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In preparation for the Maritime Canada leg of my whirlwind six-stop tour of North America this July, the Moncton Hosting Committee advance team conducted reconnaissance of Little Louis’ in Moncton’s beautiful industrial district. It met their high standards for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence, and a booking was made.

Given that our visit was during the peak of Moncton’s three-week barbecuing season, we had literally the entire restaurant to ourselves. Three nine-course tastings were quickly begun and, not surprisingly lest the staff actually outnumber the patrons, our maître d’ Frank played the triple role of sommelier and captain. We let Frank choose the wines for each course. This was not wise; it was brilliant, bordering on genius.

Nine, however, quickly became ten. Oyster fever gripped me in its slimy claws near the end of the fish courses, and Frank was only too keen to remedy this gross nutritional deficiency before we made our way into the succulent and varied land meats. He brought each of us two exquisite natural oysters, paired with another of his dizzying array of wines. Deb’s very first oysters will also be her least expensive; the bonus course was on the house.

Overall, we were able to suggest relatively few improvements to each other on the drive home. Frank, and the waiter whose name I’ve forgotten, were welcoming, jovial, and entirely non-pretentious. When the worst criticism you can level is that the black truffle was really kind of overpowered by the foie gras in the fifth course or the surf and turf included a little too much steak for that point in the meal, well, the kitchen did OK too. Those five hours were packed with flavour.

Not to be outdone, the Mountain View Subcommittee of the California Organizing Board took it upon themselves to schedule an outing to Chez TJ, the restaurant with the awful name that was nonetheless recently awarded its second Michelin star (and thus armed with a more impressive résumé, the entire kitchen staff immediately departed for greener pastures; green with money). Eating at both restaurants within ten days made for an interesting comparison.

The meal at TJ was technically sound but, contrary to expectations, the experience was inferior to Little Louis’ in basically every way. The staff were comparatively lifeless, with no obvious leader or coherence; so many faces coming and going, we never really established a relationship with anyone. The wines were good, but not particularly well-paired with the food. Service felt a little rushed, and indeed they were almost certain to have another seating after ours. It was a good meal, but it was not worthy of their superlative prices.

Maybe we got them on a bad night, or maybe, even nine months later, it still hasn’t recovered from losing so many staff. Either way, it’s not a two-star restaurant in my book.

On the other hand, if Michelin’s travel guide ever expands to Canada, you can expect to find at least one star taking up residency at Little Louis’. If you’re even in the vague vicinity of Moncton, ask for Frank by name and accept no substitutions. Make sure you get an oyster.

It’s very rarely that I eat Chinese food any more, now that I’ve been so thoroughly spoiled by years of traveling to China; it’s an order of magnitude yet rarer that I enjoy it.

Sydney’s fu manchu, I am pleased to report, serves what I would call “contemporary Chinese” dishes that are both delicious and inexpensive. Its dining area is small, simple, and modern, bearing none of the gaudy trappings that we’ve come to associate with Chinese restaurants in the English-speaking world.

I recommend that you attend to their premises and put food in your mouth. Not too much. Mostly plants.

fu manchu
249 Victoria Street
Darlinghurst, Sydney

Some friends came over last weekend, and said that the inner courtyard of my apartment building reminds them of a prison cell block. Of course they’re completely right, and now it’s all I can think about when I step outside.

I’m willing to put up with it for these few months — though Milhouse’s father would not look out of place in this apartment — but one thing I could tolerate no longer: the knives.

After enduring for weeks knives that were so dull that they were long past being dangerous, I discovered that they could not cut cold butter and my bottomless patience was exhausted.

It was suggested that if I were limiting myself to exactly one knife, it should be this 18cm santoku:

Using the Global santoku is like watching girls make out. I thought that I was keeping my knives sharp in Boston, but I was badly mistaken, and I cannot rest until I’ve learned to replicate this factory edge.

I bought a bushel of tomatoes, just to cut them up.

I sang a song while I did it.

I like the idea of using metal beads to clean your decanter — that’s clever. Cleaning a decanter is a pain in the tuchus.

Even more clever? Figuring out that someone (else) will pay $20 for fifty ball-bearings, if sold in the wine department.

See also: four nails for $5. I especially like that there are six nails in the photo.

I made Zuni’s roast chicken tonight and Brette said that it was “the best chicken [she's] ever eaten.” This is not a lie, this is the truth.

I’ll write an update about my eyes tomorrow. Go Tribe.

The forecast calls for thunderstorms back on the mainland, and while we probably could have dodged them pretty effectively, we were looking for any plausible excuse to stay another day.

Yesterday was a day of wildlife; today will be almost entirely gustatory.

It turns out that Stuart is a big fan of honey. I’m not anti-honey, to be sure, but I hadn’t considered it worthy of special praise among sweeteners until today.

