Archive for May, 2006
V Rating: VVV OK, Pompei’s is not a vego restaurant. The many, many vego options suited my craving for variety but it bears mentioning that my wife ordered carpaccio, which she rated as ‘lovely’.
In fact I told the waiter at length how fab it was, how my wife and I had travelled through Italy and I never had puttanesca as good as this and would it be too much to get the chef out here and,.. then I noticed him shuffling nervously and his eyes moving in an agitated manner. After years of working in mining camps and eating from field kitchens, I could not claim to be a true foodie and it’s a rare thing for me to do anything more after eating than look to see if any of my fellow diners has left stuff on their plates. So believe me when I say Pompei’s food was fab; those of you with a more sublime palate than mine would do well to make a beeline for Pompei’s. Anon. 30/05/06.
Well, thanks for asking. Yes I have. Veggie Friendly now features a Google Map of vegetarian friendly restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne (i.e. restaurants that score VVV or higher). The Google Map shows balloons that mark the location of the posts. If you click on a marker it brings up a speech bubble. The speech bubble shows the title of the post which has the name of the restaurant, plus its V rating. It also includes a link to the original post. You can zoom up or down on the Map, and also move the focal point up, down and left and right. I was excited when I heard that Google had released maps of Australia for use with its Google Maps API, and that you could make a Google Map mash-up by overlaying your own information on to the map. My excitement began to wane when I started reading the instructions for the Google Map API. Nine frustrating hours later I realised my best hope was to tap into the Wordpress plugin community and see if someone smarter than me had already figured out how to autmatically link post information to a map. After a bit of digging I found two options: Yongfook’s Plug and Play Google Map and Cyberhobo’s Geo Mash-up. If you’re a wordpress user, here’s what you do: Both plugins rely on another plugin called Geo. You need to download Geo and save it your plugins directory. Then you go the plugin screen and activate it. Geo adds a custom field to your posts which lets you add geocode tags (latitude and longitude). You can also preset the coordinates for a particular location if you’re going to use it repeatedly. Geo does not give you the geocode data. For that, you need to find yourself a free geocode service. So far as I can tell, Google is still not offering Australian data so I’ve been using Travelgis with a little help from the Sensis postcode finder. It’s probably best at this stage if you add the geocode data to a couple of posts. You’ll also need to visit the Google Map API page and grab yourself a unique API key. The next step is to download either Geo Mash-up or Plug and Play. I initially tried Geo Mash-up and an earlier Google Map mash-up program by Yongfook. Neither worked - Geo Mash-up would activate in my plugin screen, but when I tried to run it I got a message saying that Geo needed to be activated. Yongfook’s original program simply didn’t appear in my plug-in screen. Finally discovering some programs that would do exactly what I wanted, and then not being able to use them was really frustrating. I left a comment on both sites, but assumed that the developers would be too busy to answer. The next day I despondently went back to the sites, only to find that Yongfook had created a new version of the Google Map program called Plug and Play. It immediately loaded and worked on activation. It’s a really simple program to use. The instructions on Yongfook’s site are very clear, so I won’t repeat them in full here, but in a nutshell you create a new page which the Google Map will appear on and add a single line of code. Plug and play creates a special admin panel in the Options menu. Through the panel you enter your google key and set a few features of the map like the display size, the starting coordinates for your map (I went with Sydney Town Hall) and what you want to be displayed in the google map speech bubbles. You also add the post slug for the new Google Map page, and hey presto, you are up and running. There are some fun optional extras, like being able to add a thumbnail jpg picture to the speech bubble, and adding a button to the post which takes people to the Google Map. The only thing Plug and Play doesn’t do is let you publish multiple maps (for example, I was thinking of creating specific maps for Melbourne and Canberra as well because I have some reviewers in these cities). I guess an alternative approach would be to have a map of Australia, and then people could zoom down to the city of their choice. I also need to mention that Dylan, the Cyberhobo behind Geo Mash-up, came back to me within a matter of hours. He told me that the problem activating Geo Mash-up could have been because no geocode info was entered for any posts, or because the Geo did not load properly. He’s working on a newer version of Geo Mash-up so contact him via the Cyberhobo site if you have any trouble loading the program. So, yay Google Maps and the brilliant Wordpress plugin developer community.
V Rating: VVV I’m a bit of a newcomer to Japanese since I always believed it to be a vegetarian nightmare, what with all that fish and stuff. But after being dragged to a Japanese restaurant for a friend’s birthday last year I’ve been Japanese food’s biggest fan. Recently I’ve been bugging my wife to try out the couple of Japanese restaurants down the road and Iku Yakitori was our first target. There’s a great range of veggie fare available, with the many smaller dishes looking so appealing that on the next visit I might order a bunch of them, Tapas like, instead of a main. But this time, how could I go past the vegetarian banquet, which for $24 per person was outstanding value. First. A steaming bowl of miso soup to soothe those winter chills. Second. Organic tofu with spring onion, chili powder, ginger and soy sauce, with a seaweed salad. Third. A tofu-wrapped rice ball and a plate of sushi. Fourth. Scrumptious vegetarian dumplings. Fifth. Grilled skewers of mushroom and eggplant. Sixth. Green tea ice cream (although, this was replaced the night I was there with red bean ice cream — yummy!) Phwoooar… So full now I can barely finish my second beer. But the smallish room with the smells of cooking all around make it the perfect place to let a great meal settle before heading off home in the rain. The filthy carnivores looked happy with their food too, so, everyone’s a winner. Reviewed 28 May ‘06, SDEB.
