Category Archives: Places we like to eat at

At 43

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43 Anderson St, Yarraville. Phone: 9687 1198

What was once Cafe Urbano – an establishment of no great distinction – is now At 34, cafe by day and Thai restaurant by night.

It’s been open for a while, and we’ve often wondered how it’s going. On week nights it’s seemed a little forlorn, unloved and sparsely populated.

At 6.30pm on this Saturday night, there seems no such problems. Two tables are already busy as we arrive, two more are quickly occupied soon after and by the time we split a table of seven has also taken up residence.

This outing is Bennie’s call and it’s an inspired one. Considering his dad has been plowing through the debilitating effects of glandular fever all week, a casual five-minute stroll around the corner is much preferable to a wild drive to the wilds of Deer Park and the unknown quantities of an Indian eatery on an industrial estate. Maybe next time!

We have a swell time.

We wonder why we took so long to drop by.

The service is delightful and the arrival of our tucker prompt.

If our meal is good rather than really dandy, we happily blame a couple of dud menu choices.

Incredibly, for all the countless times Bennie have been out on the fang, this is the first Thai meal we’ve shared.

We start with one of the specials – gai hoi bai toey (marinated chicken cooked in pandan leaf, $6.90).

This is just OK for us. The chicken pieces are smallish, making the price seem a little on the steep side. They’re juicy enough, but there’s little or no taste of the publicised marinade flavour.

The pork salad (naem sod, $11.50) is a different matter entirely.

This is just as zingy with lime/lemon, ginger, coriander and chilli as we could wish, all of it a super foil for the chewy pork mince. Although it is at the upper chilli limit at which Bennie can enjoy eating!

The pad kee mao (fried thick rice noodle with chilli, sweet basil, vegetables and tofu, $11.90) is very mild by comparison.

In reality, the noodles are restrained in number, making this more of a straight-up wok-fried mixed vegetable dish. It’s good and does the job of adding variety and colour to our meal.

Our last hurrah fills us up right good – siszzling beef ($16).

This, too, is nice enough – plenty of beef pieces, almost as many cashew nuts, pleasant gravy. The problem seems to us that it’s more of a Chinese-style dish than a Thai one!

So … a good meal that may have been made better had we not tried so hard to steer clear of the usual Thai suspects.

We regret, for instance, not ordering the red duck curry ($18) on the specials board.

At 43 on Urbanspoon

Small is beautiful …

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At the weekend, Bennie and I attended a kids’ festival celebration at Taylors Lakes.

It was a nice affair, though the publicised age range of 5-12 seemed a little wide of the mark.

There was plenty going for littlies, but precious little for such an urbane hip kid as my son, let alone a dad more than capable of mixing with our smaller citizens.

Consequently, we found ourselves, after an hour or so, aboard the shuttle bus back to the Water Gardens train station, where we had parked our vehicle.

Before braving the sticky, over-heated car, we decided to check out Water Gardens Town Centre – Bennie’s interest arising from the fact many of his school mates mention it in passing, my own less enthusiastic interest lying in no more than the ability to be able to say “been there, done that”.

Past Max Brenner, Grill’d, Hog’s Breath Cafe we strolled and into the centre, which according to its website has 240 of “your favourite stores all located on the one level”.

Not that we were ever going to stick around to verify the number.

One brief stroll around the food court that was our entry point – Subway, KFC, Ali Baba, the usual suspects – was more than enough.

We didn’t expect to be unnerved or creeped-out, but we were.

Even Bennie, for whom the glittering lights and sounds and displays of hardcore retailing hold the same appeal as for any kid his age, was moved to comment: “It’s just like Highpoint – but bigger!”

The sheer immensity of the complex we fled made me think of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.

This book once seemed such an integral part of the wider hippie manifesto that I was surprised, on checking, to discover it was first published in 1973.

Still, I suspect its premise continues to hold up in a way that, for instance, The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich no longer does – let alone the ravings of  The Illuminatus! Trilogy or Carlos Castaneda!

Our Water Gardens experience also prompted me to revisit an eloquent column in The Age by Richard Glover entitled “Hearts of our towns ripped out in vicious mallings”.

In it he addresses the “malling” of the town of Mittagong in NSW and the mall phenomena in general.

This paragraph seems particularly pertinent:

The main competition that’s been brought to town is between shops serving rubbish food. For the first time, Mittagong locals have been afforded every Australian’s birthright – easy access to Michel’s Patisserie, Gloria Jean’s, Donut King and a KFC.

Though this one, too, bristles with righteous outrage:

As the British writer Mark Steel has pointed out, the Marxist left was always attacked for wanting to make the whole world look the same – the internationalist worker’s paradise. Actually, it’s capitalism that’s turned every town into a mirror image of the next.

Look, this is not simply a case of us being smug or snooty.

We fully understand that for many people in Australia and around the world, the ways they go about supplying themselves with life’s necessities are limited by events and circumstances way out of their control.

For many, many more, eating at all is not something ever to be taken for granted.

Nevertheless, we’ll use our recent mall misadventure to reinforce our appreciation for what we have.

Let us never get too glib about the many wonderful eateries we regularly frequent where the food is incredible, made with love and served at affordable prices only by grace of bloody hard work by those who provide it.

Let us cherish the family-owned enterprises in which the kids shoot up a helluva lot quicker than the prices … but nothing much else ever seems to change.

Let us salute wobbly tables, mis-matched chairs, dog-eared menus and places where English is a second language but smiles always the first.

Let’s never take for granted the market spreads like Sunshine Fresh Food Market or Little Saigon Market in Footscray.

Let’s appreciate the likes of Leo Pace and his Pace Biscuits, with which we’ve fallen in love – such good-quality chocolate and prices way below Brunetti’s!

Let’s give thanks for a business like Lemat Injera Bakery, which few may have cause to enter but which has been instrumental in deeply enriching our collective eating habits.

The bakeries, cafes, neighbourhood burger joints, human-friendly supermarkets, kebab shacks, specialist delis and butchers, and all the rest – we are thankful for them all.

ajitoya

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82 Charles St, Seddon. Phone: 96871027

New review can be found here.