Kangaroo Island, visitors are reminded frequently, is the only place in the world with purebred Ligurian bees, apparently loved by beekeepers for their docility. Bees were not native to the island, and it’s far enough from the mainland that they can’t fly here, so this specific strain was introduced in the late 19th century.

one of clifford’s ligurian bees. on my car.

Clifford’s Honey Farm operates a little shop where you can taste their honeys and learn how they’re made, and it’s good, clean family fun. Although it is fairly obvious in retrospect, having never tasted a honey made from a single type of plant nectar, I wasn’t really aware of how varied in flavour they can be.

From there we headed to a winery on the eastern part of the island, and our path took us right past Prospect Hill and its 512 steps of fun. Climbing stairs always reminds me of the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, but that has a hojillion more stairs than this.

your intrepid leader has a bold new vision for the future

Having worn ourselves out, it was time for lunch at Sunset Wines. They had a pretty nice tasting tray, and a very acceptable sparkling shiraz, along with a selection of local cheeses, olives, chorizo, and so on.

The Island Pure sheep dairy is nothing particularly special to look at — I advise that you skip the “tour”, which consists of a 15-minute videotape and a walk through two nearly empty rooms — but produces cheese and yogourt that are the pinnacle of the human dairy craft. These I advise that you not skip, again and again.

Including that haloumi I was talking about.

Having stayed an extra day, I needed different charts out of the plane to plan tomorrow’s flights. Our hope is to go directly to Canberra tomorrow, and spend about a day there. Stuart’s never been, and I’m always up for another day at the War Memorial, so it seems like a fairly solid plan.

I didn’t have the code for the airside security gate at the airport, but fortunately the government’s multi-million-dollar “anti-terror” charade can be defeated with a single shoelace. Is this how MacGyver feels all the time?

me breaking into an airport

It was raining as we got back into Kingscote, but we were right on time for the pelican feeding.

It’s a fairly low-key affair, in which he dumps an entire beakful of fish into one pelican, some others chase that one around for a while, he hands out a few here and there, and otherwise leaves them hungry. They (who?) want the pelicans to come back every day, but not get dependent on the pelican man for food.

the Pelican Man

The weather looks marginal for tomorrow, but we’ll get as far as we can. It would be great to see my Canberra friends once more before I head home.

(Complete photoset)

Today we holidayed in the Barossa Valley, about 60 km from Adelaide. It wasn’t long into the drive before we were in fairly rural South Australia, passing by all manner of SA’s agricultural production. But mostly sheep.

In one of the pastures we caught a glimpse of the Great Australian Wool Pipeline, with which Stuart was not familiar, so maybe you aren’t either. Completed in 1954, the Great Australian Wool Pipeline runs from Adelaide to Melbourne, and transports fully 25% of the annual Australian wool production to market. Unfortunately, the two-year drought has been hard on both graziers and the pipeline operator, and it’s facing stiff competition from rail and trucking. It’s a national treasure; I couldn’t believe Stuart had never heard of it.

At any rate, our first stop in Barossa was the venerable Jacob’s Creek, who are, if not the area’s most delicious label, at least perhaps the most famous. A suitable place from which to begin, particularly as this designated driver was abstaining this morning.

We took lunch at the 1918 Bistro, fortunately arriving early enough to secure a table on this very busy Mother’s Day. A bit on the expensive side, but a solid dining experience. I cannot vouch for its wine list, knowing full well that the afternoon would consist of more free wine than I could possibly safely consume.

From there to the Two Hands winery, who definitely had the nicest staff of the day. I was surprised to find it empty on Mother’s Day, and they were more than happy to educate and share their entire range. We also discovered, along with them, that one of their wineglasses — I forget which — will, in fact, hold an entire bottle of wine. The woman looked mildly embarrassed to reveal that she’d been filling them about halfway when she poured at home. ahem.

Given the overwhelming choices for the rest of our afternoon, we decided to focus on a class of wine that I’ve come to love, that was essentially invented in and remains native to Australia, and that is rarely available in the United States: the sparkling shiraz.

The nice folks at Two Hands recommended more than enough wineries with a sparkling shiraz to fill the rest of the afternoon. The only problem was, they had all already sold their entire stock for the season. sad.

Fortunately, they also recommended Seppelt’s rare fortified wine tasting, which was superb. I now have a new benchmark for port, the 1986 Para Single Vintage Tawny.

The final stop on our way out of Barossa was a last-minute addition to the programme, the unique Barossa Fruit Wines. They have a dazzling array of fruit wines, almost all delicious: apricot, blackberry, blueberry, cherry, mulberry, peach, plum, quandong, quince, raspberry, rose petal, plum, and strawberry. The winemaker was charming and enjoys making charcoal drawings of locally-built locomotives in his spare time. My only regret is that I was already pushing max gross weight on the plane, so I limited myself to a scant three bottles.

