. If it’s on special, shouldn’t there be a pot bubbling away on the stove, ready to be spooned into bowls for waiting customers? Apparently not. It took twenty minutes, and a reminder from the customer (me) to get my soup. When it arrived, it was too hot, the contents were too crunchy, and I’ll bet it was made to order – which, unless the food is soup, is generally a good thing. Because it was made so quickly, it was very thin and there was little or no taste. I like Slow Food as much as the next snob, but waiting 20 minutes for so-so soup? That’s not on. It’s Minestrone! It should have been made weeks ago, and be left to slowly bubble on the far back burner of the stove before being served to customers. Strike two, Zen.

This one’s by Mica. The silly title stands for They Go Really Well Together. Here we go. This is a recipe for banana with parsley and sesame nougatine stuff, which looks like this:

Banana Ice Cream

1 banana
6 scoops of vanilla ice cream
1 vanilla bean
1 tablespoon of maple syrup

Mash banana, mix with de-seeded vanilla bean and maple syrup. Add ice cream, mix quickly and refreeze.

Sesame parsley nougatine

200g sesame seeds
1 bunch of parsley
250g castor sugar

Dry-fry seeds and parsley leaves together in a frying pan. Set aside.
Dry-caramalise sugar in a heavy-based saucepan. Turn off heat.
Add sesame and parsley. Mix and pour thinly onto grease-proof paper.
Break into pieces when cool.
Put 1/4 of the mixture into a food processor, process until it becomes crumbs.

Fried banana

Bananas, 1/2 per person
Maple syrup, 2 tbsp per person

Chop banana, fry in maple syrup, serve around ice cream and nougatine as per picture.

Aside from a couple of minor interruptions from my brilliant programmers and lovely drinking partners co-managerial staff, it’s been a work-free five days. First time in quite a while. Mica had the same time off, so we basically hung out together, not doing much at all. Aside from minor car dramas (it wouldn’t start, so we had to cancel our trip down to the Mornington Peninsula for lunch at a little café thing), really shitty weather, and car dramas (after getting it fixed, it wouldn’t start again) and and and… well, okay, it wasn’t exactly a great vacation, but at least I didn’t have to go to the office.

Because there was no car around, and because there was a fantastic foodie festival on, I was able to put my feet up and get some tasty wine (and beer, see previous entry) past my taste buds. I spent $60 on one bottle of one of the best wines I’ve had in a long time, Peter Althaus’s Domaine A Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 from Tasmania’s Coal River valley. Yummy. That’s going into the cellar for a while (thanks heaps to Diz, who introduced me to that excellent drop while I was living in Hobart). I also got to taste a pint of Mountain Goat stunning (and award-winning) Surefoot Stout. I’m generally a fan of their beers (their signature Hightail Ale kicks real butt), and Surefoot Stout does not disappoint.

All that alcohol-talk was a preamble to this link to an article in Modern Drunkard Magazine – they’re talking about benders there. Funny article. This holiday wasn’t about drinking a lot – it was about drinking well, and relaxing that silly rule about not having any before noon. Because, as you know gentle reader, it’s always afternoon somewhere.

The good folks at Melbn’s own Mountain Goat Brewery have won a whole bunch of awards at the Australian International Beer Awards (why didn’t anyone tell me about this before it happened??). Their Surefoot Stout won Best In Class, Champion Stout, and the Premier’s Trophy for Best Victorian Beer and Flagrant Use Of Title Case In An Award Name. Congratulations! I’ll be sure to raise a glass or four in your honour.

HIV’s a tricky little bugger. Its size can vary up to 3x, so it’s deceptively difficult to figure out what it looks like. Knowing what it looks like can be really useful, so we can hang its photo up in post offices and banks: WANTED posters and whatnot. So a bunch of scientists from the UK and Germany had a go at making a 3-D model of the thing.

Killer sushi. Looks like some kind of weird new fusion food sushi, perhaps a chunk of tandoori chicken in the middle, surrounded by an assortment of fish egg, and wrapped in blueberry-egg crêpe. No wonder it’s bad for you.

(Original article from the BBC).