Sydney yum cha

If only I could remember the name of this restaurant. It was great.

Yum cha at the Sydney Fish Markets

Fisherman's Wharf Seafood Restaurant is at the end of the Fish Markets arcade and up the stairs.

We went for lunch one Tuesday. I was transfixed by the prawns in the tank. The way they scoot along the floor without moving, like running on a treadmill. Like layers of leaves rustling on a windy street. The yum cha was great too, especially my favourite one, the fried oval-shaped rice dumplings with BBQ pork inside. There were some fantastic prawn and vegetable steamed ones and the good old silken tofu in cold coconut soup. Then I found the crab tanks. And the lobster tanks. Who needs a lava lamp or a meditation tape when you can watch seafood?

Four random images

These are from my week in Sydney. It took us eleven hours to drive there, and only one to fly back!


The CWA park in Grafton, where we stopped for a breakfast of chicken legs, watermelon and pomegranate seeds.










The awesomely funky letterbox/sculpture outside the arthouse private church, The Kirk, in Surry Hills.















Stopping at one end of King Street, Newtown, for some water (on a 34C day) and to read a quiet chapter of my book, I noticed a bra in a tree. Intriguing. Looks like this is the excitement end of town!




Haven't we all wanted to scrawl our feelings about service providers on the nearest public noticeboard?
(Underneath, someone else has written "but vodafone is nice").

Zushi, Sydney

Sashimi salad
salmon sashimi on mixed-leaf salad with soy/mirin dressing










Whiting tempura
lightly battered whiting fillets served with a ponzu and chili dipping sauce
















Gyoza roll
gyoza dumplings rolled inside-out with cucumber, finished with sesame seeds, shallots and wasabi mayonnaise















We visited Zushi, a small sushi restaurant in Victoria St, Darlinghurst, Sydney. It was voted Australia's Favourite Japanese Restaurant in the Lifestyle Food Awards, 2007, plus it wasn't too far from temporary-home in Annandale, so we thought we'd give it a try.
As well as these three dishes, we also tried the beef tataki salad and the chili edamame.

The verdict: 6 out of 10. All the dishes were good, especially the beef and salmon. The gyoza roll was good, but not great. Chili edamame was delicious. Service was pretty bad: the waiter took away our dishes and gave us the bill without asking for it, basically asking us to leave (even though there was hardly anyone else there.) Plus, he looked like some sort of clubbing rent-boy, wearing jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap while serving. Attitude.
However, they do have Sapporo on tap and the food was very tasty.
Next door is Gelato Messina. I can personally recommend the pear and rhubarb gelato.

Two Sydney bakeries

Brasserie Bread and Sonoma. Both great. I would choose Brasserie over Sonoma for range of loaves, but Sonoma for ease of access and a ready-made lunch. The sandwiches in the glass case were mouth-watering.

Mere Catherine

Finally, after twenty years of hearing about how amazing this place is, I got to visit Mere Catherine, Potts Point, Sydney. Tiny, cosy, dark, eccentric restaurant that seats 15 or so. I had heard wondrous things about the chateaubriand, but as there were only two of us, Mum and I chose the pork in a creamy mustard sauce and the duck a l'orange for mains. Her duck was perfect: crispy, sweet-sauced, tender and juicy. My pork was wonderful, but we thought the mustard sauce was over-salty. To begin with we had had the salad with Roquefort dressing (very good) and a homemade slab of pate that came with triangles of toast. Excellent pate.

I was able to have a good chat with the miniscule old lady who runs the dining room: we spoke in French about the restaurant's origins and the fact that 90% of the patrons every night are repeat customers who never even have to look at the menu, as it hasn't changed since the 1970s when the original owner set the tone with simple French classics.

Seems like places like this are on the way out: it's a pity, as it's wonderful to find somewhere in the middle of the city where you can be welcomed like an old friend and enjoy a home-cooked meal.