As a final word of warning, permit me to expound on the most fucked-up Thai “meal” I’ve ever had. Four words:

Deep. Fried. Chicken. Satay.

Adelaide residents and visitors beware: do not eat at Aroy-Thai.

Aware of my epicurean delight for all things porcine — and most especially bacon itself — Alice and Zach enrolled me in the Bacon of the Month Club for my birthday last month. The first shipment arrived just before I went to Ohio for Thanksgiving.

In this edition of Cambridge Bacon Review, we’ll indulge in FATHER’S hickory smoked country bacon from Gatton Farms of Bremen, Kentucky.

Right away I knew this bacon was special. Whether the package exterior was slightly contaminated, or the sturdy plastic vacuum-pack was unable to contain that universe of aroma, I care not which. All I know is that from the moment I opened that ice-packed box, I could smell the hand-rubbed, country-smoked bouquet.

When I cut open the inner package, put my nose inside the bag, and inhaled deeply, the sheer concentration of hickory molecules almost made me pass out. My Blood Hickory Content was off the charts. There is no mistaking this for ordinary, chemical-cured bacon, the kind of bacon you might buy at a 7-11, the kind of bacon that real midwestern farmers wouldn’t feed to prisoners of war.

This is manly, thick-cut bacon; a bacon that you must treat with tender care and all due respect, cooked slowly over a low flame. For a less subtle hand would ruin it with crispiness, long before the deep fats have a chance to vacate the premises. I like to cook my bacon using chopsticks. To protect my hands. It’s a thing I do.

When it comes to flavour, that first bite made me believe that an entire midwestern, hand-rubbed, salt-cured, hickory-smoked, slow-aged ham had taken up residence in my mouth. We are dealing with intense taste… but not bacon perfection. I like hickory almost as much as the next person, and this may be an admittedly-inexperienced bacon palette talking: but I think the smoke is too thick. Almost nothing else gets a chance against the overpowering wood flavour. I would love to describe the subtle taste of the meat, how you can tell that these pigs were themselves dining on quality ingredients, and so on. But in all honesty, all I can taste is autumn fireplaces.

Given the choice between this and almost any other bacon available to me outside of a specialty butcher, it is a clear winner. However, with eleven months of artisan bacon ahead of me, I must be ruthlessly discriminating in my judgments. When I consider bacon nirvana, on an absolute scale, it just doesn’t match up.

FATHER’s hickory smoked country bacon: C+

Both of my regular readers will recall my fondness for pickled turnips, but you may not necessarily have appreciated my love for virtually all things pickled. And as one who is not really in the habit of moderating my intake of anything, it’s quite fortunate that pickling (as far as I know) tends to be a fairly healthy way to prepare food.

People have been asking what I’m up to these days, and for the past few weeks I have been mostly out of town. But this week I have been pickling my ass off.

I can recommend without reservation The Joy of Pickling, from which almost all of these recipes came. It tells you how to pickle everything from artichokes to shrimp, and includes good information for people who have never sterilized or canned anything in their entire lives. Many of the recipes are designed for refrigeration or quick consumption, and thus don’t even require the annoyance of boiling water pasteurization.

From left: spicy Japanese cucumbers pickled in soy; Thai pickled carrots; shallots pickled in red wine vinegar; Polish pickled mushrooms; cilantro cucumber pickles; hot and spicy eggs; salt eggs; red onions; green beans; asparagus; and the omnipresent Lebanese pickled turnips

Some of these — both cucumber pickles, the carrots, and the red onions — are ready within hours. Of those, only the red onions will not be invited back for next season (this particular pickle seems to produce a result indistinguishable from simple deflaming; I have higher expectations for the shallots). The cucumbers in soy have a considerable bite that goes perfectly with the salty soy; the carrots are a simple but delicious sweet and sour contrast; and the cilantro cucumbers are so delicious that my entire stock of willpower reserves were required to ensure that any made their way into the jars at all. If you don’t think cilantro tastes like soap, you will love them.

The remainder will be ready at various times over the next three weeks, for which my excitement and hunger are both palpable.

As you may recall, for some time I have been on a quest for the best recipe for Lebanese pickled beets turnips. I am pleased to report to you the results of my exhaustive adequate survey.

The taste test included two recipes: one that I believe to be more traditional, using only salt and sugar, but taking twenty days to pickle. The other uses vinegar and salt, and requires only five days.

I am pleased thrilled to announce that the five-day recipe is not only faster but also superior in taste (and probably more antibacterial?). They were almost entirely and ravenously consumed by family and friends, however, so this operation is in need of scaling.

Go forth and enjoy.