After Chiang Mai, Melbourne was a breath of fresh air.
Yes, that's a cliche, and yes, it's literally very true.
A month of inhaling exhaust fumes and zip, through the magic of more fossil fuels and Thai Airways, I found myself cheerfully bouncing down the lovely long running track by the Yarra River. Alongside me long-limbed men and women cruised slowly on bicycles shouting through megaphones complicated vowels at rowers skimming by on the river. Here we are in Australia!
Actually, the Yarra River came one week later. When we first arrived in Melbourne, our aviator-glasses-wearing, Arab-speaking taxi driver speeded us over the smooth pavement, past the tall gum trees, under the cloudless blue sky to the seaside suburb of St. Kilda. I felt like we'd landed in a movie where it was summer. The beach was mobbed and it was hot, really hot -- like 34 C hot. I was so happy!
And E was happy too because all that heat meant heirloom tomatoes were making star appearances on every menu across town. Heirloom tomatoes are kind of like E's kryptonite, but in a good way ;-) When the all-pro waiters at Cicciolina in St. Kilda set this beautiful dish in front of us, it erased all of his frustration about the Internet and left only cheerfulness in its wake. The artisan-made whatever-kind-of-cheese-this-was was pretty incredible too.
Actually, E is walking by right now and he says it was the heirloom tomato salad at Cumulus -- the second time, not the first time -- that he liked the best. That big green slice of tomato was absolutely delicious...
And as I was pawing through the mound of photos we've accumulated from The Trip, I came across two more stellar tomato performances in Melbourne. The first was at Huxtable, a hipster-y joint run by Kiwis, and the second was at Noir, run by a husband-wife team, where they peeled the exquisite tomatoes and served them with smoked trout (my salad, not E's).
As you can see, the quality of the food in Melbourne was truly a cut above (and sorry for the quality of some of these photos). As each dish arrived in front of me, I felt as though it was a precious offering. There were two dimensions to this: the quality of the raw food stuff and the quality of the cooking.
Australia, like California, hit the jackpot when it comes to food production. They have fantastic meat of all kinds, excellent dairy, fruit and veg, and wine, among other things. They also have a fantastic smorgasbord of immigrant cultures: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Greek, Turkish, Lebanese... Interestingly, the population of Australia is about 60% that of California. About 23 million people live in Australia , while 38 million live in California. (Since we've been traveling I've started saying I'm from California, not the US.)
So the thing to do when you visit Melbourne, is to head to Victoria Market to witness this glorious agricultural and cultural abundance on display. Strangely enough, I expected to be bowled over, but wasn't. Maybe some people besides tourists really shop there, but it didn't feel like a living market. South Melbourne Market was a different story entirely...
There was handmade dim sum to take home and steam. Yay!
Lovely Turkish breads and pastries...
Gorgeous poultry, "free to roam in large barns"...
Feisty-looking greens...
A luscious array of fruits like rock melons, kiwis, and mangos...
Fresh flowers at reasonable prices (I've got more to say about prices!)...
And besides all these nice gastronomic building blocks, there was pretty much everything else under the sun. Imagine the retail spectrum of a Wal-Mart, all supplied by small, independent producers. From fabric stores to cell phone repair to custom jewelry. Pretty darn cool. Some of my favorite stalls:
Hipster sneakers,
Bicyles,
Vacuums, even! Can you imagine buying a vacuum anyplace other than a big box store?
But anyway, back to the food...it isn't just what goes into the kitchens that makes Melbourne special. There is a seriousness about cooking and food production that doesn't exist in any US cities, with the exception perhaps of NYC. And I have to take San Francisco to task here a bit because, on the whole, people there can't cook there...not like they can in Asia and not like they can in Melbourne. Sorry, but it's true.
On some level, the coffee culture in Melbourne shows you the essence of seriousness about food prep. Check out this coffee-maker at Naked Espresso in the CBD:
Solid gold, baby! And you should see the barrista in action. People laugh at the title "barrista" in the US. In Australia, there is much respect. A young German expat I met told me with great seriousness how he'd studied philosophy in university and was now learning to be a barrista in Australia. Ay yi yi! But anyway, you order and then you wait for the rock star behind the counter to deliver the long black, flat white, or whatever for a mere AUD 4-5. Yes, that's right. Boutique coffee $5. Cheap coffee $3.80. But I'm getting to that...
We'd heard so much about the fabulousness of Melbourne's restaurants that we arrived in the city with a whole sheaf of recommendations and many bookings at fancy pants joints. The most over-the-top point in our trip came when we rented a car and drove two hours north of Melbourne to Drysdale to eat at the intriguing (and pretentious) restaurant LOAM.
