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Singapore – what a city! I loved this place. It’s a visually arresting city with fantastic food, friendly people and it was so easy to manage. I had really high expectations and Singapore exceeded them – it goes straight onto my “Cities I Want to …
I had been to 48 countries around the world before I managed to put my Australian snobbery about Bali aside and finally get there – Indonesia became number 49. I am so glad I got over myself – we had a blast! I travelled with …
You’ve probably eaten kangaroo and wallaby and maybe even salt bush. You’ve probably heard of bunya nuts and lemon myrtle and quandong, even if you haven’t had a chance to taste them quite yet. But what about dorrigo or sunrise limes or brush cherries? It’s incredible how much of the Australian population is only just learning about native Australian ingredients – me included. And how much there is yet to learn. Australian modern cuisine is generally considered in terms of a mish mash of lots of other cusines – English traditional, Italian, meat and three veg and maybe some Asian fusion along the way. You just don’t say “I’m having Australian tonight” in the same way you do for Italian or Japanese or Indian. The oldest living culture in the world has much to teach us about Australian cuisine, even if we are only just beginning to ask.
Jock Zonfrillo, a Scottish-born chef, has done more than most to bring some knowledge to Australians about their own native ingredients. Zonfrillo’s restaurant, Orana, opened in Adelaide in 2013 and has gone from strength to strength, named as the 2018 Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year and achieving two hats in the 2018 Good Food Guide (the 2019 version will be released next week).
But, it’s not just about the restaurant. In fact, according to an interview with Good Food, the restaurant was started as a vehicle to get funding for the Orana Foundation. The foundation, in conjunction with the University of Adelaide, is building a native-food database, running flavor trials and assessing the viability of commercial production. It aims to bring recognition to traditional food cultures and ensure that Indigenous communities are benefiting from any future commercial enterprises. In an interview with Gourmet Traveller when Orana won the Best Restaurant gong, Zonfrillo said, “The restaurant is just a billboard that promotes this food. Developing the foundation is the crucial next step in capturing and preserving Indigenous food knowledge and to sharing that with everyone. I aim to give back more than I take.” The world is listening, with Zonfrillo winning the Basque Culinary World Prize 2018 — a prestigious award for chefs improving society through gastronomy.
When Cat suggested we eat at Orana on one of her final weekends in Adelaide, I was so excited! I had been wanting to eat Zonfrillo’s food for a long time. A great advantage of one of the best restaurants in the country being in Adelaide is that we were able to get a booking on a Friday night only a week in advance!
After making our way up the industrial staircase on the side of the building to the first floor, we were greeted warmly for our 6pm seating. On the undressed, timber table, sat a glass cloche protecting dough proving, ready to be taken away, baked and served to us later. It was clear this was going to be more than just a meal – over the next two and a half hours, we were treated to 17 courses, each with a story and a sense of discovery.
The first course of potato damper threaded onto lemon myrtle skewers, cooking over hot coals with a side of roast lamb butter was put in front of us, alongside a cup of macadamia soup with native thyme oil. Our waiter, squatting down next to the table so she was eye level with us, implored us to relax and get our camping vibe on. The fun of this dish was a great indicator that whilst the food that night was going to be seriously good, Orana didn’t want us to take ourselves too seriously.
The ‘snacks’ then commenced, with a constant stream of different dishes making their way out of the partially open kitchen, served either by a chef or the very well informed wait staff. Our standout was the Spencer Gulf prawn roti – flaky, crisp roti with native greens and a plump prawn with a sauce that was pure comfort food. The kangaroo tail pies were also delicious, with a rich meat sauce encased in crumbly pastry.
The crockery was gorgeous, a mixture of custom pieces designed especially for Orana and other pieces they have picked up along the way. Cutlery wasn’t really required for most of the snacks – it was all food you could pick up and eat in your hands.
We were told the ‘Soup Soup’, a broth of Marron with Australian botanicals left to steep on the table, is so named because a particularly good soup is dubbed ‘Soup Soup’ by indigenous communities Zonfrillo has been visiting as part of his research. Cat dubbed this one ‘Soup Soup Soup’ and she was quite right – it was complex and full of flavor.
Three main courses followed the 11 snack courses, with the Marron, green ants & Geraldton Wax being the most striking of the three. The vibrant green sauce, with little ants floating around in it, was visually arresting. We were heartily encouraged to take hold of the Marron tail, use it to mop up the green sauce and to make sure we got lots of crunchy ants with each bite! We complied and it was delicious! Tender, kangaroo slivers served hugging a bed of smoked potato and resting in a feral plum and wattleseed sauce was a rich and fitting end to the main courses, with the smoked mash tying back into the potato damper that we started with.
