Yum cha, Welcome Inn

Yum cha monsters

Originally uploaded by Fat Duck.

I’m not certain what type of animals these are. Echidnas?

At yum cha, it’s not enough to eat lots and lots of animal. Your food must resemble an animal, too. And this isn’t just a fun-loving dessert: these are stuffed with meat.

I stabbed my chopstick right through one of these critters, waved it around, quite violently.

Later that day I murdered more animals — some yabbies. M told me off for pouring live yabbies into a pot of boiling water. He said that I should have sent them to sleep first by putting them in the freezer.

I argued that yabbies taste better if they are boiled at room temperature, but, truthfully, I just forgot to put them in the freezer.

Lunch at Sittella, Swan Valley

Lamb rack special, Sittella

Originally uploaded by Fat Duck.

Finally I found a mash that isn’t built on cream. It’s just a shame that it was lumpy. And not just a little bit lumpy — there were huge hunks of potato in there.

Ah, but who cares when the lamb rack tastes this good?

B had informed us that Sittella was the best place to eat in the Swan Valley. It was good, but I don’t think it quite deserves that description. The menu works well with the regional produce but seems to lack refinement.

The waitress read the specials out in a staccatto-like monotone, as if the challenge in delivering specials is remembering all them fancy ingredients rather than actually describing the dishes.

I’d say that Riverbank’s a better spot for lunch, even though I haven’t eaten there. Yet.

Eminem, Perth

Today we have rogue poster, C.

Greetings “blogosphere”. A treat for you (well, me, really) today, as I share my thoughts on popular Nedlands restaurant and Eminem. 

I’d long harboured the idea that when it comes to dining, it’s really only the food that is the thing. As someone who doesn’t much care for foodie culture, I’ve always been cynical about the importance of the other aspects of the dining experience. In my head I’d always thought that after food and wine, everything else accounts for roughly 20% of a restaurant’s worth.

Eminem, then, made for an instructive evening. The format is pretty straight ahead – mezze, mains and petit fours — $60. One has a particularly meaty choice of mains – there’s no vegetarian option. The food is undoubtedly good, if a little conventional. The mezze was predictable but pleasing.  The pomegranate and (I think) beetroot dip and the baba ghanoush were especially good.  The bread was fresher than Will Smith in 1990 and the fried three-cheese-and-mint pastry displayed a lightness of touch with something that could have gone very wrong, the broadbeans al dente, and the scampi a la grecque was the best thing to reach the table all night. Any chef worth their whetstone should be able to knock this up, but it was a fine bit of classic cuisine.  

The meat is handled well — my groper (a large chunk of fish) was evenly cooked, well seasoned and clearly a quality bit of fish. Fat Duck’s exceedingly large scotch fillet was nicely aged, and cooked medium-rare, as requested.  

The desserts were very good; the pink grapefruit sorbet a cracking finish. 

The Wine: Mt. Difficulty Pinot Noir 2003 (Central Otago, $80, around $45 in the shops) is a very respectable wine. A puff of oak smoke follows tightly coiled strawberry and sweet cherry fruit, largely well balanced with a decent mouthfeel that will only improve with a couple of years age. People expect big things of Mt. Difficulty, and it’s easy to see why. In general, the wine list is fairly good, though $35 above retail is, to my mind, at about the limits of acceptability.  

So, in terms of what was consumed, it was all good. But (and this is a but so large it would make Sir Mix-A-Lot blanche) everything – and I mean everything else at Eminem – is awful.   Mostly, I can’t give a shit about interior design. As an art I rank it up there with doodling whilst talking on the phone. But Eminem’s mish-mash of chairs looks like a 1998-2002 IKEA retrospective. The table itself was fine. It’s that it was scarcely a foot from the one next to us. That and the fact that it was too small to support all the separate plates the mezze arrive on. So every time someone eats there, there are serving difficulties, a state of affairs that is in its own way notable only for its sheer stupidity.  

The restaurant itself is dark enough Kurtz might break out the tea-lights, and the soundtrack is at best peculiar. Given it’s neither a café, a club, 1997, the drum and bass is more than a little out of place.  The view of Stirling Highway and car park is a mite unromantic and a Spotter’s Badge surely goes to anyone else who has noticed that the wallpaper is identical to that of the Chinese restaurant at Greenwood Village shopping centre, C1994.   If these things conspire to impede the dining experience, then a paragraph or three must go to Eminem’s staff. Four separate staff members attended our table and most disconcerting was that the two clearly new to the place were undoubtedly the best. That the bukiak with a horrid, faux-British / Perth College accent chose to admonish our original waiter in the middle of the restaurant speaks volumes about the professionalism of the place.  

