Stephen Downes

Brahimi remembers

Apr 22nd, 2008 by stephend | Comments Off

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Guillaume Brahimi, the Sydney chef whose new bistro has recently opened at Melbourne’s Crown casino and entertainment complex, came out to talk to guests when I dined there last week for an upcoming Herald Sun review.

I’d never met him, and he turned out to be large and gentle, like many Gallic cooks. He told me I was the first Australian to review his food — at Pond in Sydney perhaps a dozen years ago. I wrote a critique of his first Australian outing for my weekly column in The Australian Financial Review.

I seemed to recall, I said, that Pond was pretty good. Yes, he said. He remembered everything I ate — as many chefs do, even years later — but I didn’t ask him to recite the inventory.

He sent his mother the clipping, he said, which she has kept. It was yellowing now, he added.

Guillaume took Australian citizenship in 1994.

Filled under: Blogs, cooking

Blues with bleu

Apr 22nd, 2008 by stephend | 2

Perhaps south Gippsland is another country. I swung through the region with la Dominique at the weekend, and discovered that its chefs have enormous problems cooking beef ‘bleu’.

Lunched on Saturday at the estimable Grand Ridge Brewery in the Main Street of the tiny village of Mirboo North, high up in the Strzelecki Ranges. We began with a tasting tray — hardwood — of the six standard beers Grand Ridge makes. I liked them all, the ‘Hatlifter’ stout the least and the Brewers Pilsner cold-fermented with Czech hops the most. They’re rich, long-tasting, complex and well-rounded beers, and as far as I could tell, technically perfect.

But didn’t I cause a stir when I asked the waitress to cook the brewery’s own hamburger ‘bleu’. A young cook emerged from the kitchen to apologise in the nicest way that regulations prevented his doing it. If he were making me a steak tartare from scratch it would be more than bleu, of course. But because he’d minced the beef already, in prep, he had to cook it through.

Actually, the result was terrific. Heaps of bacon, a fried egg, salad, fine chips, sundry other items, and a ground-beef pillow of perhaps 250g of excellent steak — done bleu. Dominique had a two-rib rack of poached veal served hot and draped with tuna mayonnaise. Melting potato cylinders and a rocket salad accompanied.

That night at the Crazy Dog Cafe in the tiny town of Yarram, Dominique asked for her rib eye to be done bleu. The waitress seemed appalled, especially since only seconds before a guest at another table had asked for his steak to be served ‘burned’. Regulations prevented their cooking steak bleu, she said. They just couldn’t do it. I said that the whole of the state of Victoria cooked steak bleu, and I was surprised that south Gippsland couldn’t. Just do it, we said, as little as possible. (Knock off the horns, wipe its bum, etc … my usual joke.) It arrived bleu and was, again, excellent meat. (The Crazy Dog’s problems are more in its service and the well-meaning but fairly farm-kitchen vegies it serves.)

The following morning in Yarram I was served the best bacon and eggs I can recall. Jenny Gierens at the Federal Coffee Palace bakes amazing cakes and pies, but what I ate was a huge amount of brilliantly cooked, rich and tasty rashers, two flavour-filled eggs with yolks of an intensely luminous orange-yellow colour on two slices of what seemed to be fat-drenched French toast. Don’t dismiss eating like this. With fruit for lunch, theire is no need to eat before 7pm or later.

Filled under: Blogs, Out of town, cooking

Paris on a plate (Murdoch Books 2006)

Apr 21st, 2008 by stephend | 0

A ‘gastronomic’ diary of a dozen days in the French capital, Paris on a plate leans heavily on nostalgia for – and memories of – my early years living in Paris, where I worked, fell in love and got married. But underpinning these memories and observations of the street life of a great city is my meal-by-meal inventory of that fortnight. I eat at three great restaurants, several famous ones and a few that are downright ordinary. The book also outlines how the restaurant business has changed in France and the affect of big money on France’s alleged leadership in things culinary.

Filled under: books

To Die For: 100 food experiences to have before you die (Pier 9 2005)

Apr 21st, 2008 by stephend | 1

The sub-titles says it all. This book was such terrific fun to write. And so easy. I simply dredged my memory for the best things I’ve ever eaten. In a blitz of about three-quarters of an hour, I jotted down the first 70 or so. I break up the experiences into those that you must go to specific restaurants to enjoy, those that can be easily cooked at home, dishes that require a little more effort, and ‘Perfect 10s’ or ingredients – such as a home-grown tomato – that scream their transcendence. The book is packed with anecdotes about how I came to discover these essential gustatory experiences. There is even a story about the erotic potential of a ripe mango.

Filled under: books

Adagio for a simple clarinet (Lothian Books 2005)

Apr 21st, 2008 by stephend | 0

This is another book I very much enjoyed writing. It allowed me to experiment with a narrative style that comprised biography, autobiography, fiction, musicology, Nazi history, travelogue and time dislocations. At the story’s centre is my rediscovery of my father’s clarinet and my setting myself the goal of learning to play a short piece on it. The narrative explores what might motivate such a solipsistic challenge. Fundamentally, of course, it’s a story about a father-son relationship. But even now, if I reread Adagio I have moments when I believe I’m not the narrator. I’m fascinated by the ability of each of us to be several different people. At its extreme, of course, this human quality throws up a Hitler who loved children, an executioner who can go home and be kind to his dog, a bureaucrat or businessman who can make decisions that will make the disadvantaged yet more disadvantaged but mow his infirm neighbor’s front lawn. Before he weekends at his beach house.

Filled under: books

Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes

Brahimi remembers

Blues with bleu

Paris on a plate (Murdoch Books 2006)

To Die For: 100 food experiences to have before you die (Pier 9 2005)

Adagio for a simple clarinet (Lothian Books 2005)

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