The signature dessert of buffalo milk in a pool of wild strawberry juice and eucalyptus oil has been on the menu since day one. It was one of the dishes Cat and I kept returning to as we talked about the meal again and again over the weekend. The texture of the set buffalo milk was so silky and the eucalyptus cutting through the strawberry ensured there was no overwhelming sweetness to the dish at all.
Over 17 dishes, every single one had an ingredient I had never tried before. Many I had never heard of. It’s no small thing that Orana has been as successful as it has with a menu that will challenge many diners, even those of us who think we know a little bit about food. But the kind and never, ever pretentious or condescending service made the experience really comfortable. It was such a lovely mix of information, fun and care. We asked lots of questions and hung on every word of the dish introductions, revelling in the learning experience as well as the fact we were eating really delicious food.
Orana is a special occasion restaurant for most, with a dinner Tasting menu coming in at $240 per person and wine matching for an additional $170. That said, it holds up exceptionally well against some of the 3 Michelin star restaurants I have visited over the last year. Two people could eat as well, if not better, at Orana for the same price as one person at any of the San Francisco restaurants I visited in May.
When weighing up the ‘is it worth it’ question, I think it is worth considering how the restaurant interacts with the work of the Orana Foundation. The interest the dining experience sparked in me to learn more about indigenous ingredients has led me to reading a number of articles and blogs I might never have stumbled across otherwise. The aim of the foundation to build knowledge and awareness and create an industry around these ingredients that supports Aboriginal communities is an important one. Increasing exposure and interest in these ingredients and advancing the aims of the Orana Foundation is a wonderful reason to visit the vehicle that was launched to support it.
Saison, Joshua Skene’s 3 Michelin Star, fire focused restaurant in San Francisco, is easily the most fun dining experience I’ve ever had in a fancy restaurant. What a treat to combine serious, sophisticated food with a vibe that was warm and irreverent. It was such …
Beaune is one of those places that just charms your socks off. Gorgeous medieval buildings, cobblestone streets, French accents and every second shop sells wine or food! Especially at night, I felt like I was walking around in one of my favourite movies, Midnight in …
I first laid eyes on Crested Butte in the winter of 2002/03. I had just finished university and was due to start my first job as a baby lawyer in March 2003. A few months of adventure seemed like the right thing to do before I got all serious and adult-y. This would be my last hurrah, right? Down to business after that. Little did I know I would make a bit of a habit of decamping for months (or years) at a time and would still be doing it at 40! Little did I know that Crested Butte would become a second home to me and so much part of my life that I would work another season there in 2005/06 and then keep visiting, over and over.
Back when I first arrived, Crested Butte was marketed as the last great Colorado ski town, the end of the road, unique and proud of it. It boasted of the steepest, most extreme terrain in North America, it was violently anti-establishment and it still had wet t-shirt competitions as a reason to visit on its very primitive website. It might only be 20 miles from Aspen as the crow flies over the mountains, but it was (and still is) light years away from the glitz and glamour of that playground of the rich and famous.
Nearly 16 years later, not much has changed…oh, except for the fact the mountain was just bought out by Vail, one of the biggest, shiniest, most establishment ski resort businesses in the world. Vail owns ski areas all over the world, including Perisher in Australia. The announcement was made the day before I arrived, so I walked straight into the shock and outrage of a community not known for its love of change or corporations!
As the news sunk in, the response has been an interesting mix of resignation about the inevitability of this because of the way the ski business is becoming almost exclusively large-scale corporate; panic about the likely increase in visitor numbers and what this will mean for a very small permanent population, with proportionate infrastructure and services; giddy optimism from home owners about their property prices; despair from the hundreds of pay-check to pay-check workers that fear they will never be able to afford to buy in this town now; hope that Vail will invest and understand that Crested Butte has its own very unique selling point (as Vail representatives put it after the announcement, ‘we have a Vail in the portfolio, we don’t have a Crested Butte’).
