Playing Tourist

Usually when I have a weekend in Cairns it is focused around stocking up at the shops, running errands and eating. But given this is a tourist town it seems wrong to not every now and again join in the fun and pretend to be on holidays (even if it is just for the day).

So how did my attempt at playing tourist play out? Well it started with sadness. We all know that when it comes to eggs benedict I am a connoisseur. I am still recovering from an incident a few weeks back at home when I was served hollandaise sauce that was simply clumps of butter (yup, Duffy Cafe missed the mark that week) so I had high hopes stepping into a familiar Cairns cafe on Saturday morning. Sadly, though, we are on tough economic times where the volume of sauce needs to be scaled back. This was the saddest eggs benny I think I have had in a long time. If I wanted poached eggs on salmon I would have just ordered that....

As it turned out, Saturday was also the start of the Cairns Festival. So, on Saturday night I toddled off the esplanade to watch the parade. 

Now the parade was...interesting. It started with groups of school kids in uniform riding bikes, which left me pondering what kind of parade exactly this was. Eventually the floats started to arrive. There was a theme of multiculturalism. Which, as you can imagine, led to awesome displays by groups like the PNG Wantok association, and the Indonesian association of Cairns. There were some interesting interpretations of the theme though. Like the school that just whacked up a hills hoist and put flags on it...

 Or the radio station that went full Australian...

The list of groups in the parade were eclectic to say the least. There were the home schooled children who dressed up as insects (clearly art and craft is a significant part of the curriculum).

There were wheelchair athletes pulling their float (impressive).

There was also a marching band dressed as minions playing Pharrell's "Happy" on repeat, roller debry demonstrations, cos play clubs, dog adoption groups, swimmers wearing sting ray shaped hats and beauty queens. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Miss Ellis Beach Surf Club, blowing bubbles to her loyal subjects.

The night was capped off with a fireworks show over the water, which I freely admit is the only reason I stuck it out.

On Sunday I went all out playing tourist, catching the Kuranda Scenic Railway up to the rainforest. It was a leisurely ride up the mountain, learning all about the construction of the railway in the late 1800s, and the many uses they found for it through the war. Turns out most of the suburbs between Cairns and Kuranda are named after the nicknames the workers had for the foremen on those sites (and not all are flattering).

The ride took us past Barron Falls, where the train stopped for 10 minutes and we all got to get out and stretch our legs.

When I got to the village I decided to hit up the wildlife sites. First stop - the Butterfly Sanctuary.

This place is amazing. Tons and tons of pretty butterfly's in a small habitat that are in no way afraid of you. In fact the only thing to worry about is making sure you don't hurt one that decides you look like a nice place to land.

Next stop was Birdworld. 

Here you basically walk into a giant aviary with a bag of food and hand feed the birds. There are a group of Macaws which are the only birds you are not supposed to feed. The parrots however know that humans mean food and they will come and sit on your shoulder demanding to be fed. they are so "friendly" to the humans that they ever make you remove your earrings, because apparently they will try to take them if you are not fast enough with the food!

Next door to Birdworld are the Koala Gardens.  These guys probably have the biggest group of koalas on display that I have ever seen in a zoo. There were about 10 the day I was there. All, in typical koala style, very sleepy.

For a few extra bucks you can 'cuddle a koala' and get your picture taken. Given the last time I held a koala I was a very small child (and only know that it happened from the pictures in that lovely pink velour tracksuit) I jumped at the chance. Koala's are heavy, and clingy. It will cling to you like a tree branch, and those claws are SHARP. I still have scratches on my shoulder a week later.

After a thorougher hand washing (Koala's are great carrier of chlamydia) I went to check out the other animals hanging out in the Koala Gardens. There were kangaroos that you could hand feed, and there were wombats!

There was also a reptile room. This wasn't like a normal zoo reptile room where there is a lovely glass box between you and the snakes and spiders. These guys were free range.

I was out of there pretty quickly.

There was a small market outside the Koala Gardens where they had all manner of traditional North Queensland souvenirs. Who could go home without buying a new fridge magnet?

Or perhaps you were looking for something to place on your mantle or bar?

Maybe what you really needed was a new bottle opener. One with balls...

I had read in the pamphlet they gave us that there was a great pie shop in Kuranda, which I managed to track down. The theme of marketing poor skippy to the tourists continued there as well...

After lunch I did a spot of shopping. The models in the hat store were a little different.

I also pondered if the owners of this Aboriginal art store understood the irony of the building that they were tennated in - or if that was a f*** you to the first settlers.

It was time to head back down to Cairns. And this time the mode of transport was the SkyRail. This is basically a canopy ride over the top of the rainforest.