Adam and Maya have lived in Yarraville for five years, and for all of that time they’ve been thinking surely someone will get some Japanese action going in the neighbourhood in terms of eating out.

Nobody did … so they did!

They’ve been open for about a week when I visit and things are going good for them.

The concise yet astutely chosen Japanese grocery lines reflect Maya’s frustration about having to travel to Prahran, Moonee Ponds or Kyoto for the right products.

Adam tells me they were quite keen to do without selling the ubiquitous sushi rolls. But the fact they’re selling very briskly probably puts them in the category of things that simply can’t be avoided if you’re going into the Japanese eatery business.

For the time being,  they’re set up for providing quick, fine and affordable lunches and takeaway on a Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-7pm basis.

Adam tells me, though, that there’s space left in their musings and space on the premises, too, for a move towards more substantial dinner fare should things go well.

Adam’s background includes stints at Blue Train and Big Mouth while Maya has worked at Izakaya Den.

The ajitoya motto: “Does this train go to Osaka?” … that being something Adam was asked at least a gazillion times a day when he lived in Japan for three years.

Along with the rolls, the display cabinet holds four osozai, or salads. The soba noodles, coleslaw, salmon sashimi tataki and vegetables with sesame sauce dressing in shabu shabu style all look very lovely.

Being of robust appetite, I head straight for the menu section that details the bento meal combos.

They include karaage, agedashi tofu, sushi or a combination of three salads. With each comes rice, miso soup and a choice of one osozai, and mostly costing $16.

My miso soup is fine, of a good temperature and boasting a profusion of squishy tofu bits.

The coleslaw is everything I hope it will be, full of flavour from the sesame dressing and having that superb wilted crunchiness that only the Japanese and certain European cuisines seem capable of.

The fried chicken is little less tanned than is usually the case – maybe it was the first batch of the day? – but the coating is delicate and the chicken is just as juicy and flavoursome as I could want, beaut smeared with the dab of mayo on the side.

I suspect Adam and Maya are likely to find they were not alone in fervently wishing for a Japanese dining option in the neighbourhood, and certainly I’ll be returning very soon with Bennie – he’ll love the chook, but I reckon I’ll go for the clean and fresh salad combo.

Ms Baklover at Footscray Food Blog loves ajitoya, too, as you can discover by reading her review.

And check out the ajitoya Facebook page here.

Ajitoya on Urbanspoon

D’Lish Fish

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105 Beach St, Port Melbourne. Phone 9646 0660

There’s the weekend product of an afternoon’s cooking in the form of a no-doubt tasty mixed legume and vegetable soup awaiting in the freezer.

There’s good Italian cheese, excellent sourdough bread and olive oil to make it sing even more sweetly.

But a lusty must-be-obeyed desire for fish and chips has stolen in and mugged me.

Trouble is, it’s Monday night, and I trust none of the usual suspects in either Williamstown or Moonee Ponds to be open, so it’s over the bridge I go.

The ritzed-up Port Melbourne neighbourhood around the ferry terminal has been around a long time now, but it still has an air of artificiality about it – a bit like the Docklands waterfront precinct closer to the CBD.

Melbourne and its bay? Not a relationship that ever seems to prosper and thrive, is it?

In any case, we’ve never had much use for Port Melbourne, despite it being so close, really, to our western suburbs base. Although we have some good meals at Waterfront Station Pier Restaurant, which is just adjacent D’Lish Fish.

I’m delighted, however, to find this fish and chippery not only open early on a Monday night but actually quite busy. The sun is shining across the bay from Williamstown, there’s grandparents and grandkids coming and going; cyclists and joggers, of course.

It so feels like much later in the week – a Friday night when work and school are over, perhaps, or a lazy Sunday evening – that the effect is quite disorienting.

I seem to recall from a previous visit that what is now D’Lish Fish once bore the name of a famous, mouthy member of the AFL community. I’m glad that’s no longer the case.

Despite the flash surrounds there’s nothing flashy about D’Lish Fish – it’s a straight-up fish and chip place, rudimentary seating available inside and out. If the prices are just a smidgeon higher than our usual suspects, then it’s by so little as to be of no account.

In fact, my lunch pack – chosen from the menu behind the ordering counter at the entrance – is a pretty good deal.

Flake, four calamari rings, one prawn cutlet, chips – $13.

Throw in  tartare sauce and a can of that Coca Cola stuff and the damage is $17.50 – a little more than I was planning on spending on my dinner, but it’s just the ticket.

The calamari is superb – so tender and unchewy. It tastes of the sea!

The prawn cutlet, unusual for me, is pretty good, too.

The fish is excellent, firm and flavoursome. I really appreciate the fact it doesn’t leak oil on to the chips below, as is so often the case. It’s a little over-salted, though.

The chips are just good rather than great, and a little under-salted.

All in all, a fine meal – a spur of the moment decision come good.

In fact, I am pleased to note on my way back over the bridge that my tummy feels contentedly like it’s enjoyed a regulation meal – as opposed to the “Oh my God – what did I do that for?” feeling that sometimes follows the impulsive consumption of fish and chips, pizza and the like.

D'Lish Fish on Urbanspoon

Gol gappe at Classic Curry

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Shop 3, Clarke St, Sunshine. Phone: 9312 6766

Gol gappe is Indian street/snack food along the same lines as bhel puri.

Traditionally, it’s not meant to be part of a main meal, but that’s how I’m starting my lunch today.

The gols – seven for $5 – are egg-like spheres made from fried plain flour.

The top side is cracked open – just as with a boiled egg.

Into each one goes a heady mixture of boiled-but-still-crunchy channa dal, onion, diced potato and two tamarind-based sauces, one sour and one sweet.

Each gol is eaten whole, down the hatch, and I’m warned to get a move on as the clock is ticking. There’s no time to linger before the liquid innards render the bottoms soggy.

My last two gols do indeed collapse, but I love them just as much as their five predecessors.

