Archive for the ‘VV’ Category
V-Rating: VV When I think of stalwarts of the Canberra restaurant scene, Chairman and Yip is one of the first that comes to mind. In many ways the restaurant typifies Canberra. Understated, smart, and subtly suggestive of politics and diplomacy, it’s a comfortable fit in the national capital. Chairman and Yip is not the kind of restaurant you visit every day. With most entrees above the $10 mark, and no mains below $25 it’d definitely a work function or special occasion place. Like many expensive restaurants, the ala carte menu is a little thin on the ground for vegetarians, although there they make a respectable attempt with two vegetarian entrees and mains.
My favourite dish at Chairman and Yip has to be the entree of char-grilled mushrooms with coriander and chilli pesto. I remembered it from a visit of five years ago, and five years on it still doesn’t disappoint. The mushrooms are large, juicy and smoky from the grill, while the pesto is soft and bright green. The flavours and texture feel more European than Chinese to me, although the coriander and chilli keeps the dish in tune with the rest of the food. The vegetarian bean curd pastry rolls were delicious and comparatively filling, making them good value as the only sub $10 entree on the menu. Thin sheets of tofu are wrapped around a soft vegetable filling then deep fried, giving the vegetables a crunchy and delicate casing.
The two vegetarian mains are eggplant and tofu in yellow sauce, and stir-fried pumpkin and cucumber with caramelised chilli. The words ‘eggplant’ and ‘tofu’ together on a menu induce a Pavlovian response from me where I have to order the dish, and this was my favourite of the two vegetarian choices. The yellow sauce is pleasantly savoury, and the eggplant is lusciously soft. The tofu comes as small, hard squares with a deep-fried outer crust. It does contrast with the eggplant’s texture, but it’s too dry for my taste.
The standard version of the pumpkin and cucumber dish comes with a fish sauce so make sure you ask the kitchen to leave this out if you’re a strict vegetarian. I was intrigued by the combination of cucumber and pumpkin, but the dish was very sweet due to the caramelised sauce, making it a less is more choice for me and not something I would order if there was a third vegetarian dish on offer. For a party of three, we ordered one of each of the vegetarian dishes. If you go in a bigger group try the excellent value dinner banquet ($37.50 per head) or the exquisite vegetarian degustation ($75 or $105 including 5 small glasses of matched wine). Ignore the standard menu listed on the website for the banquet - if you tell the restaurant the number of vegetarians in your party they’ll make sure to bring out the right number of vegetarian dishes. As an added bonus, they will usually make dishes that aren’t on the ala carte menu like salt and pepper tofu. My favourite Chairman and Yip experiences were the two evenings I tried the degustation menu. The restaurant will happily cater for special dietary needs, and on one occasion we had a party of four with two of us having a vegetarian version and two others also eating seafood dishes. The degustation is great value with or without the wine, and a lovely way to celebrate a special occasion over a long and relaxed meal.
There’s something strange about the value and quality of a mountan refuge, 2000 metres above sea level and unreachable by car, exceeding that of a youth hostel in a capital city. But like in Norway, when we pushed open the small wooden gate of Refuge A on Mount Olympus we were greeted by a charming wooden chalet, reception desk, and restaurant. After a Mythos beer on the outside terrace overlooking the ocean, plains and wooded valleys of lower Olympus, we adjourned to the dining room.
Refuge A has a fully staffed kitchen with a simple, but satisfying a la carte menu. We ordered the filling fava bean soup…
vegetable soup with noodles…
and a bowl of tzatzki with bread, but there was also a vegetarian pasta for those looking for a more subtantial option on the eve of the big climb. Breakfast the next morning included yoghurt with honey, and bread with jam, and there was also a range of energy food (chocolate, nuts, fruit) available to buy from the reception to sustain climbers you on the approach to the summit. If you’re looking for Dutch courage, the refuge offers a selection of wines and beers, along with non-alcholic drinks. I’m fast becoming an admirer of the European trekking hut system - my only worry is that I’ll find it hard to go back to tents and camping food in Australia. Vegetarian in Greece: More posts on Greek veggie food
V Rating: VVV Hickson Road in Walsh Bay has morphed into a mini-theatre strip, with the Sydney Theatre Company and Bangara Dance Theatre calling it home. It’s the kind of area where you drop by before a show, looking for quick, cheap food, not demanding the best quality but needing to eat something to stave off hunger (and loud stomach noises) during the performance. But thanks to the area’s industrial past and knockout harbour views, quick, cheap food is not easy to find.