This purchase and what it means for CB people is about more than just simple distrust of corporations. If you want to see the gap between the rich and the poor in the US, spend some time in a mountain town. It’s a microcosm of wealthy tourists and second home owners and those that serve them. Leading into the busiest time of the year, local businesses of all types were actually reducing their opening hours because they couldn’t find workers. Restaurants that had been opened seven days a week were closing Monday and Tuesday. My friends in hospitality were working 10 days straight on understaffed rosters, despite really only wanting 6 shifts in that time because they also want to enjoy their short summer hiking or biking or fishing. The local paper had four pages of help wanted ads and one column of places to rent, all of them at prices that would make it impossible for any of the low wage workers. As I commented to several friends over my time there, Crested Butte is a beautiful, magical place, but it is also a really hard place to live for many. The numbers don’t stack up.
But, my friends, the people I love in this town, stay. They work their butts off in the summer and winter to save for the spring and autumn where they will earn much less. They drive beat up cars and live with room-mates and drink cheap beer. They commute from nearby communities via the free public bus to lower their living costs. They do all of this so they can ride mountain bikes at breakneck speeds along stunning single tracks and hike up fourteeners and fly fish in world class rivers and, Ullr willing, ski down the steepest grades in North America on clouds of fluffy, virgin powder. It’s not always an easy existence, but goddamn it, I think it might be worth it. I will be forever grateful I found my second home and the people in it.
Crested Butte does not have a single chain fast food outlet. Not one. Most of the places on this list have been in business for at least as long as I’ve been visiting and the new ones I’ve added deserve to join that company. Be patient with the wonderful servers and tip well…they are overworked and underpaid. The great news is that Crested Butte is fantastic for foodies. I’ve mainly included casual dining and drinking places here because that’s how I eat when I’m in CB. But if you’re looking for fine dining, there are great options at Soupçon, The Wooden Nickel, Lil’s Sushi Bar and Grill and Django’s Kitchen. You will eat very well indeed in CB. Oh, and try Third Bowl Icecream if you’re there in summer!
Everyone’s go-to coffee spot. Seems like it always has been and always will be. It actually started out of a cart in 1993. Great coffee, pastries that sell out early, take away beans that can be ground to order for you and the cutest shop front you’ve ever seen. Grab an Americano and just watch the people come and go from a chair out front.
I love this place! They have a super cute dining room for colder days and a great courtyard out the back with big umbrellas for shade. The brunch menu is served from 8am to 2pm and includes a fantastic menu of open sweet and savoury tartines, served on the fantastic house-made sourdough. You can also buy the best bread in town, with a daily special and a constant sourdough and rye option. The service is always delightful and I spent several mornings here, catching up on writing or reading over breakfast and a bottomless cup of coffee.
30 beers on tap, changing regularly. Huge courtyard that looks directly out onto Elk Avenue and has some trees and umbrellas for shade in the summer and heaters in the winter. Great outdoor bar to sit at if you’re just after a drink or a quick bite. Large and varied menu caters to all tastes and is a great spot for a group – everyone will get something they want!
The Stash has been an institution in CB for ever. They’ve moved into a much bigger premises in the centre of town since last time I visited and seem to have no trouble filling up the space. Quirky Asian style décor with lots of treasures from the owner’s travels. They do have a pretty broad menu, but really, it’s all about the pizza. By the slice or whole pies, it covers the gamut from pepperoni to blue cheese and fig (the Notorious F.I.G.). A great spot for a solo diner too – pull up a stool at the bar and grab a beer and a slice. Happy days.
Just across Elk Avenue from the Stash, Pitas has a great corner patio and a large indoor space and bar seating. Big TV screens if you need to catch a game of some sort – the World Cup was on whilst I was there. Cranking out consistently great quality pita wraps, gyros and curly fries. Do The O.G. (Original Gyros) with lamb and all the usual gyros trimmings. If you’re used to great Asian food, avoid the curry bowls!
Reasonably priced, good quality American fare such as burgers, wings, sandwiches and huge salads. Most importantly, the self-service Bloody Mary bar is a must do. You get a glass with vodka and ice in it and then you can make your Bloody however you like, including a large variety of accoutrements like bacon, pickled beans and jalapenos. Get a seat on the deck overlooking Elk and your people watching can begin!
In one of the brightest and smallest shop fronts in town, Teo has been serving up enormous burritos, tacos and tamales filled with great quality ingredients for years. If you can’t get a seat, get yours to go and eat on a bench on Elk or in the Totem Pole park like Molly and I did. Unless you’ve had a huge morning hiking, you’re likely to have plenty left for an afternoon snack or dinner!
