Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [30]
“This is all fabulous,” Cheryl says to Liz. “Tell us about Mod Oz cooking.”
“The term is just a catchy nickname for today’s leading-edge Australian cooking, which often blends European and Asian flavors, sometimes in pretty extraordinary ways. When I was growing up, Australians ate a lot of British-style meat pies, like those served at Harry’s, and they are still comfort food for many people. But in the 1970s the country abandoned a century-old whites-only immigration policy, established back in British colonial days, and this led to an influx of Asian settlers. Since then, we’ve become a truly multicultural society, and the cooking reflects that, particularly in good restaurants like this one. Our top chefs are always trying to outdo each other in creative new dishes.”
“I didn’t doubt your judgment about this place,” Bill says, “but I did see that the popular Good Food Guide gives it fifteen points out of a possible twenty for quality. Dozens of other restaurants score higher. Are they really better?”
“Maybe so. Everyone respects the Good Food Guide—our main newspaper has put it out for many years—but I like The Wharf personally, partially because it raises money for the Sydney Theatre Company. I made your reservations for Tetsuya’s and est., two of the most highly regarded places. See what you think.”
“I only wish we were able to get to more of the honor roll restaurants,” Bill says. “We’ve read great things about Neil Perry, Peter Gilmore, Luke Mangan, and other chefs, but we don’t have time to sample their food.”
“To try all the serious restaurants, you would have to spend your entire three months here. Even a devoted Sydneysider like me wouldn’t suggest that.”
The next morning, we each buy a three-day Sydney Pass, providing us with a choice of several harbor cruises and unlimited travel on city ferries, trains, and a couple of on-and-off tourist buses that make circuits of the major sights. One of the buses gets us to the Darlinghurst neighborhood for a glorious breakfast at bills, the eponymous establishment of Bill Granger. The small corner-storefront café features three treasured and much copied morning dishes: corn fritters, scrambled eggs, and ricotta hotcakes with banana and honeycomb butter. All sound as simple as a pot of tea, but that’s what stumps the imitators. Ordering a plate of each, we find them robust but subtly complex, perfectly cooked, and brimming with sterling ingredients.
Another bus on the same sightseeing line takes us to the other side of downtown, the site of the Sydney Fish Market. A large, full-bore operation, it encompasses a working fishing port, wholesale suppliers, retail sales, and food and beverage outlets—even a seafood cooking school. With more than one hundred familiar and exotic species available daily, it brags about offering the greatest variety in the world except for Japanese markets. Eating with our eyes at the retail counters, which together extend the length of a football field, we devour a broad range of just-shucked oysters, scallops on the half shell with their crimson roe attached, “bay bugs” that resemble lobster tails, cobalt blue swimmer crabs, cooked red spanner crabs, glistening green-lipped mussels, hefty Tasmanian black dover mussels, and loads of fresh fish of every shape, size, and color. Cheryl says, “This is as good as snorkeling, with the same kind of Technicolor flash.”
The market makes us want to take to the water and that’s what we do for most of the afternoon, lounging comfortably on a ferry deck during a two-and-a-half-hour cruise of the harbor. The boat leaves from busy Circular Quay, in the area where the first English settlers landed in