Each one is a veritable mouthful of flavour explosion, all with a mild chilli hit.

They’re tangy magic of the highest order!

Also called pani puri, I can see these becoming a regular post-school snack for Bennie and I.

But a meal they do not make, so I resort to my trusty choice of chole bhatura ($7), which I was unaware Classic Curry produced a version of despite the frequency with which I’ve eaten here in recent years.

Oh God, this is outstanding – right up there with the recently sampled rendition at Sharma’s and the earlier experience at Bikanos in Werribee!

The breads are light, ungreasy and so fresh they emit steam when torn open.

The chick pea curry is mild with a more sophisticated gravy than is often the case.

The yogurt is creamy and a little salty in a delicious way.

On the side and joining sliced red onion is a dab of fresh chutney made with onions and boasting tremendous flavour from fresh mint.

As others have created blogs dedicated to, say, parmas and burgers, so does Consider The Sauce seem to be heading in a similar direction with chole bhatura.

But given its almost total invisibility on food blogs and in the broader foodie media – dosas, for instance, get much better coverage – it seems a job that requires doing!

Classic Curry (Sunshine) on Urbanspoon

The Pie & Pastry House

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166 Churchill Ave, Braybrook. Phone: 9311 3388

Gotta love an old-school pie shop – and it’s a delight that there’s so many in the western suburbs, happily holding their own amid the multicultural swirl.

The Pie & Pastry House, operating since 1952 according the its business card, certainly fits the bill right from the decor and screen door to the milkshake machine and technicolour display of doughnuts.

It lives in a Braybrook shopping strip that features a couple of Filipino places awaiting our further exploration and opposite a park and adventure playground at which we’ve attended many a birthday party.

I order my standard lunch in such places – a plain beef pie and a sausage roll.

The plastic cutlery is a bit of a downer, offset by the tomato sauce coming in squeeze bottle form rather than the a horrid sachet.

The pastry outer of my sausage roll is incredibly flaky, and soon the whole table is flecked with it. It’s just OK, tending towards blandness – as sausage rolls tend to do.

The pie, pastry not so flaky, is better, though in need of a seasoning boost by my way of thinking.

I like my lunch items, and I sense that they and the other lines the shop sells are perfectly suited for its loyal and long-term customers, quite a few of whom come and go as I am going about my lunch business.

The vanilla slices look scrumptious.

The ginormous family-size pasties, at $9.50, look like an outright bargain and destined soon for a test run on our dinner table. Visual appraisal suggests that with a bit of help from salad on the side, they’d feed two adults and two kids no problem

All I take away with me though are a single lemon tart ($1.25) and a single cream shortbread ($1).

The former is, fittingly, old-school, with a slightly chewy filling.

The latter is a sensational taste grenade – two pieces of light, fresh shortbread, joined by a smooth vanilla cream and dusted in icing sugar.

It’s not just the highlight of the day – it’s the best of the week.

Such a simple, affordable pleasure!

Consider The Sauce’s Greatest Hits

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Gamekeepers Secret Country Inn

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1555 Melton Hwy, Rockbank. Phone: 9747 1000

The Olde English thing has never worked for me.

I’d be hard pressed to tell authentic Olde English from faux Olde English.

In fact, I harbour suspicions that there is no such thing as authentic Olde English, even though I lived there for a few years a very long time ago.

But as I wander around the somewhat vast dining room of Gamekeepers Secret Country Inn, I rapidly warm to the place.

How can I not when its embracing of the gamey theme is done with such brazen, unapologetic and politically incorrect zeal?

There are formerly live things of the furred, feathered and scaled variety hanging from the ceilings and adorning the walls wherever I look. They’re now very much of the dead persuasion.

It was Keith of the venerable Heather Dell bakery in Yarraville from whom we got the tip about this place, but it’s a taken a year for me to find my way here.

With a drive on the Bacchus Marsh-Geelong road beckoning after lunch is done, I am finding the change of routine a tonic. I have an armful of newly-arrived CDs of the Tex-Mex and swamp pop variety, and even Hawaiian guitar recorded in Paris in the ’30s, to keep me very fine company. I love the internet!

Quite oddly the establishment’s food fare seems to be lacking any offerings of a game-based tucker equivalent of the overwhelming theme of the decor.

The food on the main menu and the cheapo lunch list that is the focus of myself, and presumably the handful of other tables in use for this midweek lunch, features a regular lineup of oysters, pasta, salads, ribs, steaks, a seafood platter, roast duck, garlic prawns and so on.

Typical country pub fare, in other words – its own kind of comfort food. This change of routine, too, can sometimes be a tonic and I’m looking forward to my lunch.

Having already perused the option at the inn’s website, I have my heart set on the corned beef from the lunch list, which also includes braised lamb shank, steak sandwich and beer-battered fish and chips – all for $14.50.

How nice and quirky is it to be charged $14.50 for something – as opposed to, say, $13.99 or $14.99?

The vegetable component of my lunch is very good – they’re cooked through but still have a beaut element of crunch.

The mashed spuds aren’t a patch on the coarse skin-on version we rustle up at home with just olive oil, salt, pepper and parsley, but I like it anyway.

The sauce, using a seeded mustard, has sufficient tang to overwhelm my three medium-thick and very mildy-flavoured slices of corned beef.

Remember back a decade or more ago when corned beef became so very trendy around Melbourne? This is like that – I hanker for the heftier, saltier flavour whack that resides in memory of the corned beef served countless time to me during my upbringing by that most superb of cooks, Pauline Ethel Weir. (Hi Mum!)

Maybe it’s another trick of the mind.

In any case, I save my last slice of Gamekeepers corned beef to savour at the end of my meal, at which point the flavours do come through with a strongish whiff of cloves.

It’s all good and I enjoy my lunch. The bill of $14.50 seems pretty fair for this kind of food in this kind of place.

After eating, I embark on another stroll around, taking in more of the dead critters and the music room upstairs. The entertainment fare seems to be very much of the Kenny, Dolly, Big O and Neil variety.