At $60 a head one has some basic expectations of restaurant staff. I don’t want to be courted and nor do I want to be their chum. And who wants to feel like a mark moments after taking their jacket off? Thirty seconds after being seated we were asked for a second time if we wanted an aperitif. This would be fine, but I know the waitress heard this question be asked as we were being seated by our original waiter. Being upsold is one (irritating) given of contemporary dining. But it’s not often that you stare wait staff in the eye until they go away. It’s even less often that you tip $2 to express your contempt. 

Eminem is, in essence, an exercise in the difference between being able to create good food and creating a good dining experience. It might be the Nedlands air, but it has the moneyed smugness of a West Coast Eagles season ticket holder. It’s smug, successful, and at least two of the staff are about as charming and elegant as Wilson Tuckey in a wifebeater.   

20%? The food is a rock solid 7/10. The experience a don’t-go-back 3.   

Breakfast at Lu Lu’s

The title’s deceptive. Breakfast at Lu Lu’s was not an eating experience. Rather, it was the only cafe in Rockingham open at 8.30am on a Thursday. My $11.50 scrambled eggs were dry, crumbly and hard. My toast, white Tip-Top bread slathered in margarine, was only partly toasted. They asked me if I wanted my latte in a mug.

As I’ve been working in Rockingham and Mandurah, and driving around a lot, good food’s been, well, rare. On Wednesday morning, for example, I found myself fashioning a breakfast at a service station. In the end I bought a mocha milk, I was so desperate for caffeine. Though I could’ve gone to the Y2K Cafe, on Rockingham Beach Rd, instead. I just love how they can’t be bothered changing their name.

The Mussell Bar, Fremantle

Perched out on the harbour in Fremantle, the Mussell Bar enjoys a pretty good reputation. Nonetheless, I was suspicious, as so many of these top-location restaurants in Perth are overpriced, touristy, and the service is terrible. The types of places that clear plates the second the person’s finished eating — even if others on the table are yet to receive their food.

So a friend’s birthday dinner was a good excuse to snuff it out. The service was fine, if a little slow, but the food was excellent. Salt-and-pepper calamari — served with pear chutney — was cooked just right, in a very light batter. I had the ‘Thai curry’ mussels: small mussels steamed in coconut milk, with chilli, lime juice, and coriander.

Seated not far from us was a large group of 21-year-olds; boys on one table, girls on the other. When someone tried to take a group photo, one guy stood up and pretended to flash his penis. These boys were yelling, and grabbing each other by the throat. Every single one of the girls had some type of plunging neckline.

At about 11pm, one girl was in the toilets, down on all fours, head down the toilet bowl. I was in the cubical next to her. I looked down to see her twisted stillettos splayed under the door.

After dinner we went to Little Creatures for a few more drinks. On the way we walked past a number of 20-year-olds hanging out the front of the nearby pub, the Harbourside. One girl — who was wearing some of the tightest jeans I’ve seen in Perth so far, decked out in super-high stilettos — suddenly collapsed, and fell back into the wall.

I think she was a bit drunk.

Can I please have a woolly latte?

Originally uploaded by Fat Duck.

Mum was pretty keen to take me to Woolly Latte’s (yes, that’s how they like to use the apostrophe), as it’s a “local’s secret” up the road from her house.

It’s basically a knitting-coffeeshop. They sell all types of wool and proudly display hand-knitted items such as scarfs, ponchos, cardigans, beanies.

Not long after I’d sat down in a wicker chair did I spot the cafe’s namesake: the woolly latte cover. (Mum’s woolly latte is pictured here. ) As you can see, it’s like a tea cosy for a latte glass. It’s important that the latte glass has a handle — otherwise the woolly latte cover cannot function.

Just after I’d taken the photo, the owner swarmed in on me. “I’d be very grateful if you would ask permission before taking photos of the woolly lattes,” she said. She was almost shaking with rage. She was looking at my camera, considering whether she should demand I delete the photo in front of her. Just like Sean Penn might’ve done after he punched that photographer on the 80s.

But she seemed to calm a little, and said, “a lot of people come in here and take photos, then they steal the patterns.”

The woolly latte is similar to an artwork in this sense.

I figured the best approach would be to be extremely friendly. “Oh, it’s nothing like that!” I pushed my eyeballs out at her. “I just wanted to take a photo because it’s so amazing,” I said.

She took another look at me, figured I wasn’t to type to knit a woolly latte, and stormed off.