Locantro Fine Foods

On a rainy, cold and windy Saturday morning in Sydney (you know the kind that turns your umbrella inside out and you end up like a wet rat), we visited this gorgeous little deli in Leichardt. At 7am, it was like a golden warm oasis of light in a sea of grey concrete. Beautiful, Italian-owned patisserie and delicatessen, wide range of smallgoods, pastries, drygoods and cheeses. They also make a great, strong, and tooth-biting coffee.

It was deserted. For breakfast, Mum and I ordered two coffees, a blueberry danish and a palmier. I love palmiers: ever since France I've been obsessed with their symmetrical loopy shape and sugary simplicity- perfect for coffee-dunking and a bit of a nibble. I also had a bit of a stickybeak round the shop, looking for anyting in particular that I'd be unlikely to find back in Brisbane. Happily, I didn't find anything. Queensland is no longer a cultural shopping backwater: everything you'd get in a third-generation Italian community deli you can get at Black Pearl, James St or Balaclava St. They had some great-looking risotto rice.

Behold the chocolate croissants, tiny blood orange tarts, eclairs, almond-filled galettes, raisin-studded pastry wheels, glazed to within an inch of their lives, lime cakes, chocolate ganache-coated puddings and fruit-filled doughnuts (or beignets as the French call them.) I'm so jealous that Mum lives just around the corner from these guys. If I lived close by, I would practically move in. Unfortunate but true. There's no point in denying it.

Busshari

Busshari is at 119 Macleay St, Potts Point, Sydney. Mum took me there for a great dinner, straight off the plane from Brisbane. After the cramped too-bright, too-loud flight, this place was just what I needed. Still loud, but warm and dim, filled with paper lanterns, hip locals, and delicious. Sweet sashimi numbs the pain.

We ate trout sashimi, pieces of rare wagyu sizzling on a fiery cube of aromatic clay, white radish salad and a cold green tea and soba noodle salad. I loved all the dishes, but I especially loved the presentation of the noodle salad. Couldn't get a picture (forgot camera, of course, but also it probably would have been too dark) but before the noodles arrived, they brought us each a tall square glass vase of cold broth (possibly dashi, but quite tangy) and some dipping sauces and wasabi. Then the noodles were brought: imagine a low wide bowl, and sitting in the middle, an upside-down ice bowl, forming an island in the big bowl. Then there was a bamboo sushi mat, rolled up and placed across the ice, with one end resting on the bowl rim for balance. Arranged around the ice were fresh salad ingredients, cucumber, radish, wombok, spring onion, very finely chopped and sliced. Then draped across the bamboo mat and the ice were two huge hanks of cold cooked noodles: one green tea and one the malty-coloured soba. The whole thing looked amazing. We also had some beautiful green tea and champagne. Great dinner.

Sydney Fish Markets

I had such a great time in Sydney. Pretty much my favourite thing was visiting the Fish Markets. Even though it was a weekend, so the auction floors were not operating, there was so much seafood there. I went into some sort of camera frenzy, running around like a maniac in a red coat taking photos of various fishlike creatures. It was FANTASTIC. The clams and the periwinkles, urchins, sashimi-grade salmon and tuna, huge-suckered tentacular giant octopus, mackerel, mussels, marron, bugs, scampi, school prawns, oysters, abalone, snapper, Atlantic salmon, crabs, all fresh, fresh, fresh. Local, Australian seafood, not imported, hardly ever frozen. Why do I find fish so exciting? Especially squid? We didn't even buy anything. No wait, we did. Some salt and pepper calamari: delicious, scattered with sliced green chili and unskinned. I love my photos of the fish markets.
There was also the Fish Market Cafe, where you could buy ready-to-eat cooked seafood in various configurations. You've got your oysters kilpatrick, your huge cheesy, greasy lobster mornay (someone we know ate this for BREAKFAST), your bacony scallops, and then of course there's the prawn dumpring. Mmm.
Look at this guy, buried up to his leering eyeballs in ice.

Blue swimmer crab. Imagine a dress in these colours...