Frankly, it was a long boring drive out there with a long gravel road at the end. The hostess, who was working a carefully stylized wholesome look, greeted us by name, "You must be Mr. X." E wasn't buying. His BS-sensors were buzzing like crazy. We sat down in a large room with a big plate glass window looking out at hills and olive trees. Elegant wood tables and chairs, a little pile of stones at the edge of our table in lieu of flowers, everything naturalistic in a painfully artificial way. I started with a glass of Over The Shoulder pinot grigio and the waiter congratulated me "winery of the year" or some such. I looked over at E -- buzz, buzz, buzz.
Then came the menu: a card with a list of local food stuff -- stuff like fennel pollen and chickweed. You were supposed to tell them if there was anything you didn't like and leave the rest up to the chef.
From there on out followed a string of dishes that were alternately bizarre and sublime. Notable among them:
House-made butter with intensely smoked...boy, can't remember...maybe seaweed? It was awful. Unpleasant in that way where you keep trying it to convince yourself it could really be that unpleasant.
But then, a delectable piece of salmon jerky with creme fraiche, dill, and probably pernod (?). Amazing flavor combination, exquisite assembly. Wow.
Then came an amazing dish: pan-fried baby snapper with basil seeds (those things that look like fish eggs) and some sort of salty lemon cream on top. It was, frankly, phenomenal. And beautiful.
And then there was "dessert." The waiter announced it with some trepidation..."Our chef likes to play with savory and sweet." Clearly, he'd had some reactions that were less than...enthusiastic. If this dish were intended as a message, one could only interpret it as F*** Y***.
That mound of fluff on top? Potato. Unsweetened. The green dust? Parsley. Underneath is a pile of barely cooked, very tart apple slices filled with rose petal vinegar jelly. Not making it up. I tried, I really did. I didn't get it. It wasn't interesting except for the fact that it seemed so aggressively unpleasant. I asked the waiter for a hint, "I don't get it -- what is this about?" He blushed and said, "It's just to enjoy. I find myself missing the pork..." Eh? Serve me the fixings for rack of lamb and call it dessert. I am a very open-minded diner, but this was...retarded.
We departed.
E, who had patiently endured, made a pit stop at Hungry Jack. It wasn't the last on our trip. But, to be fair, that's a good looking burger, don't you think?
If I could pinpoint it, this is probably when we started hitting the restaurant wall in Melbourne. But most certainly the second point of contact was the AUD 53 chicken pie and AUD 27 side salad at Donovans in St. Kilda. A few more nights of AUD 150/two person dinners at casual-elegant types of places and we just caved. When we considered our dinner options -- and looked at pictures online of the very exotic construction-on-a-plate made out of precious food stuff -- we looked at each other and said, is it worth another AUD 150 for this? Do you want to eat that? Not really. Do I want to? No. Then why the hell are we going?
So we cancelled the reservations at Attica and Cutler & Co and a bunch of other much lauded joints and spent the rest of our time in pubs, pizza joints, noodle shops, and Mediterranean bakeries. Melbourne's pubs, by the way, are nothing to sneeze at. The food is just...simpler, but no less gourmet in sensibility. Many places offered vegan dishes too, like this Moroccan tagine at Palookaville:
Oh, and there was that really yummy red onion chili pizza at I Carusi II:
Oh, and there was the day I bought four desserts at International Cakes because I couldn't decide between pistachio baklava, a yo-yo, a macadamia tart, or a rum ball. I mean, could you?
Oh shoot, and I forgot to mention the wonderful sour plum cake at Babka...exactly my favorite sort of sweet:
And E says not to forget about the tapas at Movida, which were really yum, especially the balsamic mushrooms...wow, such intense and grilly flavor. Delish! (Photos didn't come out because they were pitch-black.)
There's something about the seriousness with which Melburnians undertake food preparation that seems fundamentally Australian to me. And it's an Australian-ness that you're probably not familiar with if you've never been to the country. Because most Americans (or "yanks" as they call us) have a Crocodile Dundee-based idea of Aussies as wild men from the bush, anarchistic Mad Max warriors. They're really not like that. One Australian told me that saying something "wasn't Australian" was roughly equivalent to saying it lacked integrity.
In general, my observation was that Australians do stuff properly and on time. Every time. Not unlike the Swiss. For example, do you see the workers in this photo? They are hauling butt on a Saturday to completely strip down the tram lines that run through the central artery of the CBD, relay the tracks -- electrical work and all -- and be finished with the entire job by 5 am Monday. Ze-trams-run-on-time in Australia -- and they did. I don't think anything like this has ever happened in the US.
It was nice to be back in a country where things are so solid. There are good systems here, and people follow the rules and things work...except that we kept getting honked and beeped at, and eyebrows-raised-at as we jay-walked and cue-hopped our way through the month. Holy cow, I didn't realize what a renegade I've become. Maybe it's E's influence, or the after-effects of two months in Thailand, but these days I'm in the habit of only following rules that make sense to me. What am I, Italian?
Sorry, that's in poor taste. For those of you who didn't hear, the Costa Concordia was a cruise ship that sank near the island of Giglio, Italy, this January, because the captain decided (on a whim?) to divert from the regular charted course, as a kind of tribute to one of the crew members who was from the island.