After paying and exiting, I walk across to the neighbouring Galli winery, where I am knocked out by the gorgeous dining room and peruse their menus, which actually traverse very similar territory and price range as those of the inn I have just departed.

Another one for the hit list!

My first ever drive on the road from Bacchus Marsh to Geelong is pleasant but somewhat featureless, though I do see lots of parrot-type birds – of the live variety this time.

The soundtrack is fabulous.

Game Keepers Secret Country Inn on Urbanspoon

Pho Tam

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 Shop 7-9, Leeds St, Footscray. Phone: 9687 2680

These days, when desiring to be out and about in Footscray central, we find it rewarding and less time consuming to park by the railways tracks, just around the corner from the Dancing Mutt.

In the days when we were still falling for the folly of attempting to park on the other side of the CED (Central Eating District), we often passed Pho Tam going elsewhere, mainly because it always seemed so crowded and busy.

I’ve spent an aimless day-off half-hour wandering between those two outer extremes of the CED with no particular place to go, as that zealous fan of multicultural food, Chuck Berry, once famously sung.

It’s Pho Tam or retrace my steps. I am happy to step through the doorway.

I like the plain wooden tables and chairs, the Viet pop at just the right volume and smiling, prompt service.

I especially like the symbolic artwork in the windows that links maps of Australia and Vietnam with a bowl and chopsticks. Pity it doesn’t photograph too well!

Customers are few, and for my most of lunch’s duration I am alone.

The menu is varied and full of interest.

I consider the mi Quang Bennie and I had tried the previous week at the brand new Braybrook place Quan Viet.

I finally decide on a dish I’ve never before seen in a Vietnamese eatery – goat curry (ca ri de). At $11, it’s a buck more than the chicken wing curry (ca ri ga) and the stewed beef (bo kho). Instead of noodles, I ask for the bread option.

I am surprised to get two crusty rolls with my bowl of intrigue. Asking if it’s mandatory to fully consume both, I am told that there’ll be no dessert for me unless I do.

As I expect, my curry is thin, mild and on the bone.

I like it  a lot.

The meat comes easily from the bone, though I thoroughly enjoy eating with zen-like deliberation in order to preserve teeth into which I have invested many thousands to the vast enrichment of my dentist.

Unlike many other experiences with cheaper, bone-in cuts of meat – both at home and eating out – there is little obvious fat, though for reasons both to do with squeamishness and healthiness I do set aside the bits of flabby goat hide.

There’s onions galore – thin slices and thicker chunks of the adult variety; chopped and segments of the young, green type.

But as with roti and Malaysian-style curry, in many ways the main event is the gravy/soup and the bread – and I’m surprised that I devour far more of my second, lovely role than I had expected.

Still, I do not quite finish it, so … no dessert for me!

The Footscray Food Blog review of Pho Tam is here.

Pho Tam on Urbanspoon

Chef Lagenda revisted

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16 Pin Oak Crescent, Flemington. Phone: 9376 2668

Since out earlier visits to Chef Lagenda and its cheek-by-jowl neighbour Laksa King, our incessant orbiting has found us looking elsewhere for our jollies.

In the meantime, it’s been a bunch of fun reading myriad comments about both – comparing them, weighing up the various pluses and minuses, sometimes opining that one is superior to the other and even pondering the politics/relationship between the two.

We care nothing for that last point, and if we rate one above the other – and after today’s lunch, we most certainly do – it seems beyond dispute to us that whatever the rivalry between the Flemington neighbours, it is actually good for the business of both in the long-term.

A feature of the Chef Lagenda menu is the Meal Deal.

For $9.50, they offer a choice of two meats (steamed chicken, roast chicken, BBQ pork, soya duck), noodles or rice (flat rice noodles, hokkien noodles, vermicelli, egg noodles, chicken rice) and soup (clear chicken, laksa, tom yum, soya sauce (dry)).

Bennie goes BBQ pork, roast chicken, hokkien and tom yum and loves it, slurping and sipping with gusto.

As far as I’m aware this his first prolonged exposure to tom yum and it’s mild enough to be no problem, though it seems a little on the sweet side to me and he tires of it before the end.

The meats are in biggish chunks and, oddly, taste more like Western roasts than is usual in Asian eateries, and a little on the dry side, too. No matter – there’s plenty of moisture going on, including the bed of yummy wilted bean sprouts on which the meats reside.

The Meal Deal is a good deal, especially I suspect for kids.

I go for the straight-up bog standard curry laksa ($9.20) – and it’s a beauty.

At first glance, it lacks the devastating and lusty oomph of the laksa swooned over this year at Nasi Lemak House.

But it is of broader and deeper appeal.

Rather than usual couple of prawn tails, this rendition features something like half a dozen fat doozies full of flavour. Exceptional! (I’d already scarfed a couple before I realised this laksa’s prawn count was unusual, so cannot be more precise …)

Likewise, the fish cake is more thickly sliced than is the norm.

There’s ample bits of chicken and chewy juicy tofu, and the soup/gravy is good, though on the mild side.

The crowning glory is the largish slice of eggplant sitting atop the lot – it’s slippery, delicious and Bennie gets none of it.  Ha!

We like the quirky crooked-house layout of Chef Lagenda, and the service is just as good as the food.

The Chef Lagenda website is here.

Chef Lagenda on Urbanspoon

Quan Viet

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103 South Rd, Braybrook. Phone: 9312 1009

For many years, every time we drove past the slightly ramshackle yet high-potential shopping strip on South Rd, Braybrook, we would scan the shopfronts eagerly.

Why not? After all, it’s just the sort of precinct that regularly delivers us food gratification.

We have always been disappointed, though.

A locked-up premises going by the splendid name of Extreme Pizza & Kebab, a couple of beauty salons and groceries but little more to inspire us to explore further.

Until a few weeks’ back, when there it was – bingo! – right on the corner: A brand new Vietnamese eatery.

Our mid-week visit is our first, the place is companionably busy but the service is great.

