The weeks in brief: 17 June – 30 June
I have amassed a lot of photos from the last fortnight.
You are warned.
Search Results for: high tea
Meatmother
Meatmother opened in Richmond recently, and as you may be able to guess from the name – it’s all about the meat. Not just any meat though, the focus is the wonderful art of American BBQ.
One Saturday, I headed there for an impromptu dinner with Haz, Gaz, Thanh and Alastair. They don’t take bookings for groups smaller than eight, so we all arrived before their opening time of 6pm and hung around outside until the doors opened.
The restaurant is split over two levels, with downstairs holding a bar and bar seating, and a main dining room upstairs. Upstairs are several large communal tables (plus a few smaller ones), large pictures hung on what look like butcher hooks, and industrial style dim lighting.
Masak Masak
Masak Masak is a newish Malaysian eatery in Collingwood. They describe their food as “Malaysian hawker food with a twist”.
Hazzie suggested it as a dinner outing, and since I never say no to dinner out, along I trotted with Shellie and Daisy and Mr B. Huzzah. I like going to these types of places with a decent amount of people because it means getting to try more stuff. 🙂
BBQ Festival Masterclass
Disclosure: I attended the masterclass courtesy of the Redheads BBQ Festival and Gram.
Normally at 8:30am on a Sunday morning the very last thing you would find me doing is sitting by the beach in St Kilda. But one Sunday in March, there I was sipping a coffee and watching early morning fitness freaks run past. I definitely wasn’t down in St Kilda for fitness purposes, as I was about to take a BBQ masterclass and scoff meat for breakfast. Fitness be damned.
As part of the BBQ Festival, there were several master classes in barbequing. I attended a session hosted by Chris Girvin-Brown from Perth, who held a class about offset and direct heat barbequing in the super condensed time of two hours (normally they’re a full day).
Ciao Bella
Following the success of Friday Road Trip, the Labour Day long weekend saw us (me, Shellie, Thanh, April, Haz and Gaz) pile into two cars for more driving and llama seeking. This trip had a slightly different focus from the previous one – instead of food, our goal was an op shop crawl.
There was still food involved of course, as we scheduled in a lunch stop. Plus we were looking for food styling props so… it always comes back to food in the end.
It’s the circle of a food blogger.
Estelle Bar & Kitchen 2
When my FIL visited over Christmas, one of the few things he requested to do was a degustation.
I mean – we could’ve taken him to see the Melbourne sights: the beautiful Yarra River as it glints brownly in the sun, the finger biting excitement of a hook turn in the city, the half finished Docklands wheel overlooking Costco and the cargo ports ** – but having a nice meal sounded much more fun to me.
(**I say all this in jest! I do love Melbourne, really.)
So we booked in dinner at the Estelle. You may remember that Alastair and I had lunch there in mid-2012.
Peru: Lima – Astrid y Gaston
Astrid and Gaston was the only restaurant I booked before we left for our trip, reserving a table for our last night in Peru before we headed to Ecuador. If you take any notice of those “Best Restaurants in the World” lists, it’s on one of them at number 35.
Astrid and Gaston is owned by Peruvian chef Gaston Acurio (you may remember that we also visited another of his restaurants in Cusco – Chicha).
I had researched how long it would take for us to get there from our hotel – about 15 minutes by car – but despite leaving early, terrible Lima traffic got the better of us. What should’ve taken 15 minutes stretched out to 40 minutes, and I had to quickly call from the taxi to apologise for running late. Fortunately they seemed totally fine about it – perhaps being used to people running on Latin time?
Astrid and Gaston is located in Miraflores, an upmarket suburb in Lima that’s also a major tourist spot. The restaurant was on a quiet street with a discreet entrance guarded by a doorman. Inside, the restaurant is spread over several rooms and we were seated in one of the back rooms, surrounded by racks of wine.