Return of the shagging chef

Who’d have thought? First Rick Stein with a Sydney food glossy’s (Okay Gourmet Traveller) publicist. Now John Burton-Race, the man who had a profound influence on our own star Shannon Bennett turns out to be pretty obnoxious and a potent shagger. Many of us remember Burton-Race on TV from the engaging shows French Leave and the Return of the Chef. As Jay Rayner says in The Observer:

“With Burton-Race it’s always best to check. He attracts dramas and intrigues the way dogs attract fleas. Although he came to public prominence as the devoted family man on the series French Leave and the sequel, Return of the Chef, in which his wife Kim and six of the eight kids they have between them featured heavily, he turned out to be rather less devoted to that particular family than many thought. In March 2007 he left for his lover Suzi Ward, his agent’s one-time personal assistant, and their then two-year-old son Pip, his fifth child, of whom Kim knew nothing.

A long and very public battle over assets between ex-husband and wife ensued which culminated with Kim closing their restaurant, the New Angel in Dartmouth, while Burton-Race was deep in the Australian jungle as a contestant on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. He knew nothing of it until he was evicted by public vote.”

Peru for F–dies

I’d never thought of visiting Peru for anything other than Machu Picchu but have avoided it because I’m allergic to tourist swarms:

Dare I say that Peru could become a F–die destination. As James Doran discovers in The Observer:

“The real reason to visit Peru is the food. While more athletic types huff and puff their way to high altitude I would rather be sitting in a darkened picantería with a steaming plate of chicharrones (the original hot pork scratchings) and a frothing glass of chicha de jora (fermented corn beer).”

More:

“Here groups of middle-aged women expertly carve the fish, prepare the marinades and hawk their wares with formidable voices all day long. ‘Come inside, come inside, enjoy the heating and the fine table settings of our magnificent restaurant my big strong king with your beautiful queen,’ is a rough translation of the greeting we received. The ceviche women of Ancon are the Latina equivalent of Cockney market traders, and have a patter to match.

The restaurant, of course, has no heating, no fine table settings and indeed no walls. It is merely a series of tables and chairs set out along the jetty under a tarpaulin roof. But the food is sublime. Here you can feast on ceviche mixto – a mix of conchitas negras (black cockles), shrimps, octopus, flat fish, and pejerrey, a sort of anchovy.”

Ben Shewry showcased

Making a connection with memories…

He’s probably the hottest chef in Melbourne right now. When Michel Roux recently visited eating at Attica in suburban Ripponlea was a stand out for him. Gourmet Traveller lauded New Zealander Ben Shewry as best new talent. And when I had to decide where to eat for my birthday last year I ate at Attica, as did my good friend the Martini Monster. John Lethlean writing in Gourmet Traveller:

” …we ask him how at the age of 30 his food is developing, having wowed fans at Melbourne’s Attica over the past two-and-a-half years with highly original dishes reflecting diverse interests and influences…

Shewry says: “I know it sounds all New Age and pathetic,” he says, “but I’m really trying to make it more emotional. I’m starting to try and make a connection with memories. Not just making a dish visually appealing and with great flavours, but also trying to evoke other emotions.”

GT also has an exclusive video of Shewry here.

Attica, 74 Glen Eira Rd, Ripponlea, Vic, (03) 9530 0111

AA Gill: The one star review

The wicked one star review that also lays into bottled water (and bottled fermented grape juice). As AA Gill says:

“Your starter for 10: since the beginning of the industrial revolution, how much water has mankind irreplaceably used up? Is it one gallon per head, 100 gallons per head or 1,000 gallons per head? And how much of that figure do you think is due to bottled water? The answer is, of course, none. All the water that ever was, every ice-age glacier, every princess’s tear, every rill, gill, brook, beck and burn, each and every drop of monsoon, all scattered showers, every old man’s prostate dribble and teenager’s salivay snog is still here. The world is as soggy as the Garden of Eden.”

The little brown restaurant review

Yes, AA Gill has been to India and done the usual squatting over a bowl – and a restaurant back in London:

“Somehow, I picked something up. I’d had enough pebble-dashing amoeba and slurry with the fringe on top to insist on drugs, so I took it straight round to my doctor. “I’ll need a specimen,” he said, without any discernible note of excited inquiry. The thing with specimens is, well, everything. And they never find anything in them. I mean, would you? How hard are you going to look? Can I suggest you give me the most powerful antibiotics known to botty world, and let God pick through the corpses? He handed me a plastic container the size of a film canister, with a little spatula attached.”

Back eating out again it doesn’t get much better:

“The walls are brick, the tables zinc and the room full of locals talking and eating. Suggs from Madness lurched back and forth to the street for fags. Inside, the menu is short and replete with those dishes that have become young England classics, or clichés, depending on how your digestion’s feeling. I started with mushroom soup, which was a thick, grey custard of underseasoned field mushrooms and not much else.”

Europe’s top food destination is?

San Sebastian. When I was recently asked to write about the top five food trips for 2008 San Sebastain was right up there. now the BBC food blog has joined the fray.

“This is the city with more Michelin stars per head of the population than anywhere else in Europe and a reputation for being obsessed with food…

Over the course of three days we hopped from bar to bar and in each one we had fantastic food, served quickly and with great pride…

All this grazing is amazingly good value, but if you start to yearn for a more leisurely pace of eating then many of the bars have restaurant tables but you will pay more.”

Eggs Benedict 2.0

They look different and the taste is more concentrated than usual. Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 doesn’t even use the whites in his new version of Eggs Benedict. As Frank Bruni of the New York Times says in The Shape of Eggs benedict to Come:

“On the finished plate a column of egg yolk and a muffin-encrusted cube of fudgy hollandaise prop up an ultrathin, ultracrispy chip of Canadian bacon.
“At once concise and comprehensive, it’s perhaps the tidiest Benedict the egg-loving world has ever known. It’s quite possibly the best, yielding more yolk, more hollandaise and a more pronounced juxtaposition of textures in each bite.”

Ramsay the guru and the C word

He is topping the ratings on Channel Nine. A few weeks ago it was the C word. Last week he said fuck 80 times in a show and 10 expletives in 45 minutes. This week The Age’s Jim Schembri says “celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay actually channels a very healthy philosophy through his various exposes of managerial incompetence.” His brutal approach makes failig restaurant owners see their need for change.
Ramsay reached cult management guru status in the UK. And his Channel 9 assault is bringing his hard-nosed foul mouthed philosophy to Australia. The thing people don’t realise is that behind all the F—ing he really knows what he is talking about. When he walked out of Aubergine in London in 1997 to open Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road his loyal staff followed.
As Bill Burford said in the New Yorker last year:

“Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster. Ramsay, who is also the host of three uniquely adversarial in-your-face television shows (“Hell’s Kitchen” in the United States; “The F Word” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” in the United Kingdom), is not the most abusive person running a restaurant. And although a British undercover documentary once captured him in mid-torrent, profanities flowing in a diatribe directed at a young intern, earning Ramsay the title of one of the country’s “most unbearable bosses,” the people who work for him show a tenacious, irrational-seeming loyalty verging on love. But he does get angry, helplessly and uncontrollably angry—not an earthly anger but something darker—and has trouble knowing how to stop.”