The vibe is nice – about midway between your standard, tiled, formica-laden pho joint and some of the swisher joints in Footscray central.

We are first seated at a tiny table for two, but then invited to move a bigger option near the front window that affords us more room for all the bits and pieces, including Bennie’s lurid drink.

The menu seems to throw up few real surprises or points of difference.

There is pho, the usual rice dishes, spring and paper rolls, although there is also beef stew on rice or egg noodle (hu tieu/mi bo kho, $9) and crab meat fried rice (com chien cua, $11).

Despite that, we manage a combined order that is unusually innovative for us.

On the illustrated menu Bennie stabs a digit at the Quang style rice noodles (mi Quang, $9) and says: “I want that!”

This is very, very fine, though Bennie is put off slightly by the presence of two hard-boiled egg halves.

A popular dish from the provinces of Quang Nam and Da Nang in the south central coast of Vietnam, this is built on a hearty handful of very wide, slippery and delicious rice noodles coloured/flavoured with turmeric. The effect is just like the kind of sexy artisan pasta you might get in a posh Italian joint like Grossi Florentino – and pay about $30 or so for the privilege!

Also on board are a fish-based stock, chicken that seems to be stewed rather than steamed or fried, two fat prawns still in their crunchy shells, peanuts and strips of juicy, fatty pork, the lot topped by a couple of commercial prawn crackers and some mint.

It’s all good and I covet it. It’s a refreshing option to the many other soup/noodle options – a bit like Assam laksa is to its Malaysian soup/noodles colleagues.

Bennie likewise covets my order – Vietnamese pan-fried crepe (banh xeo, $11).

This has less stuffing than I’ve had at the likes of Pho Hien Saigon in Sunshine or Wild Rice in Williamstown. In some ways, this is no bad things as it allows the flavour of turmeric-tinged rice flour pancake to come through.

As Bennie memorably opines: “It’s fried and floppy at the same time!”

The filling of the same pork strips as in Bennie’s soup, fine small/medium shell-on prawn tails and bean sprouts is fine with the pancake, fish sauce/chilli dipping concoction and voluminous plate of leafy wonders and mint.

Halfway through our dinner, Bennie and I do swappsies, though I then discover the lad has slurped all the fangtastic noodles. No fair!

Quan Viet seems likely to prosper and thrive not only based on its fine food, which we’re keen to try again soonish.

Like Minh Hy, just up the road apiece in Sunshine, Quan Viet stands out for being the only outlet of its kind in the surrounding neighbourhood.

Check out a much more in-depth review at Footscray Food Blog here.

Quan Viet on Urbanspoon

KFC Signature Series burgers

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Ready, steady … crook?

Well, actually – no.

Chef Darren Simpson, who we know of only from the odd time we used to watch Ready Steady Cook, has come in for a good deal of sometimes venomous stick for taking the KFC dosh and having his name and image affixed to the chain’s line of supposedly deluxe burgers.

Like just about everyone else, we sniggered.

Good luck to him, though.

Truth is, if I was in the same position as he or fellow foodie celebs such as Maeve O’Meara or Curtis Stone, I’d probably be doing exactly the same. Kids to put through school and hay to be made while the sun shines and all that.

As the barbs flew amid talk that Simpson had comprehensively trashed whatever reputation he had, he was moved to comment: “I’m not sure how many of these critics have actually tried my burgers, but I think they should do that before passing judgment.”

Well, now we have – and our judgment is … nowhere near as bad as we expected.

As we pull into the local Barkly St KFC outlet, Bennie is gobsmacked more than surprised or delighted.

We’ve talked about it for weeks, so he can’t quite believe his dad is really going to do this.

We order one apiece of the two burgers to share – smoked bacon and parmesan, and sweet BBQ and carelmised onion.

My expectations are below zero.

I warn Bennie that if this goes as badly as I expect, we’ll out of there pronto and up the road for a dosa.

I expect this food to be so awful as to be beyond redemption. And certainly I expect it to look nothing like the images conveyed by TV trickery.

The latter is certainly true.

These are diminutive sandwiches.

Nor does the chicken bulge out from under the “warm sourdough buns” as strongly suggested in the advertising. Big surprise, eh?

But the buns ARE superior to the normal unbread served by the major chains.

The other lauded protagonists – parmesan, real carmelised onion, BBQ sauce, chilli sauce, bacon – are in as short supply as is the chicken.

And the bacon is under-cooked.

There are only a few tantalising moments as that trademark KFC chicken flavour merges with the rest to deliver something approaching flavoursome.

Worse, as we drive away we agree that we struggled to tell the difference between the two – something confirmed when we get home and I can’t tell one from the other when I upload the photos.

Still, our burgers are edible in a way that I truly didn’t expect.

Far from memorable in either a good or a bad way – and that, indeed, does exceed my expectations.

And far from the “car crash” described in the only pertinent review I was able to find the previous night.

At $6.95 each, though, we can’t help but compare them very unfavourably with the similarly priced and truly memorable sandwiches we experienced recently at La Morentia.

Sharma’s Indian Sweet & Curry House

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Sharma’s Indian Sweet & Curry House, 4/350 Taylors Rd, Taylors Lakes. Phone: 9356 4400

Sharma’s has been open for about a year and is situated in a small shopping centre a few blocks from Watergardens Town Centre.

Outside and in it superficially looks like a simple suburban Indian takeaway joint.

It doesn’t take too much of a closer look, though, to discover this is emphatically not the case.

Sharma’s is some serious Indian foodery, let me tell you.

They have so many bases covered, at prices significantly below those of more formal Indian places, that I am excited about the prospects of returning with my co-blogger and various friends in coming months.

I am saddened that Sharma’s is not just around the corner.

I am frustrated that today’s weekend solo outing so restricts my ability to graze the menu.

On the extensive menu they list dosas, Punjabi breakfast fare and chat snacks such as bhel puri.

And instead of a single goat dish as featured at so many Indian places, Sharma’s lists five.

There’s an Indo-Chinese section, meat curries are about the $13 mark, vegetable curries about $10 and the bread listing is long.

