Cup Specialty Coffee

Cup Coffee, Russell St at West End: I will gladly marry every single one of your baristas and have all their babies, if you promise never to close down and never to change. No altering with the years, no upgrades, no tweaking. Just stay frozen in time, just as you are, right now, today.

Today you made me a long black. It changed my life.

This coffee you made me contained not a single tiny trace of bitterness or acidity. I didn't know that was even possible, especially with black coffee. The flavour was not just full: it was rich. It was nuanced. It was full of earth and wind and terroir. It was juicy. It was fat and rippling with life.

I would gladly choose your coffee as my last meal. This is the best coffee in the universe. 10 out of 10.

Plus there is a funky robot on the wall and he is also on the cup itself. That increases the awesomeness to 11.

Onsen lunch

Can't remember the name of this onsen in northern Japan, but it was my first ever hot springs experience. As part of the visit an incredible lunch was included, served in our own private room with mountain views. Truly amazing. Beef cooked on our own stone hotplate with potato and corn, tempura vegetables, broth with enoki mushrooms and soup vegetables, sashimi, cooked eel, edamame, salad, and for dessert, a poached sweet tomato. Eleven out of ten!

Random sugar from Japan

These were amazing. Like fruit iceblocks in ball form, and with fantastic flavours like grape and lychee and melon. If these ever make it to Australia I will buy out their entire stock.
Peach jelly

















Cheesecake
Green tea and red bean bun cake
Peach soft candies
Green tea- flavoured Kit Kat

Okonomiyaki

My first okonomiyaki experience. People told me it was amazing. They were right. A giant savoury cake, filled with vegetables and various meats. You mix and fry it yourself on the teppan (hot plate).
We also had a delicious daikon salad to share.

The two wooden boxes stacked up on the left are filled with dried seaweed flakes and dried bonito flakes for sprinkling. The glazed black pot has a brush in it and contains the sweet thick okonomiyaki sauce. The three little bottles have soy sauce, oil and chili oil. Behind them is the mayonnaise, and in front is my glass of melon-flavoured Fanta. Over to the right is the Dalek-looking thing: it has a button on it you press to call the server and doubles as an astrology guide.

There's a good recipe for okonomiyaki here.

Cow tongue deliciousness

Mmm, gyutan. I could go some cow tongue right about now.

This Japanese restaurant specialises in cow tongue and serves it with rice, cucumber pickles and a broth, also made from tongue. The texture is slightly chewy, but also tender. You'd never know it was tongue. Really delicious.

Cold roast pork noodles

These were up there with the best noodles of my life. Cold ramen in a bowl of ice cubes and tangy savoury broth, topped with roast pork slices, ham, sweet egg slices, pickled ginger, cucumber, tomato, nori strips and mustard. There was a raw egg on the side for mixing through, but we preferred the noodles without. Perfect for a hot summer day.

The lunch that changed my life

Like all serendipitous events, this one came out of nowhere. It was Wednesday, July 8th, 2009. I was walking through Paris with my friend, looking for a sandwich shop. You see, I have a thing for classic jambon beurre sandwiches, and this one apparently won Le Monde's local competition for the best jambon beurre in town. The map I had showed the shop to be just outside the entrance to the Odeon metro stop, in Saint-Germain. We got there, hungry and cold, just after noon. We had been visiting the catacombs all morning: standing in queues, descending stairs, trudging through dripping corridors, staring through the gloom at thousands of skulls, dodging drips and puddles, ascending claustrophobically tight spiral staircases (at the top of which there was a defibrillator- creepy) and then wandering through the crowded town searching for a sandwich.

Of course, the shop was not to be found. I checked and re-checked the map. I asked. No one knew what I was talking about. We were getting hungrier.

Finally we abandoned the hunt for the jambon beurre, and walked around the corner to this little neighbourhood bistro, which had a table free out the front, just waiting for us. We had no idea what was in store.

First we ordered a glass of white wine. At the table next to us were two old men arguing and sharing a plate of Guadeloupe rockmelon and slices of air-dried Eric Ospital ham. Of course we had to get that too- and it was amazing. At this point, we perhaps realised that this was going to be a fantastic lunch.