This was the view back over the Barron River.

And the view of Cairns as we approached.

Back in town that evening I decided to head to the library after dark, where there was an illuminated presentation happening. It was a story of summer rain, and the way the ecosystem reacts.

With that, it was up very early the next morning to make the trip home. And a week later, I am still pondering the presence of these dinosaurs in the main street...

Can you really make the Sizzler cheese toast at home?

So, this week came the sad news that an icon of my high school years may be shutting it's doors. Apparently a number of Sizzler restaurants in Australia are going to be closed.

So, as you do, a staff member allegedly leaked the secret recipe for the infamous cheese toast. Now, when I went there during my high school days the urban legend of the cheese toast told us all that it was made a special yeast that would expand in your tummy. The idea behind giving it to you at the start of the meal was to stop you going all Homer Simpson on the buffet and eating Sizzler out of house and home. As a grown up I am 96% sure this isn't true, but it did mean it was many years before I ate the cheese toast again - instead preferring to load up on the potato skins on the salad bar (and then there was that amazing red sauce for the pasta...but I digress).

I wanted to try the 'leaked' recipe to see if it did indeed taste like the real thing. it all starts with equal parts of butter and that really fine parmesan cheese. It ended up making a buttery paste.

Part two is pretty easy - spread on bread.

You then need to fry it, butter side down (I am now starting to understand why this tastes so good...).

The recipe suggests putting a lid or plate on it to "steam" the bread, but mine was really fresh, so i skipped that step. this is what I ended up with.

Looked pretty similiar to the Sizzler cheese toast, but it all came down to the taste test. And how did that go? Well the fact that right now I am craving potato skins says to me that it must be pretty true to the real thing to my taste buds. If nothing else it reiterated that this is far from the healthiest thing you could possibly eat at Sizzler - so maybe it worked in my favor all those years I believed the urban legend.

Another city, another meal

I figured whilst we were on the subject of food I would share the final meal of the holiday. The restaurant was Atelier Joel Robuchon in Paris. Two little problems with that meal - firstly I was in the midst of the head cold from hell that day so my taste buds were fast asleep and secondly, the restaurant was FULL of Australians. The guest list had all the diversity of a Vegemite appreciation day.

Rather than sitting at tables, every seat in the restaurant is at a bar facing the kitchen that wraps around the entire room.  Every diner in the place (by my count the place only sat about 40-50 people) had a front row seat to watch the chefs at work.

We opted for the tasting menu (who wouldn't?), and it was all kicked off with an amuse bouche of...something. We never did find out what exactly was in this dish. Whilst tasty, the best part by far was it gave me the opportunity to say "amuse bouche" over and over again on an endless loop.

How pretty are the plates? Next up was a cold gazpacho with a sorbet made from mustard (wonder if it came from nearby Dijon...). The bonus of this was that the mustard sorbet was strong enough to cut through the cold and flu germs.

Then there was a ceviche. Again, this had enough bite that I could actually taste something. It is making me realise that with this cold an Indian restaurant would have been a smarter choice than French...

I am racking my brain trying to recall what this next dish was. From memory I think it was supposed to be a play on mac and cheese. Just supersized. Clearly didn't have anything with heat in it because I don't really recall what it tasted like. The picture however reminds me that there were mushrooms...

This next dish was essentially really tasty bacon in a really tasty sauce. I suspect it had a fancy name, and more ingredients than those I recall, but I do remember that my cold let me taste the bacon, which was a much appreciated concession. And foam, because it's not really a French restaurant without foam... (p.s. I find foam the wankiest ingredient in the food world).

Now the next dish comes with a warning - vegetarians might want to look away. It is just what you come to France for - grilled foie gras with roasted cherries. The white bits were raw almonds, which have a very difference flavour and texture to the kind you normally get.

Next up was the fish course, complete with a few little clams. 

This was quickly followed by a meat course. I opted for the baby lamb. Yes, I know lambs are babies, but the menu actually said "baby lamb". There is nothing in the picture for scale unfortunately but these lamb cutlets were about the size of an (Australian) 50 cent piece. The best part was the mash - it was basically pure butter. Thankfully we were not limited to the little bit on the plate, they provided a whole bowl of it (each) as a "side". 

The end of the savory dishes was followed by a palette cleanser. It was rhubarb, a citrisy sorbet and gold flakes. Actual gold. That might have been why the bill was so high. 

The it was time for dessert, and by this point I was as stuffed as the liver of the goose who provided the foie gras course. Dessert was basically death by chocolate. The waiter described it as being chocolate of many textures, and that sums it up well. It was essentially layers of chocolate (like a trifle) with each layer giving a different texture. It was incredibly rich. I am not ashamed to say I wasn't able to eat the whole thing. 