At the counter there are fine-looking displays of lusciously rich sweets ($18-24 a kilogram) and salty, crunchy spicy snacks know as namkeen ($16 a kilogram). I buy two $2 bags of the latter to take home – one heavy with puffed rice and peanuts, the other with crunchy noodles.

They even list six soups – and it’s with one of those that I start my lunch. I regret, though, ordering the lentil number ($4) when seeing and tasting how they do mushroom soup may’ve been far more interesting.

Consisting of dals mung, masur and channa, and turmeric, salt and mustard seeds, this is about as straitlaced as Indian food gets. It’s fine in its own plain way, but may be better appreciated as part of a thali or Indian vego feast.

Next up, I simply can’t resist Sharma’s version of the irresistible thali spread of puris, chick pea curry, yogurt and condiments that is here called chana bhatura – despite the nagging feeling that I should be pursuing more variety on behalf of Consider The Sauce and its readers.

Hey, it’s my lunch, OK, and I’ll try to do better next time …

Seriously, though, I don’t think the bar can go much higher on this dish than what I am served here – it’s magnificent in every way:

Puris hot, fresh and no more oily than is acceptable.

Yogurt creamy, lightly perfumed with cumin and a little on the sweet side.

Chick peas very good with a mild chilli kick.

Commercial piquant hot pickle, a little dab of spicy mint chutney and crunchy red onion bits.

And the price – $7.50!

It’s perfect!

Sharma's Indian Sweet & Curry House on Urbanspoon

Sunday morning at Vic Market

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Two weisswursts – one with sinus-blasting hot English, the other with Dijon.

A pricey ($4) but very good cafe latte at a serious coffee joint.

A small bar of organic chocolate to take home.

I dimly remember a time when the Vic market was pretty much moribund on Sundays. A few stalls in the food hall open, and far from all of them open in the wide open acres of general merchandise and clothing.

It’s all go these days – almost everything open, but with a pleasing drop in the sometimes fraught ambiance and crowded scenes that are the market on Saturday mornings.

Sometimes it’s where I like to go – even with a house chockers with food and no special shopping needs pressing.

Outside the food areas, it’s fun to pick out the genuine products and bargains, shining like diamonds amid vast spaces of general all-round tackiness.

Loving Earth chocolate uses agave syrup instead of cane sugar and is described as “essentially uncooked, unprocessed chocolate in its pure rich essential form”.

Market Lane Coffee, adjacent the market food hall, is a Serious Coffee Establishment. I like my cafe latte and I like the passion of their endeavours.

There’s one at Prahran Market, too.

La Morenita Latin Cuisine: New menu

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67 Berkshire Rd, Sunshine North. Phone: 9311 2911

If La Morenita has fallen off our radar a little in terms of eating in since we first discovered the place, it remains a reliable regular for the odd coffee and sweetie and – even more so – take-out empanadas for the freezer and school/work lunch boxes.

We love those empanadas!

It was on a recent empanada run that we happily noticed that La Morenita’s in-house menu had grown with several new additions.

It’s time to check them out!

They include chorizo con huevos for a keenly priced $5, but we figure we’ll leave those for breakfast some time.

The rest of the new stuff is mostly South American sandwiches, but being robust of appetite we choose three of them to share.

We do a sort of reverse-Goldilocks, starting with the littlest, moving on to a bigger number and ending with the biggest.

First up is the arolloado ($5) of sliced pork, avocado and mayo.

It comes in a flatter roll than shown in the photo on the blackboard menu. The sliced pork seems to be more like some sort of pressed ham. Whatever the case, this is a tasty winner.

Next up … the chacarero ($5) of steak, cheese, tomato, mayo, greens beans and hot green chilli.

Now this different! As ever here the sliced beef is very tasty and nicely chewy. There’s a cool chilli undertow, but the best aspect is provided by the greens beans. They’re cooked but still have a little bite left in them, which delivers a most unsandwich-like texture. Another winner!

Rolling right along … we complete our increasingly enjoyable lunch with the chivito ($8), which comprises steak, bacon, ham, lettuce, tomato, tasty cheese, boiled egg, roast capsicum, black olives, onion mayo.

Wowee – what is this? A glorified steak sandwich? Well, yes, if you want to look at that way. It also bears comparison in terms of substance and price to the kind of ritzy burgers served up by Grill’d and Burger Edge.

As with the chacarero, though, there is something delectably different about it that makes it a sandwich to cherish.

And with the inclusion of olives, roast capsicum and cured meats, it strikes me as being a second cousin of the muffaletta, that famous sandwich of New Orleans.

I love it. Bennie likes it, too, but fastidiously picks out the egg and olive bits. Bad Bennie!

We love all our La Morenita sandwiches for their striking personalities.

Gooey with mayo, health food this is not; delicious it is.

With a couple of imported soft drinks the total damage is a fine $23.

Our earlier La Morenita post is here.

La Morenita Latin Cuisine on Urbanspoon

Footscray Best Kebab House revisited …

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93 Nicholson St, Footscray. Phone: 9689 0777

When considering the pros and cons of running a food blog, it’s tempting to simply state: “It’s all good!”

And certainly, in terms of both expectations and unexpected delights and surprises, getting Consider The Sauce up and running has been an overwhelmingly enjoyable and satisfying experience.

But if there is one, albeit minor, downside it is this: Revisiting old and muchly favoured regulars, as well as new discoveries and finds that deserve to become so, has become just that little bit more difficult.

The pressure is on for the next blog post!

Through it all, however, we have retained Footscray Best Kebab House as a regular haunt, so highly do we dig the food – and even though it was covered in one of our very early pieces. 

In this case, fronting up is an especially enjoyable proposition as we are being joined by Ms Baklover of Footscray Food Blog fame and her girls, all of for whom this is a debut visit to FBKB.

We are a tad early, so being sans either my usual book or newspaper, it’s supremely pleasurable to just sit for a quiet moment. I contemplate a lazy, relaxing day ahead with my son. I consider the changeless surrounds of Footscray Best Kebab House. Like other institutions around the city – Pellegrini’s is an oft-quoted example – the prices have crept up but all else is just as it ever was.