The Dogwood is the place to go in CB if you want some seriously delicious, innovative drinks and great food to go with them. Owners, Drew and Sarah-Jane, have put together a cocktail list of bold flavour combinations, packed with botanicals. My favourite was the Yellow Rose – vodka, lemon and rosemary that smacked me in the face with flavour. And for the purists, the whisky list is extensive, with plenty of classics along with some interesting local options. It’s located in an old miner’s cabin built in 1891 and during winter would be the cosiest of spots to hide from the cold. But in summer, happy hour in the cute courtyard totally lived up to its name!
Good, old fashioned American dive bar. It has barely changed since I first walked in there and it’s dark enough to not notice the stains and smells of winters past. Pool tables and fuseball upstairs, bands and juke box downstairs. Be careful, time and space can get quite unaccountably altered at the Talk and questionable decisions are almost guaranteed. Don’t miss the last bus!
Located out in CB South, Tassinong Farms is a great little wine and food joint. They have a self-dispensing wine system which allows you to taste various wines by the tasting pour, half glass or full glass in addition to a full wine list. Very European! Food is fresh and light and they grow a lot of their own veggies and salad leaves out the back in massive hydroponic containers. You can buy salad leaves direct. There are salads, flat breads and a great selection of cheese and charcuterie. Definitely worth the drive or bus out to CB South if you’re looking for something classy and modern!
Ok, this is number 11 and it’s in Gunnison, not Crested Butte, but I would be remiss not to include it! Chef Mike Busse and his wife Traci have been running Italian restaurant Garlic Mike’s, located on the Gunnison river on the outskirts of town since 1994. Consistently great food and service with a decent wine list. The River Bar is open in summer and is a great spot to enjoy some tunes and a drink before dinner. If you’re overwhelmed by the large menu, just order the Con Pepe steak, it’s always great! And my CB bestie, Erika, works there so make sure you say hi!
Dominique Crenn is a rockstar. She is truly a world famous, instantly recognisable chef to anyone interested in food. Her flagship restaurant, Atelier Crenn in San Francisco was first awarded two Michelin starts in 2012, with Dominique being the first female chef in the US …
The need for a little solo adventure was starting to get pretty pressing. I was feeling the need to test out the ankle a bit. Of course, I could do that in Port Fairy or Melbourne, but I was also craving a bit of solitude …
Destination dining has been a long established part of the Australian food scene. The Lake House in Daylesford was amongst the first to entice city slickers out to the sticks for a good feed over thirty years ago. Living in Port Fairy, the Royal Mail in Dunkeld has been a close option for us for many years and Fen was just around the corner until it closed in January. But it’s a risky proposition. Generally speaking, to establish a successful business in a small, rural community, you need significant local support. From suppliers, to staff, to consumers. By the looks of their Facebook Page, the new proprietors of The Bunyip Hotel in Cavendish have been making sure of that! They’ve used local tradespeople to give the pub an updated look, they have sourced beautiful local timbers for new outdoor tables and chairs, their wine list is exclusively local and their spuds are from Koroit!
Cavendish is a town of approximately 500 people, situated on the Wannon River at the southern edge of the Grampians National Park, about 30 minutes north of Hamilton. Not where you’d expect to be eating refined classic pub fare such as Portland rockling and Koroit chips alongside wagyu pastrami served with house made kimchi! I had started to hear rumblings around town that this place was worth the drive. In true country town style, pieces started to fall into place that the chef Jimmy Campbell was not only the ex head chef of two hatted Movida in Sydney, but was a local boy who had come home. A Good Food article then let me know he had been cooking at the pub since early 2017, before taking over the lease early 2018 from the Bunyip Brewery who moved to new premises nearby.
My fellow food lovers, Emma and Daniel, came for the drive and we made a weekend of it doing a big loop around to the wineries in the Grampians. But first, lunch on Saturday at The Bunyip Hotel! I have never been there before, so can’t comment on how much work has been done, but it’s clear that there have been some updates made – a new bar, walls painted, some gorgeous artwork etc, but the overall feel of the room is still accessible, country pub chic, with formica topped tables and old school black vinyl padded chairs. Lots of light streams through the huge windows looking out over the deck and onto the beautiful red gums lining the Wannon River. We are coming back for a long, slow Sunday afternoon at the outdoor tables for sure and hopefully something will be slow roasting in that massive outdoor pizza oven!
