Post Category → Location

My head on SBS

A while back I foretold a grim future where bloggers would be hired up by major media players. That future is this afternoon. I’ve just started work on Special Broadcasting Service’s new (as yet untitled) world food blog. The site is still a bit shaky – no commenting/trackbacks/RSS yet – but it’s a start on the weird geometry where the line between journalist and blogger ceases to be meaningful.

This week, I cook lamb mechoui from the Food Safari back catalogue and conjecture on the size of Maeve O’Meara’s hands.

Addendum (10 May 2008): Comments are on, no RSS, social sharing buttons still a bit patchy.

The most useless kitchen item that I own

Ed from over at Tomatom has started an interesting thread on the least useful kitchen items that one owns. I tend to veer away from any single-use item – I wrote about this in Cambodia as a rare victory over acquisitiveness. Buying kitchen gear does not make you a better cook. Spend your hard-earned cash on better ingredients and travel.

Having been reunited with my lifetime collection of kitchen-related paraphernalia that had been in storage after returning from Cambodia, I realised that in the packing process, all of the useless items had already been discarded. I was a little horrified that I wasn’t horrified at the amount of crap that I own. That is except for one item that for some reason I can’t bear to throw away

tortilla press

This is the most useless kitchen device I own. It’s a Mexican tortilla press (tortilladora in Spanish), cast from iron. It weighs enough to be used to anchor a respectable dinghy. I’d like to spin a tale about how I picked it up from a little tortilleria in San Jose del Cabo on the Baja peninsula and carried it lovingly back to Australia but that would be a bald-faced lie.

Like much of my kitchen gear, I found it at the Savers thrift store on Sydney Road in Brunswick, Melbourne and was lucky enough to be one of the few people who knew what the hell it was. I think that I’ve used it less than ten times, simply because I rarely need to make more than about six tortillas in a single hit and by the time I get started rolling them flat with a rolling pin, I’ve forgotten that I own the damn thing.

Where to buy a tortilla press in Australia


If you’re not in a hurry and can wait for postage, tortilla presses are ~$15 on Amazon.

Otherwise, if you’re in looking for a tortilla press in Melbourne, La Tortilleria at 72 Stubbs St, Kensington has them for sale.

Travel Writing 101: Date the embassy “chick”

Welcome to hell, Lonely Planet.

“They didn’t pay me enough to go (to) Columbia (sic),”

“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

“They don’t pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.”

Thomas Kohnstamm, erstwhile author of Lonely Planet’s Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Colombia guidebooks (amongst others, above) has admitted to conducting his primary research via pillow talk rather than by visiting one of the countries in question, possibly providing the most spectacular way to demolish your travel writing career in one fell swoop.

I doubt that fraudulent guidebooks are a widespread trend at Lonely Planet, at least outside of the entirety of their South America catalogue. Surely there are some editors there that check the writer’s receipts.

It does however point out that unless you’re living in the Third World country that you’re writing about for them, it isn’t economically viable for many writers to just write Lonely Planet guidebooks. Even if you are doing subsidiary work for Tony and Maureen (e.g. providing content for the LP website; shooting photos) it is not likely that you’ll be able to make a First World living wage.

From: Author’s off the Planet.

Support local (Khmer) hip hop

bboy invite

Stuart Isett has followed up his superlative photographic work on Khmer street gangs with shots of Cambodian b-boy collective Tiny Toones, and this time there’s some fundraising going on. The parallel with the plot to Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is too uncanny for me to not make a mention of this event.

If you’re in the Seattle area:

Tiny Toones: B Boy Benefit for Cambodia
April 26th 2008, 6pm ’til late
At the Greenwood Collective
8537 Greenwood Ave. NW Seattle WA

Featuring the work of: World b-boy champions Massive Monkees, Seattle photographer Charles Peterson, immigration activist Many Uch & photographer Stuart Isett.

$5 donation at the door/Photographs for sale/All proceeds benefit The Tiny Toones.

