When I look back over the hundreds of photographs I’ve taken over the past few weeks there are a lot focused on the food and drink we’ve enjoyed. There are many of the sights and bucket-list experiences we’ve undertaken too but our enjoyment of shared food and drink is pretty obvious, if the number of photos are anything to go by, not that that will surprise many of you who know us well. We’re back in the Hunter Valley for a few days and, apart from my ballooning, there’s very little else to do here than visit the ever burgeoning number of wineries so we have and I have to report it’s not been hard. For a $5 refundable fee on any wines one buys it’s been fun to taste the wines made by a number of the wineries that we’ve not visited before, and there are now over 80 in the area. When we first visited, in 1999 we think, there were only a couple of dozen. Nevertheless many wineries in the Hunter Valley are set up and fail each year when the new owners realise how much hard work is involved but for the visiting punter like us it’s fun to try them. We have promised to return to Sydney with a selection of wines we like and hold a wine tasting evening for our hosts and their various friends next week so we’ve set about the selection challenge with some enthusiasm. Seeing how the various winery professionals undertake a wine tasting will only add to our fun wine tasting event which the girls have arranged for next Thursday, the day before we finally leave Sydney.
Postcard from….the Sydney & Hunter Valley food & drink scene
We’re lucky enough to have children and their partners who also enjoy a fun and laughter-filled good food and wine brunch, lunch and/or dinner. I’ve written about my birthday dinner already but more recently we’ve been taken to an old car garage turned restaurant, Riley Street Garage, (similar to Bibendum in London but more relaxed, Aussie-style) where the highlight of a sharing menu was slow-cooked lamb and a pork knuckle with great crackling. Yesterday, my lovely wife and I had lunch at a restaurant called Muse Kitchen here in the Valley attached to the Keith Tulloch winery (that also boasted a chocolate factory called Cocoa Nibs selling hand-painted chocolates at $36 a dozen, definitely a step too far in my opinion, but they did look amazing and tasted wonderful). The highlight at Muse Kitchen, for us, was pumpkin with blue cheese and honey, and that was just a side dish. Paula had a pork neck entree and I had roasted emperor fish on spinach. Many of the wines here are, for me, perfect. Some wines I’ve been lucky to taste in my life cost more than one can possibly imagine but the Hunter wines are so different and so delicious that if I lived in New South Wales I think I’d be in heaven every evening, at least until the novelty ran out, by which time I’d probably be dribbling in my bath chair anyway. With so many wineries here in competition with each other many have added restaurants to boost their visitors and they all seem to be busy.
A Sydney food highlight that the girls and I did together last weekend was a cookery course at the Sydney fish market, in the imaginatively-named Sydney Seafood School at the Sydney Fish Market, where we learned to cook one of our lifetime signature dishes, Singapore Chilli Crab and it’s rival, Singapore Pepper Crab. We had a lovely time learning and cooking Aussie Blue Swimmer crabs in two very delicious and, for us, appropriate and romantic ways before spending well over an hour sharing the results with our three other kitchen companions, Michelle, Ged and Karen. Another lifetime memory that, now we’ve learned how to do it, can easily be repeated next time we come across Blue Swimmer crabs, of course.
Two other travel dining highlights were a dinner of dumplings and beer and a fish and chips lunch at Balmoral Beach, where we all first shared fish and chips with my brother and his wife with a couple bottles of chardonnay way back on our first visit to Sydney in 1999. Last Sunday a group of 8 of us went for lunch at Bathers, an old bathing pavilion now converted into a lovely smart restaurant. We all had the five-course tasting menu and loved the modern Aussie food, and not just because Leah had managed to book it with a half-price voucher!
We’ve also eaten a number of meals ‘in’, the most requested menu being Mum’s tagliatelle bolognese. ‘Mum’s’ because there’s no messing about with the dish like Dad is tempted to do, adding chicken livers, minced lamb or rosemary, just plain, beautiful Mum’s home cooking so I stand aside and let the master take a bow. She may, in fact, cook it again next week to serve at our wine tasting and make extra so the girls can keep some in their freezers for when we’ve gone. 😋
I’ve already written about the coffee scene here which, I reckon, is second to none, world-wide. Coffee is taken very seriously by Sydneysiders, at least, I can’t talk for the whole of Australia. It’s quite a beautiful drink here, actually, a lovely way to spend a half hour and infinitely better for you than sucking on a cigarette (which we’ve seen very little of here, thankfully). There are very few coffee chain shops here in the Hunter or in Sydney because the independent coffee barista scene simply knocks your socks off. On every corner there’s a wonderful independent coffee shop & brunch cafe with a queue outside. There’s a whole new Aussie coffee terminology to learn, of course. Mine’s a large skinny flat white (an espresso-based coffee drink. It is prepared by pouring microfoam (steamed milk with small, fine bubbles with a glossy or velvety consistency) into a single or double shot of espresso. It is somewhat similar to the caffè latte although smaller in volume and less microfoam, therefore having a higher proportion of coffee to milk, and milk that is more velvety in consistency – allowing the espresso to dominate the flavour, while being supported by the milk), Leah’s a piccolo (a Ristretto with frothed milk served in a small glass), and Paula’s is a traditional cappuccino (double espresso, and steamed milk foam) topped with grated chocolate.
It was Australia Day last Friday, a public holiday “celebrated annually on 26 January, it marks the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales and the raising of the Flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove by Governor Arthur Phillip. In present-day Australia, celebrations reflect the diverse society and landscape of the nation and are marked by community and family events, reflections on Australian history, official community awards and citizenship ceremonies welcoming new members of the Australian community”. And barbie’s. Lots of barbie’s. The girls had booked for a group of us to play bowls on the famous Clovelly green bowls club after which Laura and her boyfriend, Tom, had invited us all back to a barbie at their flat in Bondi. Fabulous.
So we’re having some lovely dining experiences with very few, if actually no, duds. Fortunately, everyone recognises it’s not just the food, although that adds to the joy, but simply the act of sitting down together with the people you love most, everyone with the right ‘head’ on and a few glasses of beer or wine, which almost always makes for the best dining and memory experiences.
Hic!
🙋🏼♂️🙋😋
🥂🍷🍽