The wine list was super tight and super local; only one page and the only interlopers were a couple of French sparklings. We happily tried a quite unusual 2015 Hochkirch Riesling that looked, smelled and tasted a lot older than it was. Not a summer drinking session riesling, but it definitely came into its own with the food. If you’re just after a few beers and a bowl of chips, there was Carlton, Great Northern and a craft beer and cider on tap. It was great to see some local farmers come into the front bar around 2:30pm for pots. It’s still a pub you can call into in your work gear for a beer which is pretty important given where it is!
As often happens, we got a bit carried away with the ordering and didn’t account for the extraordinarily generous portion sizes. We definitely got the picture from our waitress’ somewhat amused face as she started to put the entrees down in front of us! The share plates and entrees menu pushed the traditional pub fare boundaries, with pastrami and kimchi, croquettes, black pudding and fresh Portland Bugs among the options the day we visited. The menu changes regularly depending on the produce available.
Our tomato salad with a mix of home grown heirlooms, red onion, basil and Shaw River mozarella made it clear the kitchen garden is under the control of someone who knows what they are doing. The tomatoes were gorgeous bursts of sweetness, the best I’ve had since I was in Greece last summer and that’s saying something! The slab of duck terrine was terrine for people who don’t like terrine – like me! Chunky bits of meat overcame any of my usual texture issues and the sourdough and pickles it came with were perfect accompaniments. There was no way we were passing up the bowl of hand cut Koroit potato spuds served with fried Caravan eggs and dusted with paprika. They were tasty, tasty chips!
Daniel had wisely ordered his much anticipated house made Black Pudding with roasted beetroot (listed as an entree) for his main course. Emma and I were far greedier. Our waitress placed the Pork Parma with tomato sauce, pumpkin and salad in front of Emma and the David Blackmore Wagyu Beef Neck Hot Pot in front of me, with a slightly evil grin. Under Daniel’s relentless bullying, we were instructed to eat every, last bit. We did. But it was a herculean effort!
Daniel and his housemate went through an offal stage. They would head to their local butcher on a Saturday morning to buy all the ingredients to make haggis or black pudding and report back on their efforts. It’s fair to say he has a better appreciation than most, certainly more so than me and Emma, of the intricacies of black pudding and he is a pretty harsh critic. This Black Pudding was pronounced the best thing he had eaten in a very, very long time. The Pork Parma was a lovely piece of pork, covered in lightly fried, crispy panko crumbs and a tomato sauce. We had forgotten about the cheese part of the Parma until Emma cut into the middle of the pork to find it was stuffed with ham and oozing cheese. The simple salad of cos leaves and red onion that it was served with was great to cut through the richness of the dish. My Hot Pot came deconstructed, with the most tender, rich Wagyu Beef Neck that was perfectly charred on the outside, pulling away to creamy textured meat inside. There were two very generous pieces of meat, served with roasted carrot, mashed potato and roasted potato, all swimming in a sweet, rich but surprisingly light jus that I think had some sort of sherry in it, maybe Pedro Ximinez given the Spanish influences? Whatever it was, the leftover sourdough from the terrine was put to good use by everyone at the table! I ordered it despite the hot weather the day we visited, but I will be having it again in the middle of winter with a big glass of red.
I wanted all the desserts, but frankly it was a miracle I could drag myself from the table to the car after the volume of food we had already consumed. Leaving behind the lemon tart, golden syrup dumplings and house made ice-cream still makes me a little regretful as I type this nearly a week later, but I just couldn’t do it! Next time I will have a game plan that is likely to involve a whole afternoon time frame!
Upon finding out we were from Port Fairy, one of the new owners, Matt, informed us they were looking at doing some pop ups here over next summer which is something to look forward to! In the meantime, get yourselves to Cavendish before everyone else finds out about it! It’s certainly worth the drive. I’m looking forward to a Chef’s Table Sunday lunch very soon.
PS. For those of you who have been following along with Gourmet Roaming, apologies it’s been a while between posts. I’ve been heavily in the rehab, rest, repeat cycle with not a lot of energy for much else! The healing process is going along very slowly, but I’m mainly without crutches now and I see small improvements each week. I can’t walk very far or with any pace and my patience is certainly being tested, but on the plus side I’m still very good at eating excellent food and drinking great wine 🙂
There is a reason Tuscany evokes such vivid imagery and is a dream destination for many people. I bet even as you read the title of this blog, you had a picture in your mind of rolling hills and pointy cyprus pine trees running along …