A basket of chewy sourdough bread hunks and unsalted butter arrived. I probably could have stopped there, but no. The mains arrived. Mine was roast lamb with thyme: sounds straightforward, but NO. It was served in a little dish with a deeply reduced red wine sauce, sweet and tender, over melting roasted red capsicum and vegetables, with a husk of crisp peppery biscuit on top. My friend had the duckling with roast vanilla peaches, flaked almonds and Marsala pommes purees. This was probably even better than the lamb. Her duck had salty crispy skin and a juicy soft inside. I wanted to gnaw her duck leg.

A couple of short black coffees later, we were totally happy, satisfied and content. It was the lunch that changed my life. No jambon beurre would ever have the same meaning.

Later, I found that this was a well-known restaurant that takes booking MONTHS in advance. How fortuitous that we grabbed a table straight off the street.

If and when you are ever in the neighbourhood, it's called Le Comptoir du Relais. Another article here.

Salad at Le Pre Aux Clercs

Still getting around to posting all the best bits of my Paris trip of 2009. This was a good one. It was a few days in and I had been walking nonstop for hours around the Left Bank. I also had an hour or so to spare in the evening: I had been invited to a choral concert at the Eglise of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. This beautiful and popular little restaurant was just around the corner in rue Bonaparte: Le Pre Aux Clercs. Apparently Hemingway was a regular. It's got so much more character than the touristy spots on Boulevard St. Michel.

I had a chilled glass of rose (Glinon 2008 Domaine Glaxon) and a salad: smoked salmon, asparagus, poached egg, creme fraiche with chives. This blogger had the same salad, but hers looks different.

I love the long, light summer evenings in Europe when sunset is at 10pm. With the twilight outside, the restaurant was full of lamps and flowers and books and paintings. There was a table of people near me eating plates of ratatouille and salmon that looked delicious. I was very happy to sit there for a while, watching the crowd pass by, reading my novel.

Paris street food

Ah, Paris. I'll be there in just a few short weeks: five days of bliss, tramping around the French capital, poking into walled courtyards, ferreting out sunny gardens, smearing my grimy paws on every shiny windowpane in sight, avoiding Eiffel towers and museums, digging out the juiciest strawberries at the market, inhabiting every last dishevelled cafe in every grotty side street, nursing cafe cremes and Le Figaro for hours on end. Bliss.

Why? Because I can. And because the catacombs are open again for business, after renovations, and it's high time I was exploring skeleton-lined underground caverns and dreaming of Valjean's tunnel escape in Les Miserables.

One of the real delights of Paris is food, but not the high-end restaurant classics, or even the mid-level salades composees and bistro standards. It's the street food: the stuff prepared by dubious-looking immigrants and entrepreneurial fingersmiths on every street corner, with nothing more than a hole-in-the-wall to sell from or a portable hotplate. Street food varies according to the seasons, and in winter you'll find a roaring trade in crepes spread with Nutella and hot roasted chestnuts outside Galeries Lafayettes.

In summer, things are a little different. I have a soft spot for the ubiquitous jambon beurre, a crusty baguette section split down the middle and stuffed with fresh cold butter and fat slices of carved leg ham. Sitting on a bench in one of the gravel-lined Parisian parks, the sun on your back, unwrapping the thin paper that wraps your simple sandwich and taking your first big bite is a plain and exquisite pleasure.

Less simple but just as lovely is the merguez-frites. Better for when you crave an injection of something hot, salty, meaty and juicy: a baguette stuffed with spicy North-African sausage and hot chips, sometimes with tomato, chili or garlic sauce as well.

Footpath vendors sometimes also have little containers of tabouleh, layered with hard-boiled egg, red onion, mint, basil and lemon juice. These are incredibly light and refreshing after a morning's walking and sightseeing over hard cobblestoned streets.

Alternatively, if you are more the deep-fried snacktacular calorie-feaster, go for the brik a l'oeuf. This is a square of light puff pastry, deep-fried and with a runny fried egg inside. It's tasty but not all that filling and only really good with a vinegary salad to cut the oil content.

If you have a serious sweet tooth, then beignets are for you. I confess that I have never been able to eat an entire beignet, for the extreme sugar content is just too much for me. However I am in the minority and most people fall into ecstatic raptures over a fresh beignet. Think of a doughnut with no hole, crispily fried, dredged in grainy sugar and oozing a thick filling of chocolate or fruit. With a coffee, on a cool morning, I concede that this must be a good thing.