More info and online donation at The Greenwood Collective; Stuart Isett’s shots of Khmer b-boying on Flickr

Poorism

Bangkok’s Lebua hotel, which is organizing the dinner, is no stranger to publicity – or to Michelin-starred chefs. Last year, it put on a decadent feast billed as the meal of a lifetime for $25,000 a head. Six three-star Michelin chefs were flown in from Europe to cook the 10-course meal, each plate paired with a rare vintage wine.

On April 5, the Lebua is offering another 10-course spread, this time for free. The hotel has invited 50 of its biggest-spending customers to the dinner prepared – it hopes – by three top-ranked Michelin-starred chefs.

There is one twist. Before dinner, guests will be jetted to a poor village in northern Thailand to spend the afternoon soaking up the sights of poverty. The dinner and full-day excursion will cost the hotel $300,000.

Too bad that they’re not going to Cambodia because at least then I could recommend them a village that would be poor enough to make them lose any vestiges of their appetite. It’s going to be interesting to see which 3-star chefs can be bought for (reportedly) $8000 for a few hours work. From IHT’s Luxury Bangkok hotel combines lavish meal with ‘poverty tour’.

The outing of Camy Shanghai Dumpling House’s secret

Camy Shanghai Dumpling House

When salmonella went feral a few years ago at a favorite Turkish restaurant, hospitalising a wardful of unlucky diners, I felt the urge to eat there out of solidarity with the owners but sadly, the health inspectors had put paid to my plans. The joy of returning to a previous favourite restaurant is built entirely on nostalgia. If a restaurant is beloved enough, you can eat an objectively bad meal there and love it, which tends to happen most of the time at Camy Shanghai Dumpling House.

The food at Shanghai Dumpling is not the drawcard as much as the price of the food. When you ask a fan of Camy for their reasons, they inevitably reply “It’s cheap” without much elaboration on the dumplings themselves. They’re filling, greasy and lack subtlety. The pork dumplings taste like pork when steamed and like lardy starch when fried. Even though there has been much conjecture as to the dodginess of their dumplings, there hasn’t been an outbreak of anything deadly there. If there was, I’d still go back.

So from whence does the fierce, nostalgic pang for Camy arise?

You’re not likely to be surprised by anything on the menu except for the prices. Shanghai Dumpling is one of the few places that you can get a sub-$5 plate of dumplings or even get change from $10 when sharing a multitude of plates amongst other Camy cognoscenti.

Camy Shanghai Dumpling House soup
Bland wonton and noodle soup, topped with the least piquant pickle available. But only $5.80!

The furnishings and staff don’t necessarily drive the nostalgia. Since my departure to Cambodia, the decor has morphed from typical cheap Asian to velour banquettes and chairs; glass over the top of wooden tables. I don’t miss it. The tacky art (CopperArt?) remains as does their much-loved policy of hiring Melbourne’s shirtiest front-of-house staff. I assume that the price of the dumplings shows a close correlation to the size of their paychecks. Tea is still self-serve into plastic mugs; the rest of the plateware uniformly melamine. My biggest surprise was that secret menu item: ordering the wonton soups sans-soup, has now slipped into the public domain. And this made me realise why Camy is so loved.

Camy Shanghai Dumpling House is the perfect example of an open secret. Everyone already knows about it but revels in the joy of feeling like they own privileged information. Their alleyway position helps: just hidden enough to make it an unmemorable location; as does the nondescript-ness of the decor, menus and ultimately, food. But the pleasure of being let into the fold, of knowing something that you believe that few others do, never wears off.

See also: Melbourne Gastronome’s I ate at David and Camy’s Shanghai Dumpling and survived (but only just) Facebook group

Location: 25 Tattersalls Lane (Between Little Bourke and Lonsdale), Melbourne CBD

Honda Chaly with Lemongrass

Honda Chaly on lemongrass runCambodia’s 50cc workhorse doing about as much work as it can. Spotted in downtown Kampot, Cambodia