Or so it seems. It may be a trick of the mind, but it’s one I’m happy to go along with.

As ever, the bread is fresh and warm, with some of the pieces having a nice crustiness to them. It’s a nice pacifier, too, for young children restless with food on their minds.

Bennie and I start with a couple of stuffed vine leaves, cold thanks. In the end, I end up eating both, Bennie being far too distracted by the juicy meats, dips and salads to come. The dolmades are good, but not as memorable as some I recall from previous visits.

We feel like something a little different from our usual instant-gratification trip of chicken and lamb from the spit, so go for the large adana kebab meal to share ($13.50).

It’s all present and accounted for:

Superb rice on to and into which the meat juices and dips seep.

A crunchy, lemony and ultra-fresh salad of finely diced bits and pieces that Ms Baklover suspects is sprinkled with sumac. I’m not sure about that. It’s the same topping we’ve always had here. Maybe it’s the Turkish equivalent?

A small serve, by request, of the reliably oily and delicious potato salad.

Dips in the form of cacik (cucumber and yogurt) and chilli dip. There’s two other kebab joints within a few minutes walk who do their own chilli dips, as does the very good Flemo kebab establishment. But none of them come even slightly close to this masterpiece of crunch and tang.

The only disappointment – and it’s only a slight one – is the adana kebab meat. It’s just as we like our kebab meaty bits – crusty, a little chewy, a little salty, but – in this case – a little too much on the dry side.

We earlier demurred in regards to the large shish kebab meal on the basis of price – it’s up to $17.50 these days.

That turns out to be a mistake. Ms Baklover orders it for her and her kids, and we’re jealous.

It’s just the right size for one big mouth and three little ones. Let me try that another way … It’s just the right size for mum and her three girls.

Ms Baklover seems to share our high esteem for the chilli dip and just loves the big and luxuriously tender chunks of marinated lamb and chicken.

The girls partake of all, sometimes in the face of maternal determination that it be so, but in the end show a marked preference for … the wonderful Turkish bread.

In terms of our eating-out habits, this food seems just below the top-of-the-class leaner, cleaner range of Viet options in terms of nutrition and healthiness. And the damage for Bennie and I – two stuffed vine leaves, two soft drinks, large meat/dips/salad/rice meal – is an excellent $20.

We adjourn for a somewhat chaotic but nevertheless enjoyable coffee and baklava at Babylon just down the road.

Footscray Best Kebab House – long may it reign as one of our very favourite places!

And thanks to the Baklovers for the company!

Footscray Best Kebab House on Urbanspoon

Photograph: BENNIE WEIR

Hien Vuong 1

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37 Leeds St, Footscray. Phone: 9687 1470

Expert assessment of my Saturday shopping list suggests Footscray Market is the best bet for ease and pricing.

I may struggle with the hambone, ham hock or bacon bones for the next day’s red beans and rice, and a visit to the market’s supermarket just for milk is probably unwarranted – but other than that it should be a sweet experience.

So it is I head up the ramps for the extremely cheap market parking, ending up – for the first time ever – on the roof. Great views!

First things first, though – never shop, especially in a cool market, on an empty stomach.

I’ve been a visitor to Hien Vuong 1 a few times previous, though with little or no recollection of taste sensations. Maybe pretty good pho and bo kho (beef casserole).

Nevertheless, after a nerve-jangling week I find the tiled floor, chromed furniture and Viet pop enormously comforting. This, today, right now, is where I belong.

It’s a hardcore pho joint that offers a little more variety than most.

Thus it is that I order the special chicken rice with chicken (com ga hai nam).

This is a gamble, no doubt. As the Vietnamese title denotes, this is a Viet twist on hainanese chicken rice of Malaysian derivation.

My strike rate at ordering this dish at non-Malay places is pretty much zero – ranging from utterly lame to the outright bizarre (the otherwise exemplary Carlton Chinese Noodle Cafe in Rathdowne St, review forthcoming).

I need not have worried, as my lunch is beaut.

There’s no soup, but all the other bells and whistles – so important for this dish – are present.

The chilli/carrot/fish sauce concoction on the side gets into the spirit of the occasion by coming with mashed ginger.

The rice is OK, but has no discernible chicken flavour. It’s studded with egg, slivers of fried onion and little crunchy grenades of crackly pork.

There’s three cucumber slices, two of tomato, a handful of elongated pickled carrot, and more similarly pickled carrot that is shredded and part of jumble with lettuce and mint.

The chicken is well-cooked, tender and – yes! – easily removed from the bone.

Best of all, all these components are in exactly the right proportions, with the last of each of them disappearing with the last mouthful. This is something that rates really highly with me.

Well-satisfied, I head into the market on my grocery mission just as the music situation takes a surreal turn with a cheesy cocktail bar Viet version of House Of  The Rising Sun.

A tip for semi-regular users of Footscray Market, as we are: The market has instituted a pay-station method of paying for parking. There is no pay station on the roof, so I make more use of the market’s lumbering elevators than anticipated.

Ms Baklover at Footscray Food Blog was in a particularly meditative mood when she had pho here.

Hien Vuong 1 on Urbanspoon

The Cornershop

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11 Ballarat St, Yarraville. Phone: 9689 0052

Perhaps our enjoyment of the right-in-our-backyard Yarraville village precinct would be enhanced if we didn’t pigheadedly adhere to the belief that, as we’ve (very) local, it somehow “belongs” to us all of every day of every week.

For, in truth, the busy, food-heavy streets of Anderson and Ballarat have much in common with other well-known Melbourne zones, wherein the locals are basically disenfranchised at the pointy end of the week and weekends.

I’m thinking of the likes of Brunswick St, Fitzroy, and Fitzroy St and Acland St, St Kilda.

For us Yarravillers, things get messy on Friday night, worse on Saturday and worse again on Sunday.