All in all a much nicer meal than the 15th best restaurant in the world back in Vienna (I say 15th and not 16th because to my surprise it got promoted when the new list was released a few days back). 

More Paris to come in the next post.

Fine dining - Vienna style

Yeah I know, I've been slack. I could make excuses, I have had a rotten cold for the last 9 days, but at the end of the day I was just having a little too much fun to find the time to write (not that I don't love you all, I just love Eurovision more). So now, here at home, I am playing catch up on all the things I'd like to present at Show & Tell.

As the loyal readers among you would know, one of the finer Eurovision traditions that we have developed over the years is picking the top restaurant in the host city and having a pre-Eurovision lunch on the Friday. Lunch generally stretches well into the afternoon, and this year was no different.

So what is the top restaurant in Vienna? It is Steirereck located in the Stadpark. As of today it is number 16 in the world. I say today because the list is due for it's annual update in about 12 hours, so that could change. The theme of Steirereck is to take Austrian food to a fine dining level.

So, what did we eat? Well it started well with a pisstake of Austrian food labeling laws. In Austria, restaurants have to declare (by law) a list of allergens in all the dishes on their menu. To start the meal, the team here have developed a tasting platter that singles out each of the major allergens. For example, if you are allergic to soy you can eat every dish brought out except the one highlighting the soy allergen because it doesn't cross over into any other dish. Basically, they are gloating to people without allergies the awesome flavours you can eat, but other suckers with an allergy miss out on. No allergies at our table, just a free for all to try all the dishes.

By far the most inventive of these was the oyster allergy. The oyster was frozen and then finely shaved, making it a kind of oyster snow cone...

The nut allergy was pretty cool as well and was a liquid walnuty foam.

Next up the 7 course tasting menu started in earnest. For each course there were two options. For me, course 1 was nasturtium root, aubergine, almond and radish. This was a good start to the meal.

Next up was a salad course of sorts - mine was redondo courgette and chanterelles with buckwheat and plum. Not a lot of big flavours in this dish, felt very...meh.

The following course was by far the most disappointing for me. I only managed a few bites. the sourness of the dish was quite overwhelming and left you with nothing else to taste. I will say though, the speck (backfat from a mangalitza pig - so, a kind of bacon) that was pressed for 12 months with lavender and basil was pretty awesome. The dish was young artichokes with flowering chard, hemp and speck.

Next up was the fish course. I chose the alpine salmon with white asparagus, sprouts and lemon savoury. The salmon actually came from Austria and may have been the nicest piece of salmon I have ever had. The lemon and thistle mayo was also a bit of a superstar. Could have eaten a vat of the mayo.

For the meat course, I chose the veal tongue and sweetbreads with romanesco, canihua and whiskey. Can't go wrong with a whiskey sauce. The volume of broccoli in this dish was a little over the top though.

Next up was the cheese course. There were two choices - a fresh cheese, or the cheese trolley. The trolley was the most impressive I have ever seen. So jaw dropping I failed to remember to take a picture because I was so distracted by the pretty, tasty, smelly cheese. Riin however opted on the soft cheese, which was served on a strainer. A giant strainer. This was not a tiny dessert.

Next up was dessert. We were presented with a platter of what we were told were traditional Austrian desserts - which included deep fried apple rings and creams of various flavours. There was also a little sweet cheese 'donut' which was potentially the best thing I ate all day.

My dessert was the blossom with honey, pollen and passion fruit. When it was served a waitress came over with a tray of perfume bottles and asked me to select a perfume to spray on my dessert (huh?). I opted for the orange one expecting a sprtiz or two. A full minute later my poor dessert was soggy with perfume, and my ice cream had started to melt, but the table smelt amazingly citrisy.

So, the verdict? I really felt the portions were off for a fine dining tasting menu. Everything just seemed far too big. More than half the courses i had lacked something in the flavour department as well. In the past at other top restaurants I have been served dishes I didn't p[particularly like, but you could at least appreciate where the chef was going with the dish. I didn't get that here. I know this sounds snobby, but at this price point you want something a little more creative and with far more flavour.

The actual restaurant itself is also quite sterile. There were some interesting design features, but I couldn't quite understand why the waiters were in lovely suits and their female colleagues were dressed in grey sacks that were reminiscent of a dystopian future in a young adult film (think the Abnegation in Divergent).

I'll leave you with this - after lunch I headed back to the hotel to get ready for the night's show to find housekeeping had a little fun in the bathroom.