Fortunately, there is one restaurant that caters to the theatre crowd. Its name is the Walsh Bay Cafe. You probably wouldn’t guess this from the “Chinese Cuisine” sign hanging out the front. That’s why I’ve helpfully posted a photo here.
The small inside room is surprisingly cute and modern, with vibrant red tablecloths and bold Chinese character wallpaper. The restaurant is BYO, and you can scoot next door to a bottle shop if you’re after wine with your meal.
Walsh Bay Cafe offers 12 vegetarian choices, including Chinese classics like salt and pepper tofu, ma po tofu, garlic baby spinach and tofu and snowpeas in black bean sauce. We tried the stir-fry vegetables and noodles, along with a tofu and vegetable stir-fry. The dishes weren’t going to set the world on fire, but they came quickly and had a fresh, healthy flavour.
Afterwards we ambled across the road to the Bangara Theatre to see a Sydney Writers Festival event on China called “Is Communism All Bad?” The main speaker on the panel was Diane Wei Liang, a Chinese author now living in Europe who was a student activist in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests. There were some fairly sobering observations about the state of democracy and human rights in China, mixed with optimism for the future. Diane’s description of how Tiananmen Square unfolded inspired me to read her autobiography, The Lake With No Name. Having only seen Western reporting on Tiananmen, it was fascinating to read about it from the perspective of someone who was there. Wei describes how the protest grow from a spontaneous outburst, to a youth-fired mass movement, to a violent end when the army entered the Square. Definitely food for thought as we plan our trip there at the end of the year.
V Rating: VV After a six month absence, I rejoined Book Grub, my Asian themed book club, last Wednesday at Matsuri in Surry Hills. The neat thing about Book Grub is that each month we read a book set in a different country in Asia, and then meet to talk about it at a restaurant from the same culture. This month’s book was Across the Nightingale Floor, which is set in Japan. I was feeling very sheepish that I hadn’t found, let alone read, the book - so much for making a good impression on my return.
Our themed venue was Matsuri on Crown Street. Happily, for a Japanese restaurant Matsuri offers a decent vegetarian choice, with a selection of vegetarian entrees and sushi, if fewer options for mains. My friends were Matsuri regulars, and recommended the edamame beans and the agedashi tofu entree. I think that would have been a good choice. Stupidly, I distracted everyone with the specials menu and we ended up with the agedashi eggplant, and a tofu dish that I don’t remember the name of (this veneer of professionalism, it’s very thin). We threw in the spinach with soy and sesame from the regular entree menu and had some miso each.
These dishes were nice, but not as good as Japanese food I’ve had at Musashi or Naniwa-Tei. The eggplant was soft but quite oily and hadn’t fully soaked in the agedashi flavour. The fried tofu cubes had an interesting presentation, but I found the dish a little dry.
My friends also shared a plate of sushi and sashimi. Even though there was a wide range of vegetarian sushi to choose from, I short-sightedly decided I had enough food to eat with the entree dishes.
This was a pretty dumb decision on my part. As regulars know, Matsuri is famous for its sushi and sashimi and my friend’s plate looked amazing. I wouldn’t normally write about non-vegetarian dishes, but I’m posting this photo to remind myself not to be such a fool and overlook the sushi next time I try Matsuri.
V Rating: VV PEN is surreptitiously located at the corner of two biggish roads in Pyrmont in a converted wool shed. The exterior looks like your run of the mill, humble local cafe serving the office crowd. It’s always intrigued me because the name reminds me of a writer’s activist group - but until recently I’d never ventured in.
Once inside, you realise that it has a tardis like design. The narrow frontage belies the large, single room that makes up the cafe. The interior is very striking, with vivacious red walls, exposed dark wood roof beams, and a large, polished wooden table running down the centre of the room, adding an inner West cum country kitchen feel. The menu, while full of fresh market ingredients, is not abundant with vegetarian options. There are two vegetarian salads, including a salad stack, a vegetarian sandwich, and a vegetarian pasta sauce than comes with a choice of four pastas. There were no vegetarian specials the day I visited, and my first choice of salad was out of stock, even though it was slightly before 12.30 when I ordered. So, while I usually avoid ordering dishes that sound tokenistic, I went the salad stack. My first impression wasn’t great. The stack didn’t come with all the ingredients listed on the menu. Also, when I asked for the optional cheddar cheese I assumed it would be delicately scattered around the plate, not stuck in a chunk at the top of the stack. These things aside, this was one of the better stacks I’ve tried. The nicest part was that it utilised a lot of fresh ingredients, like grated carrot, avocado, alfalfa beetroot and lettuce, rather than being made up of oily grilled vegetables. The dressing was a light, lemon vinegarette, which brought the fresh ingredients to life by adding some zing. I wouldn’t rate PEN as my favourite lunchspot in Pyrmont. However, it stacks up (boom tish) well against its other cafe counterparts.