The only options, really, are stay at home, hit-and-run missions for homecooking or adventures further away in, say, St Albans or Flemington.

These mad crush dynamics apply in particular to popular places such as The Cornershop.

Yet twice this week I have enjoyed lovely day-off lunches during which there was ample elbow room and superb food served by unharried, efficient and obliging staff.

Early in the piece it was the Lebanese salad with shanklish cheese and sumac ($14.50). It was tangy and crunchy and studded with pita pieces that retained some semblance of crunch right to the last delicious mouthful.

 

 

Because of the crowd factor, The Cornershop has evolved into mainly a coffee spot for us. Yet despite the crowds, its popularity is not universal – a peculiar ambivalence on the part of significant minority is in evidence in comments about the place at both Urbanspoon and Footscray Food Blog.

Our own experiences have likewise been a little uneven, an early lowlight being told 15 minutes after ordering one of the pide sandwiches that those particular ingredients were no longer in-house; nor were those required for our second choice. Our third choice was lunch elsewhere.

That’s all easy to forget, though, when I chow down – later in the week but still with plenty of space and service – on the spiced, braised meatballs with grilled Turkish bread and parmesan ($15).

This a little ritzy and pricey by my usual lunch standards – almost on a level of fine dining! – but it’s so darn good. And worth every cent.

The half-dozen cheese-dusted meatballs are firm at the outset, tender under forkish ministrations but only very midly spiced.

The superbly fresh rocket leaves work both as salad and as a nicely soggy foil for the tangy tomato sauce.

But the real star is lengthy slice of Turkish bread, which is alive with a mindblowingly tasty aroma and flavour from being grilled. It’s softer than it looks and work just right for wiping out the last remnants of the sauce.

Yarraville? Maybe it’s all in the timing.

 

The Cornershop on Urbanspoon

Bunnings sausage sizzle

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Bunnings, 290-298 Millers Rd, Altona. Phone: 8331 5800

At just about high noon, as I depart the parking lot at the Altona branch of Bunnings, I am liberally adorned with the not unpleasant pong of Aroma de Sausage Sizzle.

This seems a small price to pay for the fun of watching the happy and hard-working crew from Seaholme Primary School going about the serious business of raising funds for their school via a Bunnings sausage sizzle.

Not to mention the scarfing of two delicious snags on bread, hold the onions, judicious dabs of tomato sauce and mustard.

The previous year, they’d raised $1200 and this year they’re looking to do significantly better.

I reckon their chances are looking pretty good.

There’s an ebb and flow to the sausage trade this morning, but it’s pretty intense, and there seems to be a rush hour, well, every 10 minutes or so.

Just about everyone who is done with their chores at Bunnings, and more than a few just starting, seems to stop by for snags for themselves and their families.

Bolstering the air of optimism among Team Seaholme is the fact that the following day is Fathers Day, so Bunnings is likely to be doing a roaring trade.

The school’s sausage sizzle co-ordinator, Suzanne Croft (that’s her in the pic above, with sunnies, third from right) fills me on the preparations required to get the show up and running.

The sausage sizzles are so popular and such an effective method of raising desperately needed money for all sorts of community groups that the waiting lists can often be longer than six months.

Bunnings supplies the cooking facilities and marquee, the community groups supply the rest.

Suzanne sourced the bread and sausages (at $4 a kilogram) from Aussie Farmers Direct. The local franchise holder is a school parent, but Suzanne tells me this sort of community engagement is what the company does anyhow.

She hit up various local supermarkets for vouchers she redeemed for canned soft drinks and condiments.

She estimates the cash outgoings for the school at about $50.

They’re selling snags for $2.50 and drinks for $1.50 – and it’s just about all profit.

These sausage sizzles are undoubtedly a good look and good business for Bunnings, but I reckon they’re pretty much a win-win situation all round – making a lot of people happy and doing good, too.

They’ve certainly become a colourful, notable part of the Australian weekend landscape.

Officeworks do them, too.

And as I head for Sunshine Fresh Food Market, I pass another in the forecourt of Tasman Market Fresh Meats in Brooklyn.

Sure seems to beat the drip-drip-drip and rather passive fundraising method of flogging sad-sack chocolate bears and other candy in workplaces!

***

Post-script:

Hi Kenny,

Just thought I’d drop you a line and let you know that on Saturday we made a profit of $1,553 from the Bunnings BBQ for our school – Seaholme Primary.

 I hope you enjoyed the sausage … we had many comments approving of them. It would be great if you could mention that Aussie Farmers Direct were the suppliers of those sausages.

 Cheers, Suzanne Croft.

Chick N Ranch

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149 Minerva Rd, Geelong West. Phone: 5298 1921

Chicken shop in an old servo?

It drew me like a magnet.

I chat to the main Ranch hand, Tony Kopty, outside while I take photos.

He tells me that while his mob have been running the show for only a couple of years, the once-was-a-servo has served as a chicken shop of one variety or another for 20.

I tell him it’s notable that several posters on the joint’s Facebook page use words such as “great for hangovers” or some such.

“You should see them on Sundays, about midday, rolling up here like zombies,” he says with a laugh.

Fuelled by the appeal of the location and its former use, as well as the outfit’s cool name, I have notions of something a little more funky than your typical Oz chicken shop.

What I get is your typical Oz chicken shop.

For me, two of the benchmarks for a cutting-edge, exemplary chicken shop experience are real cutlery/crockery and coleslaw that’s not drowning in mayo.

I get none of that here. And stupidly, I forget to take a pic or two before getting stuck into my lunch of half a chook, chips, gravy, coleslaw and soft drink. By the time I remember, it’s not in the least bit photogenic.

The chicken is good, the chips a bit tired on it but OK, while the salad has so much mayo I’m half expecting it to flow out the door.

Yes, I’ve had better chick shop feeds … but, by heck, I’ve had plenty a whole lot worse, too.

So it’s a typical Oz chicken shop meal in a typical Oz chicken shop.

Closer to home, another outfit that lives in an old servo can be found at Stephz in Sunshine.