V Rating: VVV Amazing how time flies when you’re having fun. Last Friday it was time for the next instalment of Book Grub (my Asian book club). This time around we were reading 10 000 Miles Without a Cloud. It’s the fascinating story of a lone Chinese woman who decides to retrace a Seventh century Monk’s pilgrimage from China to India.
His record was particularly important for Buddhism in India because it played a large part in 19th century attempts to track down (or as archaeologists prefer, excavate) significant Buddhist sites. Sadly, I had only reached Pakistan by the time Book Grub came around so was feeling the heavy weight of slacker bookclub guilt when I trudged through the door.
We gave 10 000 Miles Without a Cloud 7.5/10 and Sea Bay a VVV / 8. …
V Rating: V-ware I was recently treated to a lovely lunch at Aqua Dining, located on top of the North Sydney pool and within spitting distance of some of Sydney’s best-known harbourside landmarks. Despite the fact that the Aqua adjoins a swimming pool, the spectacular harbour views ensured Aqua would be a modern Australian, fine dining restaurant rather than your average chips and icy-poles sports venue cafe. The upshot is that you can eat gourmet food while idly watching swimmers toiling through their laps below. If watching exercise curbs your appetite, the other windows overlook Luna Park and the Harbour. We sat at the end table which offered a very close-up view of Luna Park’s eerily surreal giant face. The eyelashes are amazing - coyly curled yet unbending in the strong harbour wind. Aqua gets a pat on the back for having a separate vegetarian section to the menu, and for ensuring a vegan option for entree and main. However, with only only one vegetarian main, and two vegetarian entrees, I’ve given them a V-ware. I tried the tomato, haloumi and asparagus salad for entrée, which was lovely. The pieces were served as a stack in a reflective metal plate artistically smeared with pesto. The grilled haloumi was salty and seared, but without being over oily. The asparagus was crisp and lemon dressed and with the fresh slices of tomato it made a good complement to the haloumi. For an entrée the serve was large – in fact it was bigger than my main. The other vegetarian entrée was stuffed bonsai-sized zucchini flowers - if you’re not vegan go with the haloumi salad. The vegetarian main was stuffed eggplant rolls with a side of spicy beetroot. The eggplant rolls were delicate, while the beetroot mash was deceptively spicy and had me gulping my water with unladylike haste. While I wouldn’t recommend Aqua for special vegetarian occasions, at least they make sure that vegetarians and vegans can still eat there with a minimum of fuss.
V Rating: VVV I love going to motley invitee dinners where everyone at the table does something that they’re passionate about. It reminds me that being a grown-up can be fun. Last Tuesday, Andy and I joined three friends at Saigon Bay on upper Oxford Street. A friend was visiting from Alice Springs, and she’d invited along a friend back briefly from Cambodia and another friend who works in an education-can-be-fun type job. We had a lot to talk about, and Saigon Bay proved to be a great place for good food and catching up.
For entree we had huge rice paper rolls and crispy pancakes wrapped in lettuce leaves. These were helpfully put together at the table by our accomplished waitress. For mains we had the genuinely chilli lemon grass tofu and soft combination noodles. Saigon Bay gets bonus points because all dishes are cooked in pure polyunsaturated vegetable oil, and use no animal fats, artificial preservatives or MSG. How good is that? KP. 16/5/06. Today I chanced to discover that Veggie Friendly was named on a list of the Top 20 food blogs in Australia. This was a particularly generous seeing as I actually came it at no. 21. The list is compiled by the guy behind the Tomato food blog and is apparently based on your Technorati ranking. Luckily I had a whopping 16 links from nine sites. The more popular places had hundreds of links so not sure if I will make the grade next time around. If you want to help me keep the coveted 21st position please keep the links flowing in! Seriously though, I’m surprised to see that I’m even a blip on the blogging radar given I only started Veggie Friendly this year. I’ve been surprised by the number of visits I’m getting - a couple of thousand each month in April and May, with not too much self-promotion. A lot of people are still coming to the site directly, but an increasing number are coming through search engines. Unfortunately my two stat programs return different results so still not sure exactly how many people are dropping by. Have to say a special thanks at this point to the Melbourne and Canberra reviewers - you guys rock and you sure know how to pull the crowds with your erudite-yet-witty posts. I know that the site visits are tiny compared with popular blogs but I’ll take what I can get. For a couple of years I ran a creative writing website with friends, and despite having a bigger profile I always thought it was hard work to get less hits than Veggie Friendly does now. I don’t know whether there are more people going online now, or if it’s that there is an increasing awareness of blogs, which weren’t really that popular when we ran the other site. It seems to help that the content of Veggie Friendly is related to restaurants because this pulls in a wide range of searches. The most popular reviews and search terms are for iconic vegetarian and vegetarian friendly places, like Soul Mama and Lentil as Anything in Melbourne, and Bodhis, Mother Chu’s and Gertrude and Alice in Sydney. I’ll try and keep the focus on these places - been meaning to do Green Gourmet and Govinda’s in Sydney, for example. Also have a long list of improvements I want to make to the site. I guess this is what it feels like to own property and feel a constant need to renovate. Thank God I can’t afford a mortgage. Anyway, enough navel-gazing for one night. I’m off to celebrate short-lived celebrity. |
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