V Rating: VV Bill Granger is the celebrity chef du jour in Sydney. He writes a weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald, hosts a cooking show on pay TV, and publishes copious cookbooks filled with impossibly bright, light, airy photos and casually brilliant recipes. Oh, and he runs a few restaurants as well.
So, when a good friend of mine came to Sydney on the weekend I promised to take him to a special lunch spot - bills Surry Hills (formerly bills 2). Unfortunately, we arrived at 11.30am. Lunch didn’t start until 12.00pm. As a line was already starting to form for tables we didn’t like our chances of coming back in half an hour - so we had breakfast instead. I ordered the ricotta hot cakes with banana and honeycomb butter because every review I’ve read about bills make mention of them.
The hotcakes were thick, light and fluffy. The fairly meager slices of banana (bloody cyclone) were tucked cosily underneath the hotcakes. The slices of butter on top of the hot cakes looked surprisingly like slices of banana - making for a not so pleasant first mouthful. The hotcakes were good - don’t get me wrong. But not as good as the reams of glowing reviews suggested. Andy and our friend had the good sense to order sweet corn fritter, with tomato and spinach. On the menu it comes with bacon, but they had it with mushrooms instead.
The truly amazing thing about these babies was the succulent, whole pieces of corn. Even though the cakes were fried, the corn still retained a strong, fresh, sweet taste. And yes, I had food envy the whole meal. The thing about bills was that if it were a cafe I’d wandered into from the street I probably would have thought it was an amazing find. But because Bill Granger has such a mythic status in Sydney, by the time I tried it out it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The cafe is stylish and funky. The food was clearly made with high quality, fresh ingredients. There are some good vegetarian options on the menu… but maybe next time I’ll wait until 12pm and try lunch.
V Rating: VV Expensive restaurants, in my experience, are unkind to vegetarians. French restaurants are even worse. Hence, I was in a highly dubious frame of mind when I arrived at the expensive, French restaurant Bistro Moncur. In some ways I was right. Bistro Moncur doesn’t offer a lot of choice for vegetarians. However, the exceptional quality of the food, combined with the relaxed, welcoming atmosphere, put me in a forgiving mood. It helped that Bistro Moncur is located inside a There were a decent three vegetarian entrees on the menu (double the usual number you find at these types of places). I chose the vine ripened tomato salad. It was essentially just large, ripe tomato slices in a light dressing. Refreshing, to be sure, but a leetle bit underwhelming for $16.50. The other vegetarian option was a salad of celery, roquefort, radicchio, pears and walnuts. in a walnut oil and coddled egg vinaigrette. The person next to me chose this salad, and it looked far more exciting than my dish. Sigh. Apparently one of Bistro Moncur’s signature dishes is the french onion, blue cheese souffle. I didn’t feel up to ordering this for lunch, especially with a main to come, but this may have a been a fatal mistake on my part because it gets rave reviews on Sydney restaurant sites. This is just one vegetarian choice for main, a seasonal vegetables with a pumpkin and mostarda custard timbale, flageolet beans and lentils in a tomato broth. Each aspect of this dish was fabulous. The custard timable had a soft, delicate, frothy texture that melted in my mouth. The pumpkin and mostarda (an Italian fruit mustard condiment) gave it a predominantly sweet taste with a slight kick. Flageolet beans are large and white with soft texture. They reminded me a cross between canellinni and kidney beans. They combined well with the lentils and the lovely tomato broth. It was clear that chef Damien Pignolet had put this dish together carefully using some more unusual ingredients like mostarda and flagolet beans. While sometimes unsual ingredients feel like they’ve been included solely to add some ‘fashion’ to a dish, in this case the meal had a hearty, down-to-earth feel. My only criticism is that even though the flavours complemented each other, there was no strong relationship between the food, so it felt like a tasting plate rather than a ‘meal’. As a general note of caution about Bistro Moncur, you can’t book and it is popular so get there early or expect a long wait. Although I’d normally only give an expensive restaurant with one vegetarian main a v-ware, because of the three veggie entrees, lovely atmosphere and unusual main dish I’ve awarded Bistro Moncur VV |
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