11 March 2011

Cooking, like languages, is one of those things best learnt in situ: total cultural immersion means total cultural absorption, we think. Want to cook great Lebanese? Jump on a plane and get chopping.

All very well and good, you say, but it’s not that easy to long-haul from Sydney.

Now help is at hand in the form of new Middle-Eastern themed cooking tours – or ‘progressive brunches’ as they like to be known – in our very own backyard. ‘I Ate My Way Through Granville’ is a guided feast through the bustling Lebanese hub of Granville, 22km west of Sydney. No visa needed and a short trip away by train. The once-monthly gastronomic tours kick off tomorrow, so yalla, get going.

Read the rest of my piece in Friday’s Agenda here.

Portfolio

An Alpine alternative in Nendaz, Evening Standard // 9 March 2011

Overlooking the vine-clad Rhône Valley, Nendaz sits quietly tucked away behind her bigger, brasher sister, Verbier. And to back onto Verbier can only mean one thing: Nendaz is slap-bang in the middle of skiing mecca, the Four Valleys.

A long-time favourite of savvy Dutch and Belgians, the Swiss resort in the Valais region is a welcome diversion from the traditional catered chalet holiday town: with 80 per cent of accommodation Swiss-owned, Nendaz is all about self-catered, high-quality accommodation where the emphasis is not on squeezing sardines into a tin but rather on decent, well-run, family-sized apartments and chalets.

With Verbier at saturation point – building is arrested because of avalanche danger – Nendaz has become the Four Valleys’ new hotbed of investment. Our traditional-style apartment was spacious, modern and in a top location – costing the same, if not less, as a dingy shoebox of a flat in Verbier or the Three Valleys.

Read the rest of my piece in the London Evening Standard here.

Blog

On Collaborative Consumption // 3 March 2011

I had a great chat with Rachel Botsman yesterday, whom I interviewed for a feature or two I am putting together on collaborative consumption. If you’ve never heard of CC, mark my words, you won’t stop noticing it from now on.

There is no bigger living, breathing proponent of CC and its prodigious potential to change the way we view buying, selling, money – the whole world that we’re part of – around. Author of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, Rachel lives in Sydney and is gradually, slowly-slowly nudging Australia towards collaborative thinking that is more inline with the world’s slickest collconsumers, the Japanese, Germans and Swedish.

It’s no secret that we’re a bit behind in the fashion stakes in good ol’ Australia. We’re geographically and temporally a tad behind on many fronts, in fact – from books and movies to the GFC, things just take that bit longer to reach the antipodes. Not that it matters – why would it when we’re all calibrated on the same lifestyle levels together? It only gets a smidgen bothersome when international travel and media comes into the equation.

But – lo and behold! – Australia is not as backwards as the news-in-brief columns in UK papers suggest with those ‘drunken woman attempts to ride croc’ and ‘drunken man attempts to sell wife for 24 beers’ stories (lifted, of course, direct from the inimitable Northern Territory News). All good fun on the tube home, but not representative of the situation here Down Under, mate.

It turns out that Australia has one of the world’s highest concentrations of social media in the world. According to a 2010 study, on a per capita basis, Australia is a voracious uptaker of Facebook, blogging and myspace and last year’s stats show that of a population of 21 million, 14 million are internet users. Nearly 66% of our internet population uses Facebook. And where audiences go, advertising dollars follow.

A whacking internet use is a sure-fire sign of a market suited to collaborating via the medium of the web, you’d have thought. But the land of plenty seems slow on the uptake – think solar panel rental, book swap trading an crowdfunding models and you begin to touch of the tip of the iceberg in terms of obvious niches in which Australian collcons would sit pretty. Why? Well solar panels are plain common-sense in this climate, books are hellishly expensive because of bizarre copywright laws and crowdfunding would suit the hugely strong, solvent economy.

Australia is ripe to join the CC bandwagon – it’s a revolution, according to Rachel, and it’s here to stay.

Portfolio

Pizza e Birra Balmain, The Agenda Daily // 2 March 2011

My piece in today’s Agenda Sydney news:

Ah, pizza – the Neapolitan gift to eating that needs no introduction.

You’d have thought. But as ubiquitous as the Italian staple can be – at best elevated from peasant food to a thing of artistry, at worst a cardboard-like munchies fix– it’s often hard to find a great slice in a great setting.

Surry Hills-billies have been lucky enough to have had a Pizza e Birra for years now, and a second St Kilda branch proved the unfussy Italian fare can go down a storm in Victoria. Now, the mavens at PeB have just officially opened a third branch in Balmain, adding a family-friendly, sophisticated and – dare we say it – damn fine pizza to the city’s pie portfolio.

That’s another notch for Balmain, which already has two of the city’s top pizzaioli in Rosso Pomodoro and Piccola Napoli. Maybe the suburb is overtaking Haberfield as Sydney’s pizza mecca?

Full of atmosphere, PeB dives off Darling Street like a maze of Naples alleyways, with rambling dining areas of paper-topped tables and candles. It’s best to head to the back, past the open pizza kitchen, to be amongst the italiano action.

The menu’s accent is, unsurprisingly, on woodfired pizzas and there are 24 to chose from, including a seafood-laden frutti di mare (no cheese, people – the way it should be) and the old fail-safe olive-studded capricciosa. Housemade pastas stand out in their freshness and punchy flavours – worth a special mention is the unctuous tagliatelle with duck ragu, as is the ravioli with eggplant and tomato concasse.

Cap it all off with a tiramisu that Anna, the Italian manager, tell us is “honestly, best after my mother’s” (wow, we’d like to try her mum’s version), and it’s easy to see why this new Darling Street eatery is the new, well, darling of the suburb’s eat street.

Hours: Mon-Fri 7.30am-3pm, 5pm-late. Sat-Sun 7.30am-late.
Phone: (02) 9810 5333
Address: 332 Darling St, Balmain
Note: No bookings

Or read online here.