I really don't think that would have happened in Australia. If you're Australian and reading this, tell me if I'm wrong...
After a week or so, we started settling into a cozy sense of security -- as if there were a great Australian mum in the sky looking down on us, making sure everything was ok. But then, I walked out of the front of our building one morning and found myself face-to-face with this...
Good Lord, what happened? A hook turn gone bad?
Then a day or two later, riding the tram, I heard angry muttering and then a weird crunching sound. A disenfranchised-looking man a few seats down got so miffed he'd boarded the wrong tram that he kicked in both of the door panels with his boots.
Not a happy camper. As the man was leaving the tram, four young men rushed up from another car -- all excited by the action -- looked around at the rest of us and asked if they should go get him. Huh? What was up with the vigilante attitude?
E and I puzzled on this one for a while. This whole scene made us nervous, all of it. One of the things we talk about as we drift through all these cultures is, how would things change if the economy went south? Would one be safer in a place like Australia, where the fabric of society seems orderly now; or would it be better to be in a place like Mexico with friends who know how to circumvent danger? Are relationships more durable than systems?
Anyway, we're ones to talk about danger. Some Australians we met had just gotten back from a trip to SF where they'd seen an actual dead body in the Tenderloin. We said, Oh, but that's the Tenderloin -- and it's not usually like that.
Interestingly, the National Gallery of Victoria was hosting an exhibition called The Mad Square, with art from Germany between 1910-1937. A timeline in the exhibition showed the pace of coincident economic and political events:
1910 -- Berlin's population doubles to two million people
1912 -- Socialist Democratic Party is the largest party in the Reichstag
1914 -- World War I begins
1917 -- Lenin and Trotsky form the Soviet Republic after the Tzar is overthrown
1918
-- Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland
-- World War I ends
-- Socialist Democratic Party proclaims the Weimar Republic
-- Revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich
1919 -- Treaty of Versailles signed
1920
-- Inflation begins in Germany
-- Berlin is the world's third largest city after New York and London
-- NSDAP founded
1922 -- Hyperinflation continues
1923
-- Hitler sentenced to five years imprisonment for leading the Beer Hall Putsch
-- Inflation decreases and a period of financial stability begins
1924 -- Hitler writes Mein Kampf in prison
1927
-- Unemployment worsens
-- Nazis hold their first Nuremburg Party rally
1929
-- Stock market crashes on Wall Street, New York
-- Street clashes between the Nazis and Communists in Berlin
1930
-- Resignation of Chancellor Hermann Muller's cabinet, ending parliamentary rule
-- Nazis win 18% of the vote and gain 95 seats in the national elections
-- Minority government formed by Heinrich Bruning, leader of the Centre Party
1931 -- Unemployment reaches five million and a state of emergency declared in Germany
1932
-- Nazis increase their representation in the Reichstag to 230 seats but are unable to form a majority coalition
1933
-- Hitler creates a dictatorship under the Nazi regime
-- Nazis organize book burnings in Berlin
-- (Artists start fleeing Germany)
1934 -- Fifteen concentration camps exist in Germany
1935 -- The swastika becomes the flag of the Reich
1936
-- Spanish civil war begins
-- Olympic Games held in Garmisch and Berlin
-- Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles
1937
-- German bombing raids over Guernica in Spain in support of Franco
-- (Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich attracts two million visitors)
What I saw in this timeline was how a sustained period of hardship (years of inflation and unemployment and population growth) preceded the rise of the radical politics of Naziism. A poster by Cesar Klein from 1919 foresaw this link between unemployment and social decay (trans. Whoever Does Not Work is the Gravedigger for His Own Children).
Stepping back a sec, I realize it's only now that we've reached probably the most prosperous destination of our trip that I'm finally seeing some thought-provoking exhibitions. Also, I noticed that with the stress level of using another language and traveling in less developed places diminished...I had the ability to concentrate for longer periods of time. So I went to see lots of art in Melbourne, including Pipilotti Rist's new video work I Packed My Postcard in My Suitcase, which practically moved me to tears because it was as if someone had perfectly captured my consciousness. E thought it was...psychedelic ;-)
And also the Heide art center, where I saw some great Sidney Nolan paintings (he was openly the lover of Heide's patroness, Sunday Reed, who was married to John Reed). Here is his Bathers painting from 1943.
However most of my time at Heide was spent outside. Heide is the former home of Sunday and John Reed and covers six hectares of land outside of Melbourne. It's now dotted with modern sculptures, but I found myself mesmerized by the beautiful, lush trees...many of them hundreds of years old. I don't know why this makes me so happy, but it does!
So we left Melbourne unfinished...beautiful food, solid systems, lovely environment, wicked expensive, with simmering resentment to yanks under the surface. This place is simply a question mark for us: probably the best quality of life on the planet right now, but is it worth the price -- whatever the price may be?
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